implicit bias

I was raised in a sort of closed-system meritocracy. A cult, of worship to the individual and the isolationist, and a system in which anyone could be put to the doghouse by and for stepping wrong, which was not stepping right.

(A cult of personality, you see.)

I was raised to know that I was expected to be better than everyone else, because they were tougher than me and because they weren't. Because they needed a handicap advantage and because they didn't deserve it. Because they were they, and I was us. Who was us? Us was better. Us had to be.

I was not afforded, necessarily, the opportunity to get better, in an arena of my peers. In fact, I was stripped of peers. I stood alone without having to take a step. Naturally.

And thus I was told that I was special, by dint of being me. A member of the cult, that is. And we who are in know ourselves to be doggedly exclusionary of those who are out.

So, then; how to reconcile what I come to be: a personality hire? A someone who doesn't know everything but who promises, ruthlessly and with a beaming, serious smile, to learn. A someone who is everyone and no one. A someone with no particular defining traits.

Suddenly my "speciality" confronts a terrible erosion. Who am I if I am not us, if I am not better? Because, you recall, us was better. Us was best. Us was only, because best was only. Only was best.

I'm not able to be so easily defined as I once was. I slip through the cracks, I'm neither well-rounded nor narrowly avoiding nothingness.

(My particular defining traits: my name, and my approach to problems. Anything else is not so particular to me.)

I'm simply a person. I'm simply capable in some ways and nonexistent in others.

In truth, it is the more human answer, relentlessly coded in this incorrigible society of ours though it may be. I am, and others are, neither qualified nor unqualified (neither over nor under, but out and through and through), but the right person for the job.

(We hope, anyway - and there is no definitive answer, in the end, any way. See, here?)

I am the right person for the job because I'm the person with the job, and I'm molding myself to it.

Because this is human work. Because the whole of the world is human work. Because leadership can be taught just like prowess can. Because we're nothing more than waists upon which to hang belts, upon tools.

We are pairs of eyes, ears, hands. Feet, running and walking and standing still. We are assemblages of neural information. We are smiles, indeed, we are smiles. We are bodies in a human machine and we must all bend to fit together.

The truth is that I wanted it, and I needed it. This work. This gauge. This space.

It's enough just to want it, to do it, to be.

It's enough. It's more than - but it doesn't have to be.

When we start excluding some based on how well they align to our preconceived notions, we inch ourselves closer and closer to unjudgable doom. Thereafter lies the pit into which suckers are launched, sucked, swallowed. You may spend your whole life escaping the pull, or not bothering, until it's too late.

We should not be kind to others solely because we'd like to save ourselves, because we see ourselves in them; and yet, that is most basically and completely the universal binding tie. We should be kind to others in order to countermand, from the seed, this petulant rule of "other" and its -ing.

Who among us is so perfectly talented and dry as not to be human?

Show me to this man. I will thus show you a man none envied and little treasured.

Who among us is so perfectly useless and unpith as not to be human?

Show me to his man. I will thus show you a man who is imagined to be extant at an extreme not found possible in any living or departed soul.

Most of us lie in the middle. Most of us have some tic or other, which we label unreasonable when it issues from our own warped frameworks but which we would understand perfectly if another said it, without given reason.

It's the reasons, isn't it? The stipulations. The explication of the implicit code, that little wrinkles will naturally be tugged.

And those who come with other little things they've realized about themselves, things buried neatly in email signatures where the general populace can sweep them aside - are they any worse at their work, truly, if they've devoted that past energy to this? Is self-expression and quirk really the demon of the workplace?

Of course, yes. But it doesn't have to be.

We mustn't be afraid of the names. We mustn't be afraid of the reasons.

(Not pathologizing, but reasons. For the human work, the human explanations.)

We who have spent our entire lifetimes boxing not just with the standard but with ourselves, with our insides and our outsides and the hats we try to wear, better than anyone else, better than we ourselves are capable, regardless of whether or not it feels like it might possibly be right--

We mustn't be afraid of ourselves.

The past has put you here so that you might grow, and grow together. If I came in knowing everything, I wouldn't be me. If I knew how to do everything, I wouldn't know how to be.

I'm here to do the work and I'm here to be alive. It looks like I enjoy what I get. It's alright if I get to enjoy what I give, too.