🏝️I seem to have cured my privilege guilt
No more flinching, just walking my path, willing to help where I can
I didn’t set out to purposefully try to cure my lifelong sense of “privilege guilt”—from being born to a financially comfortable, educated, and white middle-class family in the US—but I realized last night that I may have accidentally done so.
I was walking into a grocery store that I hadn’t been to in several years (due to moving house), and I remembered how I used to feel quite self-conscious going in there. I was hyper-aware of the other patrons I tended to see there, who were often from the poorest economic class (in the US—which, I understand, is still better off than the poorest people in other parts of the world).
During those years, going to that grocery store was often an exercise in finding out my limits. I discovered that I would decline to help if a man approached me in the parking lot and asked for spare change, because I didn’t feel safe. But if a man (or anyone) asked me, in the store, to help him buy a few groceries, I would absolutely say yes. And so on.
Last night, when I went back to that grocery store for the first time in a long time, I realized that that same sense of hyper, awkward privilege-awareness was gone. Just totally gone.
Instead, I was just calmly inhabiting the fact that I am a person of privilege, and I’m ready and willing to help where I can.
There’s no fear, no flinching, no apologizing for my privilege. There’s just open-eyed acceptance of the reality that I have resources others don’t have, and I am ready to use them to help where I can.
I don’t know exactly how this change came about, but I’m guessing that it’s largely a result of all my work on “my feelings matter” practice.
Whatever the cause, I’m grateful—because the world is a mess, and there’s no time to waste on flinching and apologizing!
I love what Hermione says at the end of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (by Eliezer Yudkowsky):
“There are just people who do what they can, whatever they can. And there are also people who don’t even try to do what they can, and yes, those people are doing something wrong…
“I’ll go on trying to do most of what I can, or at least some of what I can…
“That’s my answer.” Hermione took a deep breath, her face resolute. “So, is there something I can do?”
That’s my answer too. No more “shoulds”—I’ll just do what I can to help others in need as I walk along my own path.
Can you relate to this? What insights do you have to offer for those who struggle with privilege guilt?
Oh yeah, I definitely struggle with this. When I'm feeling down it's very easy to dismiss my struggles as fickle and frivolous compared to what others go through. Then I use that as ammunition to judge myself! 😩
I like the "do what I can, when I can" approach. I've been trying to see it more as a scope issue--most of the really troubling problems we hear about are just too big for any one individual to make any difference. Which sounds defeatist, I know, but if I narrow my scope to just where I am and who I encounter each day, that's a much more manageable scale. If I can give some good to each person I encounter rather than making things worse, then I can hope it spreads outward from there.