Sunyata asked us to post about things that have made us uncomfortable. Here’s an example of a something that felt very, very uncomfortable for me, and how I coped with it. I belong to a self help fellowship. The name isn’t important, but it’s got quite a few little groups and I’d be welcome at all of them. An important principal is that you are a member when you say you are, period. One day I walked into a meeting of this group, sat down, looked around, and felt a bit funny. I talked to a few people I knew there. As the room began to fill up, mostly with people I knew to varying degrees, I became more uncomfortable, and was more and more glad that I had friends there. By time we were done and ready to leave for the night I felt very uncomfortable, and was doing my very best and probably failing to hide my discomfort. My discomfort was a bit of a shock. You see, what was making me uncomfortable was that there was about one other white guy there in the room. I mentioned that I had a bunch of friends there, right? I mentioned that this was a fellowship I belong to, right? I mentioned that I knew most of the people there, right? I lived in a pretty well integrated neighborhood. My kids slept over at their house across the street with black friends fairly often and vice versa. I’d had a job for a few years where most of my coworkers were black. I’d dated black women. So why was this making me so uncomfortable? I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of white people, in a setting where they make up about 50% of the group, will think of it as an all black group. My kids school was 45% minority and was regarded as being at the tipping point. That sort of thing didn’t feel uncomfortable. But this did. There was one other guy there that looked like me. I wasn’t used to that, in a setting that didn’t consist of just a family or a few people. I talked to a friend the next day who’d been there. Talked about how I felt different, out of place, like I stood out. She said that this all seemed pretty natural, that she felt the same way sometime when it was all white people. I thought about this. She was a successful middle class professional. She must feel this way a lot. I’d learned something in that fellowship about being uncomfortable. How it’s so tempting to blame it on other people rather than considering that it might come from myself. I had to consider that this wasn’t like I’d walked into a bar in a strange city. These were people I knew in an organization I belonged to. There was really only one answer, if I wanted to grow. So next week I went back. It was scary at first, and there’s no point in pretending it wasn’t. I’d pick someone I knew pretty well and sit with them. A few weeks later one of my friends said “you know, everyone likes you and you’re welcome here” I hadn’t said anything. It was that obvious? A few weeks later though I sat next to him, the only white guy in the room, and asked how come all the black people were sitting together, and he laughed. Laughing about discomfort is a good way to acknowledge it with out having to get too deep into what we all knew that we knew. It’s a real guy thing I think. One night there was a fight. A woman picked up a chair to hit the woman who was about to marry her ex. I was standing next to her and grabbed the chair. Then I grabbed her, holding her back while the other woman and her friends left. Most of me was thinking I didn’t want there to be a fight. Part of me was thinking here I am, a white man restraining an angry black woman in front of a lot of other black people who aren’t saying much. The rest of me was just hoping she wasn’t going to kick me in the balls. Eventually one of her girlfriends came over and calmed her down. The next day both women thanked me. I kept going. My plan was to stay until I felt comfortable. That’s more or less what happened. It took a couple of years but they were fun years. Its not like anyone needed me to be there, more that I needed to be there. And that lesson Id been taught, to examine my own discomfort and confront it, is one Ill always be grateful for.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 05:01:35 +0000
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