Privilege Doesn't Invalidate Pain
I feel like a lot of times privilege of some kind—be it being born in a free country, being white, having parents that are together, whatever—is used to tell someone their pain doesn’t matter or doesn’t matter as much as someone else’s. Because you can be a rich white man and be upset over losing a loved one, or be a child of happily married, loving parents and still struggle with depression or eating issues or anxiety, or you could be a kid starving in Africa, but all of that pain is valid. My best friend has amazing parents who love each other dearly and never fight and are just super amazing, but she complains to me, the child of an emotionally abusive father, about her life and how she feels her parents aren’t being fair. Now, a lot of the time some of her issues seem tedious to me because of what I’ve been through, but I know they don’t seem that way to her, because she hasn’t been through as much crap as I have and these are legitimate issues for her. Pain is something you build up a tolerance to. Emotional and physical. Just because someone doesn’t have as high of a tolerance as you do doesn’t make their issues and how it impacts them any less valid. Think of it like this: Person A broke their arm and Person B sprained their ankle. Person A can’t use their arm, but Person B can use their leg (or has the privilege of using their leg). However, Person B suffers pain when they use the injured leg, because, well, they have a sprained ankle and that hurts like heck. Person A’s injury is by far more severe, but Person B’s injury is still valid and shouldn’t be ignored just because Person A’s injury is worse. This also means that a first world feminist who suffers from social injustice has just as much right to speak out as a woman in Pakistan being beaten by her husband.
