Woke, Woker, Wokest

I'm of the belief that the best way to work through your internal shit is to type it out. Preferably in private, but, ya know, I have this whole blog thing, so for better or worse, even the diary/journal-type writing ends up public eventually. Please excuse me as I embarrass myself for all to see.

Something that's been a source of tension in my life recently is the idea of "wokeness," for lack of a better term. I know the word has been co-opted by some pretty nefarious political figures—like, if DeSantis does some heinous racist shit down in Florida, it's under the banner of "the fight against wokeness"—but it's just easier for me to say "woke" than say something like "politically aware" or whatever. Maybe calling myself "woke" works both as a descriptive and as a masochistic self-flagellation thing. I'd rather not get into it. (I am going to forgo the quotation marks around the word for the remainder of the blog post, though, if you don't mind, since they act somewhat like a safety net I don't deserve.)

So the tension in my life is derived from my struggle to figure out how woke I should be. Or rather, how I woke I should allow myself to be out loud. I think wokeness is connected to a sort of social empathy that is necessary to stave off the temptation to write the whole "humanity" thing off as a loss, and, I don't know, kill yourself or something. But I also think that basing your whole personality around being woke is a turn-off for some people, and it creates more misery than intended. I'm not talking about the anti-woke crowd, because fuck those asshole hacks. I'm talking about my like-minded people. Sometimes being woke can go too far.

Example time. Pam and I watched All Quiet on the Western Front the other night. The movie ended, as all WWI films are required to do under penalty of law, by stating exactly how many people were killed during that war. It was in the tens of millions. Pretty terrible stuff. And so we were talking about how tough it must have been for that generation, to grow up and to lose so many people. And I said something along the lines of "well that's still happening today with modern wars, it's just that Americans don't care about it as much because it's not white people dying in droves, it's brown people." Pam got pissed off and didn't speak to me for the rest of the night.

She wasn't upset that I was right or wrong factually, she was upset because she felt like this was part of a pattern with me, that I always have to bring conversations to this point, like I have to make it political, or woke, even when it's just the two of us, even though I know she agrees with me generally but, like, doesn't necessarily need to hear it when it's just us two and we're laying in bed and she's had a really long day with the kids, and it's just not the time for this shit, right now. Plus, it wasn't even her point. She was coming from a place of empathy, and for no other reason than to be an asshole, I had to take it in a bitter direction.

She's right, I do say shit like that unnecessarily. Like many other similarly minded individuals—privileged, a relatively good control over language, a strong sense of empathy, a bit of a complex that requires you to be "right" more than "wrong"—I have strong beliefs that more often than not fit under the umbrella of wokeness. What I struggle with is finding the appropriate outlet to express those beliefs.

I feel this sense of dread within me, and I don't know where the pressure valve is. I know I'm not unique in that regard, that I feel the darkness of the world creeping in. But I also find myself pushing back against a lot of the ways my peers seem to be lightening the psychic load, so to speak. I cringe when I feel like that darkness is meme-ified, for instance. Using internet language on social media platforms to describe your pessimistic view of the world seems to be working for a lot of people. I've grown to despise it. Feels like a big fucking circle-jerk.

I think I try to lean on my career as a way of pretending that I'm offsetting some of the injustice in our society, but even that becomes pretty difficult sometimes. Especially since I'm at the tail-end of a two-year master's program that is ostensibly designed to enhance my understanding of my career (I'm being purposefully cagey here in the name of anonymity, but stay with me), but that same program seems explicitly designed to tear down my career as well. Every class says two things simultaneously: "You can change the world as a social worker," and also, "By all accounts, social workers are embedded in an unjust system, and are thus part of the problem." I'm not fighting against this notion, I'm just saying that its truth makes me feel like dogshit sometimes.

I'm taking a class right now about race and gender, and as the only straight white male in the class, I tend to keep my mouth shut more often than not. It's not because I disagree with anything that's being said. It's more that I don't necessarily think that anyone needs to hear the straight white male say that he agrees or disagrees. My voice and those like mine have been loud enough throughout history; let's give others a voice; and so on.

Example time. There was a question the other night about whether humans (politicians specifically, but you could easily expand the question) would ever voluntarily give up power. I stupidly opened my mouth and said that politicians specifically would not do that, because the type of person who gets into politics is the type of person who craves power, but that it would be possible for humans in general, even some white males (I didn't say the last part out loud, but it was implied). Someone else in the class responded directly to that, and in somewhat aggressive terms spelled out exactly why she thought I was wrong, and that people like me would never give up that power that they are privileged to have in the first place.

She's right. I don't say she's right because I 100% agree with her—I myself am a straight white male who is in some ways attempting to give up my power by the very act of sitting in a classroom and getting a master's degree in a subject that humbles me every single day—but I say she's right because I need to be wrong in this situation, in this context. I agree with the idea that the social structure we live in right now is designed to benefit someone like me, and if I'm going to devote my working life to attempt to dismantle that structure in tiny ways, then that means I am pushing for a system that does not benefit someone like me. And that means being wrong, more often than not.

And it's a fucked up thing to wrap my head around, because it means constantly living in a space where I hate myself, basically. Not only that, but I am not allowed to define it in those terms, because the discomfort and the vulnerability and the self-hate are emotions that I'm told people less privileged than me feel every day of their lives, so who the fuck am I to complain about it, basically. And so it just becomes an endless fucking loop of feeling shitty and denying myself the right to feel shitty and then feeling shitty about that, and then trying to express those feelings, and being made to feel more shitty about it, and then feeling lost, and then reminding myself that I have no right to feel lost, and then trying to write about it, and then realizing that writing about it is going to come off terribly, like this is just another white male complaining about losing privilege, and so I feel shitty about that too, and so on and so on.

I live a good life. I'm trying my best to make life better for others. I say these two statements to myself as a way of trying to make myself feel better emotionally, but it doesn't always work, because the world is a fucked up place, and it's a lot for anyone to handle. So yeah, man, sometimes those dark thoughts slip out. Sometimes I'm going to hear about (theoretically) all of my great-grandfather's friends dying in a pit in 1917 Europe, and my reaction is going to get cold, and bitter, and calloused, and say some shitty woke thing about death and destruction in 2023, and completely ruin someone's night. I get that way and I say those things because I haven't quite figured it out, emotionally, how to deal with those feelings that I feel when confronted with something awful or sad or scary.

I don't know if it's just a matter of reading the room, or what. But if that's the case, then I haven't found a room yet where I feel comfortable expressing these emotions—not the bedroom, not the classroom, perhaps a padded cage complete with straitjacket? Obviously I'm not saying this shit when I'm with family and I'm the most progressive (okay, fine—woke) person in the room. But I'm not saying it when I'm in class and I feel like the least woke person in the room either (plus the sense of preaching to the choir that also makes me a little uncomfortable, on top of everything else). So I don't really know where to turn except to some hypothetical audience on a blog.

Even that makes me uncomfortable, honestly. The worst thing that could possibly happen is for someone to skim this stupid blog post and to walk away assuming that it's just another white dude complaining about wokeness or something. No! I'm acknowledging that there is a certain amount of complaining here, but I'm also indicating that I think my complaining is unearned and unhelpful, both to society at large and to my own personal feelings about myself. I'm taking a risk in saying this, but only because I'm that desperate to find some way to feel at peace, even though I knew the ultimate answer all along: I will never find peace, we will never find peace, the human race is too far past that possibility. And saying that feels like going to far, and so we start the endless loop yet again.

It almost becomes easier to describe what I'm not trying to say here. I'm certainly not saying any of that anti-woke shit, and if that's how you feel you can do me a favor and fuck off from Puke on Your Birthday forever. But I'm also not saying that being all woke all the time is doing anyone any favors, take it from me (unsaid here so far is that there is a difference between saying and doing, which is another issue for me). I'm not saying oh woe is me for being a privileged white male, because I know that my emotional concerns are not even a pimple on the asscrack of the world. But I'm also not saying that I don't try, and that there isn't a real concern that no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to shake this pit in my stomach whenever one of these thoughts arise.

As I said at the beginning, I'm mainly using this as a sort of therapy to try to figure out exactly what's wrong. However, I don't really know how to say what's wrong without making the situation worse. I also don't know how to describe any of this without sounding like a whiny petty shithead. I do know that if I don't take a deep breath and buckle down and write stupid pointless emo politically-charged blog posts like this every once in a while, I'm going to fucking explode, because I really don't know what else to do.