Pollyanna

Driving in this city can be kind of stressful (easy Finland, easy ;) so, provided I have nowhere pressing to be, the one hour bus ride home sometimes emerges as the nicest part of my day. I think about stuff, catch up on phone calls, journal, read, do homework, it's lovely. Today was an interesting ride.

A woman loudly, and with a great deal of anger, made sweeping, derogatory comments about people with my skin colour. For the entire ride. It was awkward. It was also interesting timing; her comments filtered through while I was reading about Buddhist meditation, about choosing to pause to check in with the emotions our knee-jerk responses want to protect before following through on them. I struggled with that tonight as the angry voice forced its way into my thoughts.

The bus ride to and from the university has become a time for searching, questioning thoughts; not exactly the kind of frivolous daydreaming I expected. This is the same bus where, very often, no one will sit beside me. The bus may be packed with people standing in the aisles but the seat beside me? Empty. The entire process of getting home each night has become an incubator for long, internal discourses about race, privilege, discrimination, socio-economic status, appearances, assumptions, fate, you name it.

Tonight I also thought about the clients we'd seen for intake that day. About the fact that no matter what kind of complaints I can fabricate about my parents, my upbringing, my siblings; no one abused me, no one forced themselves on me, no one let/encouraged their friends/partners to force themselves on me. And by 'force themelves' I mean have sex. I thought about the way in which the choice of just one person to abuse the trust and power given to them by a child can impact entire generations of a family. And I thought about the people who are coming in to talk about their experiences and the bravery and courage it must take to choose to deal with it. I'm not so sure I wouldn't stick with repression and denial.

As I write this, I feel a bit silly. I know bad things happen. I know racism exists. I know people live through all kinds of horrible abuses. And I know that some of those people include those in my very close circle - that there are no exceptions. I guess its just that when no one will sit next to me on a bus it hurts my feelings, and it makes me think about assumptions that may be made and the systems in place that support them. When I talk to my third person in a row explaining what their parent/sibling/babysitter/grandparent did to them with a straight face and matter of fact voice it feels very real and I'm again humbled by the absolute grace of fortune bestowed upon me.