I’ve always been short. I was the shortest boy in my class all the way into high school. There were a couple other short boys, but they had growth spurts. I did not. I looked up to everyone.
I’ve always been overweight. I realize people have different understandings of what that means, and that the conversation about what constitutes overweight is in constant flux – but by pretty much any conventional definition, since I was a child, I’ve been some level of overweight.
Let me stop really quickly and say this is not an invitation for you to tell me otherwise: Phil, I don’t consider you short; Phil, you’re not overweight, etc. Friends, I’m not sad about who I am, and I’m not fishing for compliments. Short and overweight aren’t bad things. Neither is being bald, by the way. Sometimes people will comment on my baldness and then apologize, like they’ve pointed out some embarrassing thing. I am not embarrassed. I don’t get hat hair, and I don’t have to pay for a stylist or expensive products. I’m doing fine. Short, overweight, and bald. Whatever. I like me. I’m not sweating it.
OK, back to what I was like when I was a kid – before I went bald. I was also bad at sports. All of them. I didn’t watch them and I didn’t excel at playing them. Well, I was pretty good at croquet, but I have to tell you that this did not make me terribly desirable. Which mattered to me. I was not a boy who believed in cooties. I had crushes on girls from the moment I met them. But the girls I liked seemed uniformly to like me “as a friend”. If I was really lucky, some would say I was like a brother to them.
When I was 13, my parents split up. We sold the house in which I had grown up, and radically downsized. My dad moved far away. Shortly thereafter, he came out of the closet to me as gay. Because of the school and church I went to, I did not feel like I could tell anyone about him. I told exactly three people and swore them to secrecy. Three years later, I moved across the country and started from scratch in a totally different culture and world.
Despite all the sentimental rhetoric around the innocence of children, people who actually spend their time with young people know better. Growing up isn’t for the faint of heart. Elementary schools, middle schools, highs schools, neighborhoods, youth groups – they all have complex social structures and hierarchies and pecking orders. We know this.
I always felt like I had to hustle – to work – to be taken seriously. I had a quick mind and a big mouth, and I would basically use those things to try to make sure I was not an outcast or sidelined. I befriended people of all kinds, with all sorts of interests. I got on student council. I was liked well enough. I was not bullied or harassed or any of that. But I did not feel like I fit in with most other boys, and I did not feel as if I was what most girls found attractive, and I did not feel as if my home life was what it should be.
Now I’m 46 and I don’t really care about any of these things because I know who I am, and I know what matters. But I can remember being young and wishing I could be like the boys who had growth spurts and got picked first for kickball and didn’t have to buy jeans from the Husky section, who didn’t seem to have to hustle to be noticed or liked, whose parents were still together. I thought they had it made.
The first time someone ever called me privileged, I was indignant. Not upset, hurt, or scandalized, just indignant. They didn’t know me! They didn’t know how I didn’t fit in. They didn’t know about me being just a friend, about the Husky section, about being the second to last one picked, about having to look up to everyone, about having to strategize to be noticed, about a broken home, about a family secret, about a cross-country move. The idea that I had some kind of advantage was ridiculous to me. I knew people who really had advantages, who didn’t have to do all the things I had to do. I worked hard. I struggled. I earned my position in the world. Privileged? Absolutely not.
There is so much I’ve left out of the story of my growing up.
We always had money. Even when my parents said we didn’t have any money, when they said we were in debt, we never went homeless or hungry. We still bought name-brand toilet paper and designer clothes. Sure, we had to sell the big house and the Mercedes, but we were still able to rent houses and buy a Honda.
For most of my childhood, we lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood. A year after we moved there, the lock on the front door broke and we never bothered to fix it. I went to private schools all but one year of my life – and I was not on scholarship. Sure, I moved across the country and started all over again, but I did it by choice so I could attend a swanky New England prep school. When I was 16, I was given a car. I didn’t think I was spoiled because it was used, and the kid down the street from me had a brand-new BMW. I drove that car fast. I got pulled over 7 times before ever getting a ticket. Just warnings from my friendly neighborhood police officers who smiled and joked with me and let me get on my way.
I graduated from that swanky New England prep school and went to a swanky New England Liberal Arts college so I could be around more people like me and find myself and figure out who I wanted to be and follow my dreams. It was, of course, at that fancy coastal elite school that someone first called me privileged to my face. It was all too easy to ignore them. It would be another 20 years before I would even begin to acknowledge the truth of it all.
Growing up, everyone in my school, in my church, in my neighborhood was White like me. My family had a bigger house than some of my friends, and a smaller one than others. In my mind, we were in the middle. In my mind, my life was maybe a little easier than others in some ways – I knew, for instance, that I had an easier time getting good grades than some of my friends – but I also knew adversity.
I lived in a bubble – as many of us do. I didn’t build that bubble. I’m no more embarrassed about growing up in that bubble than I am about being bald or short or having love handles. It is what it is. But because of that bubble, my understanding of the wider world in which I live was limited, and I was able to believe that I did not experience privilege. I was even able to think of myself as having a particularly difficult life – of overcoming great adversity, of having to really struggle and scrape to make it.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to write about how that bubble has been burst. And if I have the courage, maybe I’ll be able to admit how I’ve tried to rebuild that bubble again and again – to unsee and unknow some of the things I’ve seen and known so that I can tell myself I am not privileged. I know the topic of privilege is fraught and complicated, and I will get a lot of it wrong.
I also know that I haven’t mentioned Jesus at all in what I’ve written so far. He’s going to show up a lot in the weeks to come because it is my belief in him that has enabled me to wake up to some things I otherwise wouldn’t have, and to accept some things it would be more convenient not to. It is Jesus who seeks to make me honest, contrite, open, to face this world and love it for what it is, not what I pretend it to be.
So, I hope you’ll stick with me as I talk about privilege. I promise it’ll only hurt a little. Probably.
