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

4/4/2021

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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?) 
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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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A simultaneity of things.

3/3/2021

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HOW CAN THIS PLACE BE SO PEACEFUL for me yet so destructive to you?

This valley with its lush green grasses under my Converse sneakers. With its bright blue skies over my box-dyed hair. With its morning birds chirping to each other as I type with my thumbs on my phone. With its desert-yellow flowers I capture on my NatGeo app. And as I get closer to my brother's home in the mountains, I walk on cracked asphalt, passing a plastic, broken Pelon con Rico container on the floor, blown out of a trash can by the high winds. 
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How to Do Better

2/11/2021

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I CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT THE "GOOD GERMANS" in Nazi Germany. The people who knew Hitler was deliberately committing genocide against Jews but who voted for him, anyway. On purpose. 

People say that they were doing what they thought--believed!--was right, but how could they believe that murdering an entire subcategory of humans was the right thing? My thought process in response to this, as a Jewish person, goes like this: 

  1. They should've known better
  2. I am a Jew and therefore I can't trust people like that because survival, duh
  3. They are bad people because they are--at best--complicit in the murder of no fewer than six million people within the course of a few years.

There are obvious flaws within the system of thinking here, but I want to be transparent and honest, because that's the only way forward, here, so bear with me.

When Trump got elected in 2016 and started generalizing Mexicans in similar ways that Hitler generalized Jews, I of course panicked--because guess what? I'm Mexican, too. My friends told me that I was overreacting when I compared modern early Trumpism to early Nazi Germany, but I was genuinely terrified. Sure, I'm White-passing, and I grew up Christian. But would those things save me if push came to shove? When people start using rhetoric that blames an entire category of people, it's us-versus-them. It's fight-versus flight. It's survival thinking--and there's no reasoning with survival thinking.
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From @Life Matters at Pexels

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Why I'm Impressed with the "Sister Wives" Family: A Brief, Unpopular Opinion

7/17/2020

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WHENEVER I MENTION REALITY TV to my friend across the country, she rolls her eyes at me. My kid's godparents do, too. But I've been obsessed with reality television for a long time now--mostly because I feel like it's an impressive, meta-anthropological study into White people in America. Not the delicately performed captured footage of everyday White people and their six billion kids, but also the questions people don't often consider around them:

  • Why are White audiences so obsessed with people who are obsessed with having children?
  • What are the TLC staff thinking when they're observing these people's lives from behind the cameras?
  • Why am I so obsessed with this show? And why do people compulsively assume that reality TV is trash?
  • Is it really all "fake"? How are we defining "fake"? 
  • How much of people calling reality TV "fake" is really a dismissal of how uncomfortable and emotionally traumatic people's lives really are?

In my experience, watching TV is like a treasure hunt: you're constantly reading between the lines to find out what's really going on. 

And what's really going on is the same thing that's going on in all of our lives: heartbreak, love, birth, death, oppression of feelings, working within the confines of ridiculous societal expectations, turning blind eyes to things we aren't sure we want to be true.

This is especially illuminating when watching conservative, religious families, because they have such a much-higher pile of shit to work through than people who have been living outside the confines of American evangelical religion, which is a whole Thing in and of itself. So the answer to my question of why I'm so obsessed with this show is simple: I recognize how my beliefs used to be the same way, and I'm interested in watching other people make similar journeys toward reconciling their beliefs with the increasingly accepting world outside those religious communities. There's a catharsis in my viewership of those stories. 
​

Specifically, let's talk about the Brown family from "Sister Wives": a polygynous, Mormon-fundamentalist family featuring one dad, four moms, and a whole bunch o' kids (and now a couple of grandkids). The Browns get a lot of hate and a lot of love, which depends on the viewer's own values. And I think that's how my viewership of reality television tends to be different: I specifically push my own values out of my mindset when I watch other families. 
PictureSource: TLC

A key part of my personality is that I tend to be extremely empathetic, and therefore I have the ability to rationalize anything. This, of course, has its good sides and its bad sides, but for the sake of this blog post it certainly is an effective trait in making me an ideal viewer for empathizing with a polygynous family. 

I'm also probably more charitable toward the Brown family than most viewers because I'm also from a pretty conservative, religious community, 
and I got out of it and became comfortable with myself and my beliefs. The main thing that people balk at (when it comes to the Browns) is the polygyny--the comments on YouTube are filled to the brim with people shouting at Meri (the first wife) to leave and be happy elsewhere, or making judgmental remarks about how the polygamous lifestyle is dirty and wrong, and the Browns deserve every hardship they endure because they've chosen to live their lives this way. 

But to me, this is just viewer-anonymity rearing its ugly head. This is people looking at another family and assuming that the way they run their own families is superior. So for you, viewers, as in the same breath I also acknowledge that much of reality TV (see: "Sex Sent Me to the ER," "Yummy Mummies") is indeed trash, I offer a different interpretation:

I read the family as flawed, but earnest. I see the whole family owning up to their mistakes as they can comprehend them and constantly trying to just be better people. I'm impressed at how public they are about their struggles as a plural family, and the fact that they are so honest about their jealousies and failing relationships and, later, the hard-won successes in those same relationships. You don't get into polygamy/polyamory unless you're willing to deal with those sometimes-ugly emotions and fucking up on treating your family with love and respect.


​In this way, the Browns just seem like a regular American family: a patriarch who fucks up with his language a whole lot and isn't emotionally well-regulated, 
​but still has a whole lot of love for 


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How to Cope with Chaos

5/28/2020

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Image from https://unsplash.com/@anaspata
I KEEP LOOKING FOR THE ENDING of this story. Where it's supposed to end, based on all the stories I know of from mythology, from history, from science, from life. I find comfort in these stories, in knowing that they have endings, and I've made it my life's mission to study them. I used to study them to understand the structure of a story, so that I could be a Writer with a capital W, because Writer was some sort of fantasy occupation I had in my head for ages, or because creating worlds let me escape the uncertainty of my life. 

I didn't understand, then, that I was studying them to find something. Treasure-hunting for a fabled reward, for something that didn't necessarily exist in reality, but I thought that if I could use the power of my mind--if I could just figure out where the cracks in the world were that served as gateways to another dimension, where things were tangible and I could manipulate reality enough to make...I don't know, magic happen? If I could do this, I could see It coming. Where "It" is not a sewer-clown, but the grizzly reality that inevitably awaited me, and with this knowledge, I could avoid It. I could save myself. 

This morning, I realized the worst thing I could have possibly realized: that stories are nothing but human-fabricated frameworks, our imaginations trying to make sense out of our own realities. 

Well, fuck me.

I think I've known this a long time, but I've been too afraid to admit it: that the story structures I've studied are frames I try to fit onto a chaotic world, one that doesn't care about story structures. The attempt to create books and mythologies and anthologies about the world is merely a human source of comfort--there's no inherent truth to any of these stories. They're just reflections of what we value. ​
In some ways, this is freeing. That real-life Lord of the Flies newspiece that came out a while ago allows a different, counter-Golding narrative to be told, wrecking our predisposition to assume that people are innately vicious and evil--a predisposition that likely lasted as long as it did because of the influence of one storyteller. That storyteller understood life through one frame, and we started to accept that as fact, as reality. But reality twists and turns and isn't as simple and straightforward as storytellers have told us it is. It doesn't always have the tragic ending for girls, but also doesn't always have the heroic ending for girls. It doesn't tell the story of heroes and villains because no one is entirely hero and no one is entirely villain. 

But in other ways, it's terrifying. 

Now how am I supposed to perform risk-management on my life? When things can go any which way? When I don't know if fleeing the country in the midst of growing tensions that have been popping at the seams into all-out riots over the past few years is the right answer, or staying put is the right answer? If the tale of my life ends in my premature death, will it be a tragedy or a victory? Tragic for some, victorious for others? 

If I'm the protagonist in this story, and not some random background character (which is more likely, let's be honest), my author sucks at plotting. (I can relate.) 

I keep looking for the ending of my story so that I can shape the story in that direction, I can make myself learn the lessons I'm supposed to learn, I can become the kind of protagonist I want to be. But I can't see the ending because story structures shift as humanity continues on. We see bigger parts of the picture. We accept various narratives in place of our reality, because life is easier to cope with when you have a roadmap. That roadmap is an illusion, of course, and there is no set end to the journey, there is no right way to get there, and while that may be comforting for some--and even for me, in my good moments--I feel like I'm swimming in the uncertainty of what this presents to me. The frameworks around me that used to support my life narrative are collapsing and I'm Alice falling down the rabbit hole, books that used to be on shelves now floating in space as I pass them by, unable to swim out of the wind tunnel, no clue where I'm going to land. ​
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Government is a Team Sport: A Primary Perspective

3/3/2020

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THIS JUST IN: HUMANITY IS RUN BY HUMANS. Also newsworthy: different humans have different approaches to running humanity. Also, in case you didn't know: humans are imperfect beings who don't always have the answers to life. 

So why do we seem to have a double-standard to expect our politicians to have the perfect answer to everything? 

The hate online has been excessive during this primary season, as it always is in elections. But in an era where we're starting to accept that self-care isn't a luxury anymore, that it's essential to survival and living, where we're learning to forgive ourselves, we don't provide that same standard to our politicians. ​
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via GIPHY


​We expel vitriol and we start choosing our candidates by process of elimination: I can only vote for my candidate because the other candidates made this mistake, made that mistake, etc. Also, I'm ignoring the mistakes my candidate made, or I'm rationalizing those mistakes as "not as harmful" to our government/humanity/etc. 

I'm not blaming people for having this reaction, though. I think it's a response to post-traumatic stress. It is a fear-based response. We're so used to having to choose between bad and worse that we're still evaluating a pool full of awesome candidates--brilliant ideas and flaws and all--by purity tests instead of looking at all the ways they work well together. But we don't have to this time around. We have a bunch of good candidates, all of whom would bring something different to the stage, flaws and all. 

Remember: government is a team sport. We're all in this together. Cue High School Musical theme.
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UNCENSORED: Less-Than

8/6/2018

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​I AM FROM HEAT. A place with sun, maybe too much, but it's sorely missed when you take it away. No room for chill, except briefly for a dip in a chlorinated pool. (I don't know what to do with this saltwater nonsense.)

I am from sweat, dried sweat layered beneath wet sweat, protected beneath pimples that make my face sting and make me feel less-than human, less-than beautiful, less-than desirable, but these are my greatest strength: if I do not worry about beauty, I can focus on love, and through that I can bring people close to me to ease my perpetual insecurity.

I am from Christmas tamales with people my parents hate and who also hate them back; I am from putting on a social face and giving all the expected answers--

Yes, I'm doing well in school;
Yes, I love Jesus;
Yes, I love you, too
.

Even though I only really like the reading-stories part of school, and the teacher praise when I've done well; even though I think Jesus is a metaphor and I doubt what my church says; even though I see how you all smile on top of your lies. 


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This piece is brought to you by Libba Bray's workshop at SCBWI, "Digging for Truth," in which participants were encouraged to "name your secrets" and "honour them by acknowledging them." The piece is a 10-minute timed freewrite based on the prompt "Where I'm from." 

Photo source: COPD Living

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Children Beneath Foil

7/18/2018

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2014, Associated Press [Ross Franklin]. Republished in the Tucson Sentinel Dec. 22, 2017.
BROWN FEET. THE FEET ARE ALWAYS BROWN. Four years ago, and now, they're brown.

Children lay face-down on green camping mats, but no packages of Jet-Puffed or Honey Maid or Hershey's, classic American childhood staples, are nowhere in sight. Present instead are large sheets of Reynolds wrap, silver and shiny like a housewife's wedding ring. A woman in an advert grins overenthusiastically holding a huge box of Reynolds wrap, her hands cupping either end of the box like she's describing how big her husband's dick is. 

I guarantee you a woman did not make that ad.

There's a webpage that's titled: WOMEN IN JOURNALISM NEWSPAPER MILESTONES. It's short. Thirteen women are listed between 1739 and 1976. The author of the article is named Bill. 

In a different advert, in another decade, a boy stands in a yellow rain coat holding Reynolds wrap next to his dog. The boy is pleased. Of course he's pleased: rain boots protect his feet and he splashes in puddles with his beloved dog. 

I call the woman "woman" and the boy "boy." Most of the people who read this will assume the invisible, default word in front of those words:

                             white.

We don't have to specify.


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"Be More Professional."

4/12/2018

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WHO ELSE HAS BEEN TOLD to be more "professional" before? I've been told to not swear as much with people, because it's not as "professional," and while I agree that not everyone is open to casual swearing and that it might be a good idea to make sure people are comfortable with your swearing before dropping f-bombs on them like it's hot, I am resistant to the idea that swearing is "unprofessional."

It seems that people's ideas about what is "professional" are quite conservative, really. It's okay to mention Christmas, or throw a Christmas party in the workplace--as long as you call it a "holiday" party--and have Santa and reindeer everywhere--but a Hanukkah party and the display of a menorah at said party is "too religious." Queer people are "accepted" in the workplace, but if you want to talk about your polyamorous relationship, "you don't need to share everything" even though everyone else talks about their wives and husbands on a regular basis. Employees with mental disabilities are protected by the American Disabilities Act (ADA), but if you talk about your medication in the workplace, you shouldn't because people might think you're tripping on Vicodin 24/7.

To this I politely ask: what the hell, people?


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Elena Alvarez's Story is the Story I Needed Fifteen Years Ago

2/8/2018

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PictureBorrowed from Google. Check out Giovanni Escalera's collaborative multimedia project: https://toowhitetobemexican.bandcamp.com/
I NEVER FELT MEXICAN. NOT REALLY. 

I've written several times about growing up as a privileged half-Latina, white-passing American, and I cannot stress how embarrassing it was to never really meet anyone else going through this. And isolating. Every time I met another Latinx person, I felt like a fraud. I even considered joining my school's Amigas Unidas organization, or the Sigma Lambda Gamma chapter, but I felt "too white" to join. I kept feeling like I had to prove that I knew Spanish, kept apologizing for my grammar. I pretended like I understood the slang jokes that everyone else made. 

I was lying.

I am a proud Latina; I'm proud of the legacy that my Mexican grandparents have set, the stories of perseverance that they told about growing up prior to Cesar Chavez's labour movement. I grew up as a young Mexican girl in Fresno, but my story was far from that of Gary Soto's--I lived in the suburbs, not the barrio; I went to private, magnet, and charter schools and had an attentive mother who nagged me about my grades; there was never any question about whether I was going to college or not, and I even thought of Fresno State as a fallback school rather than something to aspire to*. ​

​And to make matters worse: I was never racially profiled.

This sounds like a good thing, doesn't it? And it is, to an extent. But it's distressing in that my brother and I have drastically different experiences with this, despite having the same racial blood makeup.


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Copyright Gabrielle Lee © 2021
  • Connect
  • One-Shot Writing
  • Longer Works
  • Part of This Complete Breakfast
  • Choreography
  • Design
  • Photography
  • Other Projects