Jackson Free Press

I taught my first class last week, and was pleased with how well things went. But I also came away from the class with an unexpected, and humbling, realization: I'm really, really glad I didn't have a student like me or at least like the kind of student I used to be.

Not that I've ever been unkind to teachers and other students in the classes I've taken. (Not intentionally, anyway.) And the comments I've gotten from professors over the years suggest to me that after a little while, they learned how to deal with, and even enjoy, the presence of a student like me. But I'm sure it must have been a lot of work to deal with a student who was so tense and self-critical, a student who was constantly trying to prove he deserved to be in the room.

I'm still working on that insecurity, that tendency to prove that I'm smart enough to belong. It silences other people's voices, and it contributes to an environment that silences other people's voices.

As is generally the case, what hurts me hurts the people around me, too. You can't hold yourself to a defensive posture without contributing to a social environment that silences others.

So I've started doing two very important things, and they've changed my life.

The first thing I've done is change my internal audience. I've avoided people who criticize me harshly and environments where I constantly feel the need to defend myself. Certain men in local communities, online and offline, have made an issue of my craniofacial condition, my neurological damage, my childhood immune deficiency, my nontraditional educational and career background, my life as a caregiver, and anything else that looks like it might be a sore spot. "They" say I'm a feminist because I've been emotionally castrated, that I write books because I can't handle a "real" 9-to-5 job, that I'm a dilettante and don't know enough about anything to be of any real use to the world, and so forth.

I can't assess the life I would have had if my life circumstances were different—but I do know that if I encountered somebody who had adapted to unusual life circumstances, I'd celebrate them. I wouldn't try to pick him or her apart for it.

And if I tolerate that kind of environment, it has a ripple effect on everything else I do. The feminist blogger Echidne of the Snakes writes often about the "Planet of the Guys"—about how imagining an all-male audience subtly influences the way public figures communicate, which has obvious corollaries to race as well. (Has there been any major political gaffe on race that wouldn't have been avoided if the speaker had just imagined he or she wasn't speaking to an ethnically homogenous audience?) I should not have to think about what the nastiest people I know would do with it every time I post a photograph or a poem or a piece of writing that says something personal about me—unless I really want to live by their priorities, sacrificing better parts of myself to become the sort of person they would respect. Sure, after years of effort, I might earn the pleasure of their company—but why on earth would I want it?

The second thing I've done is try, when I have time, to ask myself a simple question before I say or do something: "What am I trying to prove?" And if my answer is any variation on "that I'm good enough to belong here," I don't bother. Because the corollary to that question is that if I have to prove that I'm good enough to belong, then on some level I'm holding everybody else to the same cruel and unfair standard and patronizing them if they don't take the same unnecessary steps to meet it.

One of the reasons I've stopped posting so much on the Jackson Free Press site is because I want to hear more voices other than my own. This reflects what I hope has been a general shift toward less talking and more listening, less focus on proving that I've done my homework and more focus on speaking my values from the heart, even when it makes me sound vulnerable, even when it makes me sound foolish.

Because in the grand scheme of things, the question of whether I'm "good enough"—to whatever extent that can even be measured—is pretty insignificant. The more important question is whether I'm using my voice in a way that disrupts systems of shame, cruelty and oppression, or in a way that tacitly contributes to them. I've tried both ways of interacting with the world, and I've made my choice.

Freelance writer Tom Head is a lifelong Jacksonian. He has authored or co-authored 24 nonfiction books on a wide range of topics, is a civil liberties writer for About.com, and volunteers as a grassroots progressive activist.