“Your life isn’t worth two cents”

Earlier this week, someone unknown to me shared his wisdom that my existence has no value. He’s right. From his perspective, I was a random person whose living, breathing, walking, existing in a world shared however briefly with him brought him nothing he considered to have any worth.

I didn’t even have the courtesy to listen to the stranger’s entire harangue. Doing so might have helped me understand why he felt the way he did. I never learned from the source of the shouting and attempt to shadow me on my route what about me raised so much anger, fear, or hatred that the man seemed compelled to share his valuation of my life with me and anyone else who might happen to be in earshot.

Since the elimination of the Canadian penny as circulating currency, one or two cents in a cash transaction is rounded down to nothing and three or four cents is rounded up to a nickel. My life is of so little value to almost everyone alive that it’s effectively a rounding error.

At the same time, my life is of significant value to a few people and organizations. I have a job that pays me a salary based on how meaningful my work is to my employer. I do volunteer work that helps a few people and organizations. I provide a sounding board, care, advice, and other resources to several individuals and groups. I am loved, and am learning to better love myself. I am part of some communities where my contribution has meaning.

Going back to Two Cents Man, it is easy to take comfort in my harasser being some stranger who was just mouthing off, to belittle him as a small-minded person or use the ableist frame of putting him in the box “mentally unstable, probably harmless”. That’s not fair to someone I barely know. It also attempts to dismiss a pattern that exists in my life and deserves to be acknowledged.

I don’t fit neatly into some of the common categories our society likes to use, particularly but not only in the areas of gendered roles, appearance, and behaviour. My existence as an outlier makes some people, possibly a lot of people, uncomfortable. A few of those people express their discomfort to me in verbal and/or physical responses that have a common theme of “your existence is wrong and should be removed”.

There is overt (“F’ing b*tch/dyke”) and covert (body language that says “What are you? You don’t belong here”) hostility in my life on a daily basis, in person and online, including in communities where some subset of my difference is nominally acceptable. Some members of the LG population in the so-called LGBTQ community have been particularly ignorant and hurtful to me and those I love, often without being aware of their own prejudices. I don’t ignore it, though it may appear on the surface that ignoring it as I seemed to ignore Two Cents Man is how I cope.

I am a misfit and have been for as long as I can remember. Being true to myself makes some people uncomfortable, afraid, sometimes hostile. At times it contributes to an overall feeling of low self-worth.

Being different helps me continue to develop empathy and the skill of listening to people in ways that reach below the surface to our underlying assumptions, needs, and fears/hopes. And I regularly get reminded that, as bad as I have it in terms of acceptance and perceived value, the fear and contempt some people and groups have for me has limits. I have been able to turn around both my opinion of strangers and theirs of me by sharing enough of a dialogue to allow us both to be something more than a random freak. Not always, but occasionally.

For some, I am wrong and broken and a waste of resources. As I learn more about why I am perceived this way, I learn how to help individuals, groups, and the world change so I and others who share something in common with me are accepted and strong and contributors of meaningful diversity that helps all of us. I’m not going to break down all the walls. I am learning enough about building bridges to make some progress.