“You think too much”. I’ve always been told this. I remember the look my mom gave me when I asked why the sky was blue at age 6. “Why does it matter”, she said. I couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to know everything, to understand the mysteries surrounding them. So I looked in a book. I found out about wavelengths of light and the sky reflecting the ocean. This amazed me considering that we only had lakes and rivers where I lived. I also learned that people didn’t like it when I asked them too many questions. So I read more and started telling everyone what I knew. Sometimes they thought it was cute, and others react angrily.
I had teachers argue with me when I corrected them, they would send me to the office when I chose to opt out of classroom instruction that I already knew. I would pull out a book and read instead of listening to their lessons, they didn’t like that, but they also never came up with other options for me besides discipline. Eventually my questions outgrew the books, they became something more. “Why are people poor, why won’t my teachers put me in gifted classes, why do people hate it when I know things, why are they so angry towards me?” In high school the questions shifted as my anger grew. I was in AP classes being mocked and isolated, there were no black students in many of the classes. My senior year after my guidance counselor laughed at me for applying to out of state colleges, I found my answers and swallowed the anger.
We accept things as they are, and things that are questionable are seen as too difficult to answer. In social policy there is a term to describe this, “wicked problems”. Issues that are thought of as normal, difficult, and unsolvable. Things like poverty, racism, misogyny, climate change, and more. Wicked problems are socially acceptable to the point that an entire field of study gave them a label and threw their hands up in defeat. What does that say about us and how we handle our problems, problems like little girls who ask too many questions and notice too much? What happened to this girl who questioned everything? Did she stop when she was laughed at, isolated, and misunderstood? What about when she saw people defer dreams, become addicts, abuse one another, drop out, join gangs, and become shooting victims? There were no questions coming from the community experiencing these problems, there still aren’t. I could argue that the little girl I once was encountered too many “wicked problems”. I could say that her entire life was a wicked problem, including the parts where she made it.
When that little girl became an adult in college, she had professors doubt her and grade down her assignments, except for when they were submitted anonymously. Her wicked problemed life continued after she walked across the stage at graduation, when she moved to Washington and became isolated from her roots, and rejected from the Black community around her. When she became they, they became confused, but decided to pour their empty ass cup into equally wickedly, problemed people. And what about when she/they was called privileged by those who she/they thought were her/their community? Or when they watched family die left and right around them, or when they ran from gunshots during a Christmas visit that turned into them pouring their dry and cracked cup into those suffering around them?
For every step that should not have been taken according to the social policy analysts, the little girl that became them, should have stopped but did not. And now they sit, writing this with voices of doubt and question echoing inside them. Voices and people that doubted their intellect, their authenticity, and their existence. I am not a problem, no problem is unsolvable, no person is a problem. Those who become complacent are the wicked ones who choose to turn the mirror away.
Lifting As I Climb LLC 