How do I define privilege? Here is a scale I put together and you can score yourself

[themadstork]

68. Either an 18 or 15,

depending on if you think I'm a pretty dude. And my atheism is my dinger on there, which has to be the weakest of all those.


I try not to kid myself about it - to be aware and non-assholeish without suffocating in angst. I get up each day and slog at the writing and feel like such a useless fuck at what I do that dwelling on my like privilege-to-accomplishment ratio would make me want to just die.

Lately I've become intensely aware of how easy it is to be a dick and pull privilege. To mansplain, etc. I feel like, I express most of myself either in my writing hours or when making love. Those things are pretty much what I am - my fiance and my work. In those things I don't hold back: I try to forget who I am and act madly, stupidly. Like Don Quixote! Quixote is my dude. In everything else I try to stay very humble and somewhat self-effacing. I'm so weak-willed and on so many psych meds that it's hard to forget the huge number of people responsible for my not being dead. For the same reason I feel too ashamed to talk politics with anyone anymore. I work stupidy hard on my writing, but at the matter of surviving life, of facing adversity and being tough in the way the people I admire seem to be tough, I just suck. And the whole American political spectrum values the never-say-die persevere-at-all-costs type of dude so highly that I feel hypocritical saying much of anything at all. I'm not that. When presented with great adversity and stress in my life my solution has consistently been: suicide. And were I not given the extensive support system someone as lucky as I am will have, I have no doubt I would have eventually pulled it off. My fiance too has been hospitalized with a heart thing for the past three years, and she also is very privileged, and I guess between the two of us it's been hard to avoid the fact of how contingent our lives are on the support of other people. And in both our cases on support available to a vanishingly tiny sliver of the world population.