hi so ik people prob wont see this but i wanted to try anyway, i just want tips on what i should improve on for when i write discursively please 🙏
This is a practice one i've written:
Humans are social creatures. We evolved to form groups in order to feel Safe, Supported, Connected. So what happens when we start to draw lines? “You can’t do that, you’re not allowed” What happens when we start to disconnect and separate? “We don't want you here” Humans are inherently bad at estimating. Therefore we underestimate just how deep those lines cut when we draw them, how they outline one’s sense of self. Their worth. Their self-esteem. Their humanity.
But what does being human even mean? To me, it's having autonomy, deciding your life and how you live it for yourself instead of letting those lines outline where you go. It's about pushing the boundaries of these lines and exploring how much you can flourish once you cross them.
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”
Is a quote by Charlotte Bronte from her novel, Jane Eyre, 1847, she perfectly encapsulates what it means to be human in my eyes. The main character, Jane, lives in England during the Georgian Era as a woman. Historically, women have always been oppressed, restrained by the lines that drew women as wives and homemakers; nothing else. Jane, living in the Georgian Era, opposes these lines, the lines that Exclude. The lines that exclude women from basic human rights like education, freedom and an identity.
Twelve-year-old me poured over this book; unaware of how much it would build how I understand humanity at seventeen.
Exclusion strips an individual of their humanity. Their right to be comfortable in their own skin, to live according to what they want.
So why as humans, do we deprive other humans of their right to be human?
Jane contests the exclusion of women of agency, refusing to be seen as anything other than equal as men. Although Bronte wrote this novel criticizing the gender exclusion imprinted into the Georgian Era, it remains a relevant commentary today on not only gender, but; Race exclusion. Religion exclusion. Age exclusion. Pauline Hanson is a senator whose political stance is centred on exclusion and national conformity. Drawing lines between the “average Australian” and the “others,” depriving the “others” of their right to be a human.
But lines aren’t merely drawn with ink. They're drawn with speeches. In language. In policy. Policies that reject and exclude those who aren’t “ordinary” who aren’t “average.” But these lines can only draw so far; we’re all so vastly different from each other, so spread out on the spectrum on what it’s like to be a human. So different that it blurs the lines.
Removes control and growth.
But stories? They have always been political. Not because they’re crude; because they reveal. They insist on showing humanity as it is. If we placed Jane Eyre into the hands of those who construct belonging narrowly, like Pauline Hanson, it would be an invitation.
An invitation to realise when we draw lines, no one remains unscathed.
Those driven out are told they are less than human.
Those who draw them restrict their world to a place barren, dry of empathy and connection.
Drawing lines harms all of us. Not because we’re drawing them wrong, but because we never should’ve drawn them in the first place.
