Психологический прорыв: отказ от мифа о полной автономии в пользу осознанной зависимости

Having a dream while you are asleep is a temporary occupancy of your body. Having a dream while you are awake, then, while conscious of the fact that you are conscious, must mean it is a permanent occupancy of your body. While the premise might change, the inherent want, the driving need, remains indelible and eternal. This is just to say, I am good for what I am. What that means, necessarily, might be quite disconcerting, out of the normal realm of acknowledgement. It feels almost impossible to grasp wholeheartedly who a person really is. What goes on behind closed doors, when the lights shut off and the curtains are drawn. After the teeth are brushed and the eyes are closed. In a world where the basis of the human condition is evolution and development, there is no present. The past, now and future all exist at once. This realization has always felt present, yet unreachable. My recent physical acquisition of the thought came from an ordinary occurrence, dull in its nature. A Wednesday, early evening. Home for the summer, parents out of town. I decided to make a salad for myself after I had obtained the recipe from a friend on a weekend trip to Maryland. Bell Peppers, tomatoes, onions, avocado, cilantro, lime, corn and beans. Everything was ready except the beans. The can opener had always been one of those objects that existed without my having to understand it. A wedding gift. A Soviet-style piece of metal, a type that I had never seen in anyone else’s drawers. I knew, in theory, how it worked. I had watched my mother use it perhaps hundreds of times. But when I clamped it onto the rim, it slipped off. I tried again, but the gears refused to catch. I rotated the can over and over again, convinced there had to be some obvious mistake I wasn't seeing. For 15 minutes, I stood alone in the kitchen trying to convince myself that I knew what I was doing. In that moment, however, it occurred to me that my first instinct wasn’t to learn how to use it. It was to think of who I would normally ask. My father. A roommate. A partner. A friend. Someone who could take the can from my hands, open it in three seconds and hand it back without any real sense of recognition of the act. But there was no one home. I couldn’t do it on my own. Growing up on Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir and bell hooks, I had always attempted to understand what it meant to be a feminist, a “revolutionary” in terms of the sexes, before all other worldly, naturalistic things. I read and saw womanhood as a mode of independence and self-sufficiency. In my mind, I just knew that my one true goal in life was to become as intelligent as I possibly could. Because I thought about the idea of my femininity as a resistance to the expectation that I should rely on anyone else. I had to carry all of that weight on my shoulders, unaccompanied and unassisted. I considered the graces of wisdom, maturity and intellect above all other things. For most of my existence, nothing has felt as important as my critical reasoning. Standing there with the can of beans, however, I realized that my self-perceptions were incorrect. I realized that I had unknowingly spent years mistaking proximity to competence for competence itself. I had time and time again rearranged my life so that there was almost always someone nearby who could do the things I couldn’t. I never had to become incapable because I was never alone long enough for incapability to reveal itself. I had been turned into an academic elitist, almost cruelly so, respecting those who were smart but not those with more physicality than I did. I became mean and cold with nothing to really back it up. But, there was still so much of the everyday mundane that I could not achieve. At that instant, I felt like a failure. I felt like the entire foundation of my world came crashing down. I was disappointed in myself, not because I could not open the can independently, but because my first thought was to ask for someone’s help, and there was no one around. I, for so long, felt that I could do anything and everything. I was compelled by the idea that my journey to personhood and perfection had to come unescorted. I now registered that there was a world of contradictions that I had never before accepted. In all of my female autonomy and freedom and self-support, I still wanted to be taken care of. I still wanted to be accompanied. And no matter how much I ignored that fact, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Judith Butler, in Gender Trouble, writes, “Collectively considered, the repeated practice of naming sexual difference has created this appearance of natural division. The ‘naming’ of sex is an act of domination and compulsion, an institutionalized performative that both creates and legislates social reality by requiring the discursive/perceptual construction of bodies in accord with principles of sexual difference.” This can be understood as such: while the premises of gender are essentially, as many people put it, a social construct, they are thus turned into something that does not materialize as that. The binaries are seemingly built into the phenomena of the physical world. Therefore, there is an intense subjugation that permeates throughout everyday life, setting up a stream of expectations for what a man should do versus what a woman should do. I felt that my dedication to becoming a person laid in the refusal of the feminine expectations. But what I did not realize for so long was that when I tried to reverse the matrices of a gendered society, I wasn’t doing anything meaningful or significant. I was, in fact, feeding into the twofold. I spent so much time trying to escape tradition. I looked at the potential of hyper-domesticity in my future as something that could hurt me. I tried to be better than the men around me. Smarter, faster, stronger. Because I thought that would erase sexist, preconceived notions of a woman as inferior. What I came to terms with, because of this can of beans, was that the solution was to disregard the system altogether. Since then, I have long thought about what it means to hold yourself to a standard where you feel as though you can’t rely on anyone, but still want the idea of having someone you can rely on. The conclusion I reached is that there is no shame in codependence. One, of course, can be as individualistic and unchained as they would like to. But it is not a necessity. As Butler goes on to write, “There is a great deal of material that not only questions the viability of ‘the subject’ as the ultimate candidate for representation or, indeed, liberation, but there is very little agreement after all on what it is that constitutes, or ought to constitute, the category of women.” In the case of gender politics, gender equality has always been the goal. Endless philosophers and theorists have found that women must assume a united front against sexist prejudices. However, there is no uniform experience. There is no use in imagining a population of billions as a combined whole. For that reason, this anecdote of the beans has led me to believe that the best approach to feminism is a separation from it. The curtain drops. The fantasy that freedom requires absolute self-determination is dissipated. I eventually went and knocked on my neighbor’s door. He helped me open the can. I now do not think about the fact that I did not succeed. What I remember instead is the fact that I finished making my dinner. I no longer want to be someone who never needs another person. I no longer want to confuse the profound difference between independence and isolation. I instead understand that seeking a gendered release is never about refusing care. It is about feeling secure enough to choose it. And perhaps that was the dream that occupied me all along. There is no brilliance or perfect autonomy. Beneath all of my ambitions and searching for greatness was something that I have previously considered to be a weakness: the want to share a life with other people. For so long, I believed that wanting to be kept company contradicted the woman I hoped to become. Standing alone in my parents’ kitchen, unable to open a can of beans, I finally understood that it did not contradict me at all. It completed me. I am good for what I am, and everything that I can be.