Life Hacks for the Marginalized

Being human is hard! It’s even harder when your humanity is brought into question on a daily basis. But don’t let that get you down! So you’re not white/straight/male/abled/cisgendered/thin/rich — that doesn’t mean your life is over! It just means it’s much, much, much, much, much, much harder.

Luckily, we have some time-saving tips that can help! By “help,” we mean “mildly mitigate your problems.” To solve them completely, try building a time machine and either engineering a whole new history that gives your people more power, or fast-forwarding to a post-patriarchy utopia.

1

Frustrated by seeing movies, books, and TV shows without any characters that look, talk, or think like you? Try this trick: be an omnivore. Consume all media; identify with everyone. Find that character who looks least unlike you: a character who has your body but not your mind; your mind but not your life; your life but not your love. You are always refracted, rarely reflected.

2

Meet people who can and do only consume the stories that mirror theirs. Wonder how they can survive on the diet of the same thing over and over again. You yourself would starve. Engage at your own risk.

3

Nervous about people’s reactions to your look, your gender, your sexuality? Learn to read people more easily to manage your well-founded fear and anxiety. Try these techniques: retreat and avoid, soothe and befriend, attack and shred. Choose well, and you could avoid being condescended to, dismissed, or assaulted! (Results may vary.) Whichever you choose becomes stitched into who you are: you must be water to their rock, to flow around your environment no matter which way you really want to go.

4

Feel like you get an extra “tax” on everything? Work harder on your skills, your profession, your goodness as a person, your wholeness in terms of self. You will still be rejected and ignored half the time because good is not enough: you must be the ultimate. But when you do achieve, you will know you earned it, because you never believed you deserved it.

5

Want the look? The one that promises no one stares at you, no one bothers you about your basic you-ness, no one is out to get you? Try moving to another country (be selective). Try moving to a certain spot of a certain big city, where everyone blurs together. There is no certainty, but you can try.

6

You will know, very deeply, the feeling of not being heard. A deep, open wound will come from this, a sense of loss and lack of control. Name it when you see it. Name it so you can release yourself from it, crawl out from under the hand over your mouth. (If you can, break the hand.)

7

Learn to tell the difference between helpful advice and condescension, and learn it fast. Otherwise, you will only learn it through experience, and through that, hindsight, and through that, the regret that it wasn’t even your own hubris that made your dreams die—it was theirs.

8

You will experience existential crises, several times over, the kind of heart-bleeding endeavors you don’t see everyone else having. They are not very good for you, but know that you can and will survive them. Most likely, you will survive with the help of others who are suffering. That won’t be what bonds you though — instead, you will unite over your salves.

9

Know that everyone carries a variation of this poison in their veins whether they know it or see it. Sometimes in smaller doses definitely, but that makes it harder for them to detect it. Does this soothe you? No, it does not. But hone the empathy that gives you this knowledge, as much as you can, purely for your own peace of mind.

10

When you suspect that a slight is based on something about you over which you have no control? When you don’t want to think you’re being shut out or mistreated over this uncontrollable thing, you don’t want to believe it, but maybe? Maybe it’s that? When you go back and forth, and you wonder can it really be true? That’s how you know it’s true.