New Brunswick, New Jersey is a post-industrial small city in the center of my state. It’s where I was born and holds all of my hopes for the future. It was settled by the Dutch, then evolved alongside the technology of each passing decade. Ferries, canals, railroads and highways brought people through this city. Manufacturing and warehousing provided working class immigrant families with livelihoods. Those industries left, the working classes suffered, but out of the rubble rises a promising economy based on services, healthcare, and the public university to keep my city’s heart pumping today.

As a professional and as a volunteer, I’ve worked in this city to teach kids life-skills in after-school clubs, to educate others about healthy food, to teach community gardening skills, and to prepare the young adults who live here for college or a career.

It’s all-consuming work and I’m not great at setting boundaries. I work weeknights and weekends, routinely leaving hours worked off my timesheets.

It’s hard for me to care about hours turning into paychecks when the work feels urgent. It’s hard to take time off the clock from work I care about. Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember I have a personal life or a body at all.

Until, of course, people go out of their way to remind me I am a young-ish woman, my body is open for comment, and my work is aberrant and obstructs my actual value.

Like when that community member looked me up and down while I was setting up tables and chairs for an event, commenting, “Your dad must have a lot of money.”

Because there’s no way my work would be paid for, right? A woman in community work must be just filling her time somehow, not fulfilling an ambition or a professional goal. How could community work be her career?

And since she needs to be clothed and fed, and I don’t see a wedding ring, the man supporting her must be her father.

Truthfully, money is tight for me. But I do nonprofit work for a salary and pay for my own rent, utilities, food—all of it. This is all further complicated by the sky-high student debt I racked up earning a degree in Journalism.

If I choose to disclose the reality of my debt to people, I am shocked that no one ever asks, WHY DID A DEGREE COST SO MUCH?

Instead, they act perplexed that I pursued higher education in the first place.

I have had former classmates or other peers seriously suggest that the way out of debt is to marry a man who will pay off my loans. Men and women tell me this. Often.

It’s pretty clear that to them, the problem of my debt is that it’s getting in the way of me getting married, buying a house in the suburbs, producing children, and tending the home. That’s a woman’s real value, right? Why educate a woman?

Why, indeed. I’ve never found a way to succinctly express that I value my mind, so I invested in it. (While also realizing it is completely unjust that tuition has risen well above the rate of inflation, and is a barrier to entry for many bright young people when considering the current cost of living.) I want to do work in the world and see that work valued. I want to cultivate and then use an expertise, and I’d like to be paid for it.

People in my life tell me I accomplish a lot, wonder aloud how I find the time. Well, I am choosy about how I spend my time. Still, every investment of my time somewhere means I am not spending it somewhere else. I will hands-down always put my time into the things that challenge my mind or make me better at work, at the expense of things that would make me better at the performance of being a woman.

Shopping for clothes, getting timely haircuts, dieting or otherwise trying to change my body to be more attractive to men will forever be at the bottom of my list. (Incidentally, when you lose weight because you’re depressed and in an abusive relationship, lots of people tell you it’s a good look. My current boyfriend New Brunswick, for the record, prefers me happy and curvy.)

The exhausting truth is, no matter how hard I work to do good things in my community or how much I invest in my mind, people on the ground will find ways to try to police my appearance, make assumptions about my body, and remind me that as a woman I am a thing. An object for people to comment on.

And that is the best case scenario. Trump’s election has me worried we’re about to declare Open Season on sexual assault with impunity.

The results of the US Presidential election made me saddened and scared. But the truth is, on November 7 I was already tired. My strongest desire in life is to be seen as a person, dammit, to have my mind engaged and my work count for something and my heart known.

It’s been a battle, because for my entire conscious life I’ve wanted to read books, write words, care for others and build something good—while relentlessly being told that my body is unacceptable, and also it is public property, and also my priorities are wrong so shut up and make a baby already. (I want to say something funny here by my hands keep typing, DON’T SEND GIRLS TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL. DON’T SEND GIRLS TO CATHOLIC SCHOOL!)

As of this writing, my body, my mind and my life are the only things that are truly mine. I will use them as I please. For as long as I am able.

The only conclusion I can come to is: I go through every day frustrated that I have to remind folks, I AM A HUMAN AND MY LIFE IS MINE TO DIRECT. But I also read and write obsessively, to feed my mind. Maybe having to constantly express or defend my modus operandi is what I was put on this earth to do.

Other times, I think that I am just going to do the work, and let the work speak for itself.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post The Personal, the Political, and Being a Woman at Work appeared first on Newfound.

I’m going for a road trip on my own, to my new home. I cross the desert into Texas. My sense of self is shifting, as I leave my hometown and find a new environment many miles away. My sense of place is being shaken (at will, but that doesn’t make it less scary.)

I find that outside of my existential fear of change, there is great anxiety in the logistics of being a woman in unfamiliar places, on the road, at rest stops and in the world.

Fear in a woman’s world is real. It is palpable and it can have a crippling effect on the ways we orient ourselves, how we conduct our business and where we go, especially in locations we are foreign.

I am encouraged by friends to be adventurous but to just be aware.

This is a woman’s trouble: to be aware of a world that requires fear before action or confidence, before dreaming, before leaving the house, before picking an outfit and certainly before drinking.

So I think: If I have fear, as a cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white woman, who else is afraid?

I spoke to a gay friend of mine a few days ago, after the Orlando massacre, and he told me he has found himself unusually aware of his surroundings because he is afraid. The language he used was notably similar to what people have said to me about this upcoming road trip: awareness is key to safety. It’s worth pointing out that every time I’ve traveled, with girlfriends or solo, I am reminded each time, by all kinds of people, to be aware.

Be aware of my body, what time it is, where I am, where my money is, how I’m dressed, and more. I realize that basic awareness and common sense is vital to all people’s existence and modes of living. I also recognize a pattern of language that appears to be saved for certain people (read: those of us who are conditioned to be afraid for our own safety because we are visible targets for violence or assault or discrimination).

If awareness is meant to keep us safe, then it could explain why it’s popular to say she was drunk or wearing slutty clothes and this is why she was the target of  rape and sexual assault.

If just be aware means “don’t find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time”, then I want to ask, who finds themselves in a wrong place, at a wrong time?

Women
Women of color
Queer and Transgender people
Disabled people
(and more, or any intersection of these)

Why are we telling those listed above to be aware instead of those who act out, perpetuate and condone violence, domination and abuse? Because I am aware, my gay friends are aware, my transgender friends are aware, my friends of color are aware.

Home is a safe place to me (and for this I am fortunate). As I leave this safe place and venture into places unknown, I am aware of myself, what I am wearing, where I will be, what to avoid, on and on and on.

When fear rules logistics, availability, location and more, it means those of us who have been conditioned to know and learn fear, feel unwelcome where we have every right to be. It is a privilege to feel safe everywhere and for those who enjoy this privilege, it is time to be aware that safety should be a right, a universal truth instead of a peace of mind, body and spirit shared only by a few lucky folks.

Possessing a sense of self without limitation is powerful. Embodying a sense of place without domination or oppression is revolutionary.

It is time to employ the idea and live the truth that being aware means we can live together, without violence, assault or abuse, and that whoever may desire to sleep in an open field, to travel west or walk freely at night is unabridged in their ability to do so with the knowledge that to just be aware is a beloved task the community upholds in the honor of all its travelers and residents.

Savanna is a recent graduate of Oregon State University in Social Science. She created the blog Sex, Politics & Social Justice as an in-process learning project to gain political insight through the lens of intersectional feminism. She is moving to Austin, Texas where she hopes to expand her experience in the world and continue writing.

The post Just Be Aware: The Politics of Traveling Alone appeared first on Newfound.

Her blog posts, Tweets and talks consistently hit all of my humor buttons: a passion for sci-fi and fantasy, political savvy, and the most creative nicknames for tampons in the English lexicon. (Don’t worry about how I fact-checked that one.)

She’s also a fat acceptance feminist whose views attract some truly disturbing and disgusting comments over the Internet. Her compassionate response to one former troll, who made an abusive Twitter account using the name of West’s deceased father, gives me chills every time I think about it.

I was already fan of West’s writing when I began “Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman” (Hachette Books, May 2016). I should have been prepared for her to rip my heart out while also making me laugh till I cried,  but I just wasn’t ready for the way this book engaged me emotionally.

“Shrill” may have a bold red cover and contain many passages where West asserts her confidence in herself and competence as a writer, but she also exposes her vulnerable spots. Her retelling of a mediocre relationship stayed in too long, out of fear of being not-quite-lovable, is raw and relatable. West also reveals her fear of the way the aggressive responses to her writing are changing her. As a human being:

“I cope, day to day, and honestly there is something seductive about being the kind of person who can just take it. Challenging myself to absorb more and more hate is a masochistic form of vanity—the vestigial allure of a rugged individualism that I don’t even believe in. No one wants to need defenses that strong. It always hurts, somewhere. Besides, armor is heavy. My ability to weather online abuse is one of the great tragedies of my life.”

Human beings have bodies: that’s a fact of life. But how humans are socialized to react to bodies (fat bodies, women’s bodies) gets complicated. West details her own journey from shyness and insecurity to loving her body and believing in herself. West’s loving descriptions of her own body are tender and personal:

“The breadth of my shoulders makes me feel safe. I am unassailable. I intimidate. I am a polar icebreaker. I walk and climb and lift things, I can open your jar, I can absorb blows—literal and metaphorical—meant for other women, smaller women, breakable women, women who need me.”

Yet something so simple as being kind to her own body (we all only get this one!) is radical in our culture. (Case in point: It was nigh impossible to find a banner image for this post. Search “body” in a stock image search engine and you’ll see only one body type represented.) As if she could ever forget this, legions of internet commenters insult and harass West every day for having the nerve to love herself.

And so “Shrill” is both personal and political. It does both of things well. Very well. Powerfully well.

But did I mention that Lindy West is funny? She does things with words that make me gasp and then laugh out loud, then reread the sentence, not quite believing what just happened to me. She tells stories with emotional weight and gallows humor in equal parts. Her work is words and she uses them well.

“Shrill” is a book about West doing her job—writing—well (I particularly enjoyed reading her memories of working for the Seattle alternative newspaper The Stranger) while also trying to lead an ethical life. (Fun fact: she and her husband began falling in love when she challenged him to stop making people living with STIs the butt of some jokes in his stand-up routine.)

This is no small feat, especially considering how consistently funny West remains while telling her story.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Having a body, living with compassion: Lindy West’s “Shrill” appeared first on Newfound.