Another Paradox...

Another Paradox…

Ye Gods I love a big novel, one where you travel with somebody throughout their entire life, rejoice in their successes, weep for their losses, and come out the other side refreshed, inspired, awakened to your own life.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert has been just such a book, fittingly finished on International Women’s Day as the protagonist, Alma, is my favourite kind of heroine – singular, real, flawed, deeply and beautifully human.

Set in the 1800s, Alma has an insatiable curiosity about the natural world, but is only allowed to exist on the fringes of science, dabbling in one of the few areas open to women – polite botany (ugh) – her research recognized only when she disguises her gender. Her unmarried, childless state makes her an outlier, judged harshly, ridiculed. Her interests make her masculine, inappropriate, lesbian (she isn’t). She is not granted the freedom to thrive.

A few years ago, I was playing a gig and a man in the audience, unknowingly standing next to my boyfriend of the time, said ‘I bet she’s a lesbian’. This made me crack up, based as it presumably was on my short haircut coupled with a place in the otherwise male band. The difference between Alma and me, and the reason I found this comment amusing rather than cruel, is a matter of independence; I can earn a living doing what I love, even in a male-dominated genre. I can make the choice to remain childless and unmarried without judgement or scrutiny (at least in the circles I inhabit, but the fact that these circles exist is not to be sniffed at).

I can also be an actual lesbian if I so choose, so there’s another win.

This is the paradox; I don’t want to feel complacent about my opportunities, because they were hard-won by my predecessors in the frighteningly recent past, but I do also want to feel entitled to them. I don’t use this word lightly, for it has been commandeered to mean a negative, an abuse of status. I’m interested in the original meaning of ‘a just claim’ – taking up the space in the world that has been given to me, not to overpower or subdue others, but in order to claim the hallowed birthright of autonomous existence.

There’s a lot of talk these days about straight white men having entitlement in spades, but there’s a whole universe of difference between the straight white men I know and love, and the ones I see in the world’s palaces of power.  Firstly, none of my friends truly operate from a position of entitlement – they seem to share the same doubts and insecurities as me. 

Secondly, I rather hope we get to the point where they do feel entitled. Not just them, all of us. Entitled to life, to be here, to be celebrated, to have nothing to prove. Because what if the opposite of conflict isn’t peace, but play? What beautiful lives could we then create?