While grabbing a sweater from my closet yesterday, I noticed that a furry layer of dust had accumulated on the shoulders of my black blazers. I had two thoughts: First, this same gross dust is covering everything in my closet and also probably filling my lungs as I stand here. Second, I hate politics.
The dustiest piece I have is definitely the pantsuit I haven’t worn since the evening of November 8, 2016. I had chosen it that morning because I was sure that, by day’s end, the United States would have elected its first female president: Hillary Rodham Clinton. She was not perfect (none of us are), but she was smart, highly accomplished, and wore a pantsuit like no one else. A female president was long overdue. Plus, she was clearly the only sane choice when you considered her opponent.
So, you know, I was feeling pretty optimistic when I put this on:
(I have worn this suit three times, I think. It makes me look like a competent accountant.)
I wore my pantsuit that morning on the school run, telling my daughters that a woman was going to be the next president, and that I hoped it meant they would have more opportunities to do whatever they wanted when they grew up. I wore it throughout the workday, sitting next to some (male) coworkers who sported MAGA hats (ironically—but to this day, I don’t see the humour in it). I wore it to my nephew’s birthday party at a trampoline park that night, watching my kids bounce while getting intermittent text updates from my friend Mel.
I wore it as my heart broke. Actually it hadn’t broken just yet, but it was severely cracked and would break easily and repeatedly in the years to follow.
The next morning, I didn’t know what to wear. After some deliberation, I decided on my pale pink Cartonnier blazer with black detailing.
It’s the only item I own that has shoulder pads, and I felt a tiny bit stronger when I put it on. I would face the day like a 90s-era lady boss. The ruse lasted exactly 120 minutes, until I made eye contact with a female coworker in the kitchen and we both burst into tears. She gave me a big hug, but I don’t remember what she said. There was nothing to say, really.
Looking back, I recognize that it was naive for me to think that a supremely qualified woman could win out against a bottom-of-the-barrel man—that the system wasn’t stacked against her from the very start. It belies a certain kind of privilege to believe in a meritocracy, and I’m ashamed, especially as a woman of colour, to have fallen for the lies I was fed. But then again, the system is stacked against me, too.
This year, I’ve purposely closed myself off to the political noise. My heart can only take so much right now, and I’m not even American, for goodness’ sake. That doesn’t mean, though, that I’m not encouraging people to vote, or giving money to the ACLU, or speaking out in whatever way that I can. It’s just that my heart isn’t completely in it, and hope, once broken, is hard to repair.
Sometimes I think about Langston Hughes’ Tired, and I’m reminded that there is more to the poem than its first four Instagrammable lines:
I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two —
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.
The back four, where he invites us to dig down and get at the worms… it’s ugly and painful, but we have to do it ourselves if we’re going to get anywhere.
If we want to have any chance at hope, we must start by doing it to ourselves. Time to break things wide open.
:) Teresa
What is happening even?? Closet Dispatch is a free, limited-run, weekly newsletter by Teresa Wong.