Facing Our Own Blindspots

We all have things we take for granted in life.  Most of them are pretty basic: the sun will rise and set each day, the earth is round, and I will always stick the USB stick in the wrong way the first time I try to plug it in.  Sometimes those assumptions are more problematic.

For example, if this person assumed their coffee was on their left.

On Tuesday, I re-released the first Spirit Sight short story, Whispers In the Dark.  I wrote it back in 2015 and at the time, I wasn't terribly happy with the editing I'd received but as a newbie author, I assumed they knew what they were doing and I didn't.  When I wrote the final installment of the trilogy last year, I knew that I wanted to have Whispers and Rose re-edited.  Nothing big but they needed a final polish to make sure they shone.

I hired a wonderful and talented editor, Cait Gordon of Dynamic Canvas.  I knew she was thorough and found her to have the rare talent of making me excited to receive and work on my edits.  But there was one aspect which surprised me and that was the additional work she did as a sensitivity reader.

I'd known she did sensitivity reads but I'd rather arrogantly assumed that she wouldn't find anything in my work.  After all, I consider myself a fairly liberal person and I take active steps to learn from different marginalized groups to avoid using harmful stereotypes and tropes.  To my humbling realization, Cait did find some unconscious assumptions in my language choices, particularly around the topic of mental health and intelligence.  (And to give full credit to Cait, I'm sure she must have been frustrated to see those choices popping up as frequently as they did but she explained the concerns in a gracious and comprehensive way.)

Some of the fixes were incredibly simple, eg, not using "crazy" as a shorthand for uncontrolled circumstances or strong emotional reactions.  But there was one that required me to do some unflinching examination of my own thought processes: the assumption that to be smarter is to be better.

In retrospect, it is perhaps unsurprising that I picked up that particular bias.  As a nerdy, non-athletic child, academics were my opportunity to shine.  It was one of the few areas in my childhood where I received praise from the adults around me.  I learned very quickly that to appear to effortlessly pick up skills and information was a desirable quality.  Later, I was placed in the "gifted" program, where we were often told we were the leaders of the future, destined to use our intelligence to do great things for the world.  Add in a multi-generation trend of perfectionism and declarations that tiny flaws would "ruin" otherwise marvelous events or creations and I was firmly installed on the train of Brains Over Brawn.

Cait explained how many of the terms we see in everyday language, such as fool, stupid, idiot, etc., all began life as pejorative terms for those with mental handicaps.  And as someone who flinches whenever someone uses misogynistic language, even if it's not directed at me, I realized that if I didn't change my ableist language, I would be inflicting the same stings on others.

However, I soon realized that avoiding such language did not come easily to me.  I had to spend a few days really breaking down my thought process to see why I tended to default to seeing making mistakes or not easily picking things up as such a negative character trait.  And like so many assumptions about character, it turned out that my own assumptions were based on flawed interpretations and wish-fulfillment.

I was good at being smart.  I was also bullied for being smart and for not being good at other things.  That led me to want to believe that being smart was better than being good at those other things.  This was reinforced by teachers and other academically-minded adults in my life.  It was further reinforced by general society and the books and shows I watched, many of which had the "bullied child grows up to be better than those who taunted them" theme.  I watched characters who were smarter be praised and those who weren't be used as the punchline of jokes.  The point of stories like Inspector Gadget, Get Smart, or Forrest Gump was that it was funny that a less intelligent person managed to succeed.  And often they had a smarter sidekick quietly making sure of that success.

Undoing that complicated web of experience is an ongoing task.  Sometimes I still catch myself using ableist language.  And I'm sure that there are times I use it and don't catch it, which makes me feel horrible at the thought that I've likely hurt people without realizing it.

Because at the end of the day, that's why we should strive to do better: so that we don't unintentionally hurt people.  (If you're deliberately hurting people, that's a whole other problem.)  It can be easy to lose sight of that in a knee-jerk reaction of defensiveness (that's not what I meant, they're being too sensitive).  It's reassuring to tell ourselves that we didn't really cause harm.  It means we're still good people and don't have to do any work.  But it doesn't change the fact that harm has happened.  And the more that a person insists that it didn't when faced with examples and offered education, the harder it is give them the benefit of the doubt.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I do truly believe that the vast majority of people don't want to cause hurt.  But I also realize that the same majority isn't always great at accepting they've made mistakes.  As a recovering perfectionist, allow me to reassure us all that the world doesn't fall apart if we're wrong.  And that being aware doesn't suck the fun and creativity out of life, in fact, it adds to it because it means that people can just enjoy the story without worrying about the sting.

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