It's Okay That You're Racist (For Now): De-Stigmatizing Being Racist So That We Can All Move Forward

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IT'S OKAY TO BE RACIST. WHAT'S NOT OKAY is to continue to choose to allow your racist instincts to continue.

Allow me to explain: 

Racism is a lot like anxiety—and, hell, I’m not a psychologist, but it seems like racism is anxiety. And trust me—I know a lot about anxiety. I’ve been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder since 2012, and have been experiencing it loooong before then. An anxiety disorder is essentially where your neurons misfire on a regular basis to tell you that there’s a threat to your survival when there actually isn’t one, and holy hell, it is obnoxious as fuck. For those of you who don’t have anxiety disorders, it’s basically like feeling like a tiger is fucking chasing you and constantly within one swipe, except that you feel that way all the time. I’ve been dealing with my anxiety disorder for almost fifteen years. It’s exhausting. It’s awful. 
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(I need a sticker or something. Or a badge of honor. Do they have anxiety stickers?) 

Photo credit: pexels.com/@pixabay

​Anxiety is a fight-or-flight instinct. It’s something people use in times of trauma to be able to identify potential threats and continue to survive. And it works, right? I’ve been worried about shit for fifteen-plus years now and I’m still alive, ergo, it works. 

Except—no. That’s not how it works. That’s a correlative approach, not a causative one. And that’s honestly a whole other chapter.

I’ve been through years of therapy with several therapists, all of whom tell me the same thing: my anxiety is not serving me. It has a net negative outcome on my life. I spend more time existentially worrying—putting energy into worrying about things that are significantly less likely to happen than the level of worry I’m putting into preventing them—than I do actually living and enjoying my imperfect life. It’s taken me decades to embrace imperfection and unfinished projects and not overperforming in my work, but by golly, I’ve been working on it, and I have improved so much. My life is a billion times better because I’ve put in that work. I’m a billion times more relaxed than I used to be.

That doesn’t mean I’m not anxious anymore. Having an anxiety disorder means that I have to spend actual effort counteracting my brain’s instinct to be anxious. It means that when I’m in the car, thinking about how many car accidents happen on a daily basis and how many of them result in death and wondering whether the car seat we have will actually protect our kid and whether we’ve signed a will and whether we’re leaving anyone out of that will and whether they’ll be offended if they’re not included and how I’m going to need to start repairing those relationships that haven’t even broken yet—it means that I have to spend active energy unraveling that spiral as I’m going through it. I have to practice this using the tools that therapists have provided me over the years, and it takes work to re-train my brain. For some people, this comes naturally, and good for them! That’s awesome. For me, though, it takes work to make new, healthy thought-process habits. And that’s okay. 

It’s okay that my brain works the way it does.

It’s awesome that I’m putting the work in to re-train it so that I have more peace in my life.

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