The Audacity of Being an Exceptional Woman
(in a world where you’re only supposed to say you are but not actually dare to be)
(7:46pm edit: I think it would be nice to pair reading my thoughts with reading this excerpt from Why I Am Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin from the chapter “Self-Empowerment is Just Another Word for Narcissism”)
I want more women to feel exceptional. Why “exceptional?” And why feel? Because it is a state of being based in empowerment that white male Americans are very familiar with — the feeling of being special, better, entitled to a bigger slice of pie because they have merited it — and the rest of us need to catch up.
I was raised in American exceptionalism — I am a product of this country’s narrative that one can be and do anything. I passively picked up entitlement at an early age before I knew it wasn’t a message truly meant for me, a non-white person, to internalize — the trick to belonging is to not reflect so long as such to realize that one might not.
Entitlement is a state of being reserved for the ignorant and requires a certain amount of self-assuredness that could be described as arrogance. Youthful self-assurance can be charming, insulting, and irritating all at once in its naiveté and earnestness, for example. And ignorance is bliss as per the Dunning-Kruger, and the like.
But who is allowed to remain with their entitlement and ignorance as they age versus who quickly has such illusions shattered (or who has never had the luxury of believing in American exceptionalism) is what makes our identities political.
I intuitively absorbed the roles and scripts that came with upper middle class East Coast suburbia and actively learned to call it entitlement once I began to subvert such roles — which was around the same time I began to feel and observe the acute effects of being both racialized, and a racialized woman.
But this awareness can very quickly demoralize before it liberates. More often, I used to feel inadequate. More often, I experienced a relentless impostor syndrome — which you might say is strange paired with entitlement and exceptionalism — to which I counter, it isn’t so strange when one’s narratives are based in falsely meritocratic but actually arbitrary systems determining worth, mostly based in immutable fixtures of one’s proximity to whiteness and wealth — aka our education system. In fact, those who do not react to basing self-worth in such volatile measures with awareness of the insecurity it causes, invest a lot of energy in building ideological fortresses to protect themselves from cognitive dissonance.
I was afraid of my peers, imagining them all to be more intelligent or more competent than me, as if such things were determinants of how much I deserve friendship, love, community, to be able to afford living, and a sense of belonging — which is as you know, ridiculous — but not a lesson I learned until I was loved without feeling I had to do or achieve anything to earn it (I did not feel fetishized for my physical appearance or for my intellect, both of which were appreciated and revered by my partner at the time, but not commodified).
And when one exists in such a self-monitored, highly self-conscious state, it is difficult to live out the solidarity one theoretically wants to have with fellow femmes — especially the seemingly more actualized and more confident ones. It is as if their excellence somehow diminishes our own self-worth. This can pertain to anyone in moments of insecurity, not just women — because such feelings of inadequacy can pervade and overwhelm all decision-making if we don’t or can’t make mindful attempts to reduce its effects — with its effects mainly being a hindrance on forming deep relationships with others.
But somehow the necessity of action has moved me beyond self-consciousness and into the present.
The doing has not only forced me to confront that I am exceptional because I must live what I believe and I believe capacity of women is understated, but in itself, the act of doing makes me, and my peers, my fellow women doers, exceptional.
And I wish more women considering themselves ordinary would also take a moment to frame themselves as exceptional (…except white feminists, who please, for once, have some humility), which for multiple reasons related to our relative social positions and access to such spaces, we don’t do enough.
Anyway. I realize I may be conflating several topics here — as I would still like to discuss
- minimizing our achievements — I am trying to come to terms with the fact that I am a skilled writer. Some days I feel more confident about this fact. Other days, I’m not sure of anything. This is an understatement. Even as I put this down, I wanted to claim only that I have a “knack” for writing, in one fell swoop erasing years of keeping journals, of folders of half-written drafts, the amount to which I think about writing when I read, and the way my brain is accustomed/trained to narrate in full sentences in various writerly voices.
- how white men chose which types of labor to which we apply accounting and calculate the economic value of — spoiler alert: women-coded labor is treated less important ~ even though understanding the emotional undercurrents of social situations is genderized and makes us highly proficient in executive roles
- developing comfort in discomfort — taking up spaces not designed for us. Social knowledge — understanding of social norms of the economic class and community one wishes to be a part of — is extraordinarily valuable and least attainable outside of where one is from. Knowing “the way things are” is how one can apply information to conform or dissent in the ways that lets them remain true to themselves.
But that’s neither here nor there for now because I am ready to wrap up this set of thoughts for the moment.
All this to say simply that some women walk around owning their space — a thing I am learning to do better every day, a thing that inspires and energizes me, a thing that I recognize can appear arrogant to those unaccustomed to the audacity of a woman who only answers to herself.
Also, I talk about women because that’s who I most directly relate to, but I also feel galvanized by non-men and people of color carving out justice for themselves.
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