My Cards

I am 32. A woman. Without children. Not married. I can be argued to be attractive. I mean, I have big hips and big boobs and big hair and I’ve been told my smile is noticeable. I have a certain amount of physical grace available to me. People describe me as sweet. I teach yoga and work part time for a local nonprofit. I barely make ends meet, but that is because I have held on to the audacity of the notion that I can still have my dreams. And, of course, my family. My sweet, sweet parents who have always been there to catch me when I needed them.

I would blend in in Boulder just fine. Or Denver or Portland. But that is not where I live. I live in Tucson. Arizona. For where I live, my education is regarded as above average. I have an unusual scope of experiences. I know who Carl Jung is. I know who Kafka is. I know a couple of Newton’s laws and I know that in a vacuum, any falling object accelerates at the rate of 9.8m per second square. I also know that Aristotle said that the reason for this was because objects rejoice as they approach mother Earth. For fuck’s sake, I know who Boutros Boutros-Ghali is.

I was exposed to human darkness early. I saw darkness with my own two eyes. More than some, but less than most. Globally speaking, I mean. Here is a sampling – By age ten, I had seen buildings filled to the rim with asylum seekers set aflame and burn with rage, men, women and children inside; I had crawled into a mine field; I had been put on countless trips to Holocaust exhibits, museums and concentration camps, so that the black and white photos of emaciated people piled high on top of each other had etched their way into inner eye; I saw men who were once prestigious doctors be reduced to mere unemployable foreigners; I had seen the Berlin Wall up and tasted the rubbery brown mass they called deli meat on the other side of it; and then I watched it fall.

I speak another language. You guessed it. Ich bin ein Berliner. I am white. But you already knew that from the yoga and the nonprofit stuff and the financially stable parents, of course. Who are we kidding? But I am not painfully white. My dark features on my light skin, borrowed from the Middle East and Germany, respectively, make me sort of interesting looking. On official documents, I am to circle ‘Caucasian’. I have issues with this. First off, I was taught that the Caucasus is everything east of the Ural Mountains which is a geographic region that is not in any way tied to my heritage, ancestry, language, my so-called race or my culture. Second, just because half–Baghdadi-descended-Sephardic-Indian-Jew/half-German is not a category on the stupid list, it sure as fuck doesn’t make me ‘Caucasian’, but whatever.

Thing is, I can blend. For a while, I can blend in with minorities. I can blend with the Arabs, the Jews, and everything former-Yugoslavia. I get cred from the Indians (as in the country of India) for being able to navigate their culture and also from Hispanics for the way that my thick black hair makes me minimally, however, distinctly, at least a little, something-else.

Also, I am simple. I don’t buy myself expensive stuff. I don’t have fancy purses, or sunglasses or shoes, or clothes. I get that from my mother who grew up in poverty in a brown and spicy country. Ya know, seven people to a one bedroom apartment and so on. I shop at the thrift store. I can make an outfit on 15 dollars. I have a talent with clothes.

I have been a child of privilege. Considering where I live anyway. Where I live, the four years of orthodontist care that had countless people hoisting metal in and out of my mouth like miners is a rarer privilege. For where I live, the fact that I have been able to pick up the phone and schedule myself with my doctor for whatever ailed me for the entire duration of my life, is abnormal. I have never not been able to make rent. I have never found myself not being able to make it from one paycheck to the other, without having people to lean on. I have never not been able to afford or go to the doctor or the medication that was prescribed. I have never not called an ambulance because of the bill that I would be hit with afterwards and I have never not gone to the emergency room for that same reason. I wouldn’t have stood out in Norway or Germany or Sweden or Denmark or Australia. I wouldn’t have stood out among the friends I grew up with. 

But for where I live, I have been a child of privilege.

So far in this life I have stood in the majority and the minority. I have been national and I have been immigrant. I have been German and I have been Jew. I have been grouped into those persecuted and I have been persecutor. I have been abuser and I have been abused. I have struggled with addiction and identity. I have stretched myself to enormous lengths. I have been chain smoker and I have been yoga teacher - for a while, at the same time. I have been beautiful and I have been ugly. I have been obese and I have nearly starved to death. Anorexia nearly killed me, if not by means of the actual disease - the dizzy spells, hair loss, quenching of my reproductive function - then by the long and brutal road of recovery and the slew of people and substances I used to validate my worthlessness on its path. I have been cutter and I have been counselor, heavily awarded business college graduate and broke, idealistic body worker. I have been made positive and negative example. I have carried briefcases into office rooms in New York City and instructed training courses to executives, and I know well the dust and dirt of hustling below the poverty line in a desert town. I am a statistic and I am anomaly. 

I could have been a dancer. I should have been a dancer. There were countless pirouettes left untwirled and endless arabesques unleapt. My life happened differently. And I am learning now what happens with the raging spirit of a dancer when it is stifled and then redirected.

That’s it. That’s all. Those are my cards. All of them. So there you go. was going to take a whole book to tell you this, but I am running out of time. There you go. All of them. This is where I stand now. You got the Cliff Notes. Because recently I have started grinding my teeth again in my sleep again and I have not done that in a very long time and what I really need to do is tell you what I see. it’s high time that I tell you what I see…