Musings on Returning Home: guest post by Jessie

On the continuing theme of reflections from the POOR session, here’s a guest post by the fabulous and thoughtful Jessie Spector:

I went to POOR Magazine’s Revolutionary Change Session with many layers of privilege to work with. I’m a queer white girl who grew up in a small-liberal-bubble kind of town, well-intentioned but pretty sheltered. My mom is of true WASP blood (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), her particular strand of the family more liberal than most but still carries elite-isms and quite a bit of wealth. My dad grew up working class with non-religious Jewish parents who had met at a Young Communist meeting back in the day. Together they produced me: currently 22 years old and living in Brooklyn NY, after graduating from an elite private college and inheriting a couple hundred thousand dollar trust fund almost two years ago. I work at Resource Generation– a saving grace for me over the past few years- and have been long involved in queer organizing, and anti-prison work; more recently thinking increasingly deeply on how to align everyday living with the Big Visions of resisting capitalism and exploitation.

Following the introduction to Tyrone’s latest post–that apparently “blogging is an appropriate forum to post thoughts that aren’t necessarily fully formed”–I’ve taken a leap of faith to share these musings. This started as a journal entry on the flight home from the Bay, the weekend of the POOR session. On the first morning of the session several POOR Scholars spoke about home, family, community; leaving, staying, the privilege wrapped up in it all. I latched onto that theme and it stayed with me through the rest of the weekend and clearly beyond. The thoughts below are very much in progress, hardly resolved or even coherent. I would love for this to get the juices of discussion flowing- please give responses, feedback, questions, opinions, push-back, or anything else you want to offer.

6/22/09: HOME

After weeks of reflection and a thousand other thoughts percolating since the POOR session, everything on my mind keeps circling back to the concepts of home and community. I’ve always known it is a privilege to be able to leave, and that it is part of a larger, constructed trajectory that includes actively separating myself from where I was raised, my parents, my immediate family, as part of a “successful” growth process. But lately I’ve really been sitting with just how much of a privilege it was for me to be able to leave, to have the opportunity to be individualistic- in a very “little girl makes her own way in the big world” kind of way. Some of that was awesome- college, living on my own at age 18 in grand New York City, getting to resettle here- or anywhere I wanted, for that matter- after I graduated. Not only could I leave my parents and younger sister behind, but I fully knew that they would be taken care of, that they would not only care for themselves but would actually continue to support me in explicit and implicit ways, even from afar.

None of this do I out-and-out regret; like with many privileges there also come opportunities I wish everyone had, opportunities that even many “privileged” people don’t have, like being able to reflect on this home as a place of unconditional love and safety. But precisely because this home was such a place of love and safety, I’m starting to realize a huge loss in “building my own life” as separate from where the majority of my lived experience has been. What I’m beginning to discover are these losses, and just how exciting it feels to think about regaining part of what I’ve lost.

Some weighty realizations have been clues that I’m feeling a loss of home and community. Whenever anyone asks about my home, neighborhood, or community, my first thought is not where I currently live, Brooklyn, but the place I grew up. I’ve known since I moved to New York City last year that it wasn’t where I wanted to settle forever, but it’s fascinating to me to unpack how far that’s penetrated. I wasn’t consciously aware before of just how deeply I feel that Northampton is my home, and certainly hadn’t recognized how that emotional affiliation could really affect how I choose to spend my energy and think about my organizing.

We spent a lot of time at the POOR session discussing relationship-building, and also the centrality of the literal space we inhabit; how each goal and need and struggle is totally unique to the time, space, and place in which it’s enmeshed, and the ability to meet that goal and engage in that struggle is contingent on truly authentic and interdependent relationships. So I was forced to ask myself, how am I engaged (or not) in needs and struggles surrounding me, if I don’t consider them part of my home or my community? And how am I building (or not) real relationships with folks literally nearby if I don’t feel in my gut that my roots belong here? And, most of all, how am I copping out, by allowing myself to opt out of any given neighborhood meeting, local election, protest, block party, neighborly conversation, etc. on the basis that the place I’m in currently isn’t really where I want to end up and so do not need to invest?

Of course this is all in the context of a much larger picture of displacement, gentrification, etc., and shows how my physically being here (in Brooklyn) without really emotionally being here is feeding that cycle. And there’s the proof that displacement and the whole dang system we’ve got going that robs land and resources really does hurt everyone– as an owning/ruling/displacing-class person, that trajectory is beginning to bite me in the ass in the form of community-less-ness.

Hand in hand with this, I recognize the ability to be able to return home (to Northampton) is equally as privileged and complicated as the privilege to leave in the first place. Many folks who are very much like me in appearance and politics simply cannot return to a place they called home for any number of reasons: abuse, tumultuous relationships, divergent worldviews, and other traumatic histories can make “home” and given family unhealthy on all sorts of levels.  It can be violent, unsafe, hostile, or just downright unpleasant for folks’ emotional, mental, and physical well-being.

But I don’t have such complicated history. I am lucky enough to come from a home that I love very much, that is nurturing and supportive of (most of) my choices, and that is somewhere that does not negatively affect my personal, emotional, mental, or physical health. Having somewhere I can definitively call “home” to begin with is a huge opportunity and privilege in its own right, let alone the option to return to it…the consistency, security, and structure (literal and metaphorical) of such a situation is something I totally take for granted. Some folks have no other choice but to stay, whether or not they care to continue living in such immediate and often co-dependent circumstances with their given family members; others have no other choice but to leave. The opportunity to return to a place that feels healthy, safe, and loving is something to be prized. I’m left wondering, what would it mean for me to return home? I’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that living with your parents is indicative of failure, immaturity, over-reliance, or just plain uncool. But really, why the hell is that?

I get excited thinking about all the things I could do if I moved back in with my parents- a new way for me to think about leveraging my privilege! There are no people I can imagine being able to live more collectively with, in terms of basic resource-sharing. Even if I did pay them rent, split utilities or grocery costs, the difference between that and my $900+ a month for rent and bills in Brooklyn is staggering. How much freer my funds would feel; and what a better usage of literal space and habitat- it’s not like anyone else would be living in my bedroom in my folks’ house if not me.

No doubt gentrification and displacement are giant, complicated matters, but simply put: if I’m not committed in my gut, then taking a step back from this place that is gentrifying so rapidly and intensely could be a tiny iota of the part I can play in affecting change. There’s no doubt that my family contributed to the “revitalization” and “upgrading” (aka, gentrification and displacement of other peoples) in Northampton over the past decades. But whether I like it or not, my personal history and knowledge are rooted there, including concrete things like a house- that someday will be in my name- with a door already designated “Jessie’s Room.” If I feel good about committing to that space, why move elsewhere and gentrify anew; if i have the option, why not save on rent, save on space, share my mom’s garden, cook my dad dinner?

Not to mention capitalizing on more explicit privileges, like how my father is a city councilor and buddies with the mayor, or my mom sits on the board of several local organizations. If I actually knew the hot-button issues, if they were part of my town and my day-to-day, I think i could really help to challenge political decisions- something that for the very first time feels exciting to me. I hear first-hand about zoning laws that would limit who can ask for money on certain parts of the sidewalk; controversy over where to haul our trash; the complications around re-building public housing units. Influencing those at the table from behind the scenes- which is exactly the privilege I carry- could hopefully help to shake up the white liberal status quo. And because of personal safety nets and privileges, I feel like I would have the courage to push back in a way I often don’t in other places.

I get really jazzed think about all the new ways I could get to know my hometown if I returned. I’m trying to push myself to give more credit to my emotional and visceral and spiritual needs, something the WASP in me has often shortchanged. It’s kinda no surprise I’ve fought this fundamental feeling of Northampton being my home for so long, and yet I’m still surprised at my own profound excitement and comfort when I think about returning. I think about all the knowledge I have of the town, the layout, the space, the history. Even at 23 years young I’ve seen it change, seen the large and small battles that are fought– between elite colleges and working class residents, middle-class teenagers and war vets living on the street, newly wed lesbians and anti-marriage queers.

I also realize how much I have to learn about all that goes on that I’ve been totally sheltered from. The excitement and potential in recognizing that is really, really powerful to me. I always talk about the importance of organizing my own communities, in the places I know the ins and outs of. And particularly as someone with class, race and educational privilege, my access to those community ties is an especially strategic and useful way of broadening and strengthening social justice work. It is empowering to think that I am truly organizing folks from similar backgrounds, in a place I call home, and I feel it rising in my chest as I think about the possibilities in returning.