Apathetic Empathy

Shayla Ann 21 Year Old Theatre Major Creative Writing Minor Cautiously Optimistic

[venuslungs-blog]

I’ve loved this song since my freshmen year and on my walk tonight it sparked an interest in me about the line “She thinks she know me, I don’t think she know at all.” This reminded me of an overarching theme in our class of people thinking they know what is best for other people’s children when they don’t. Particularly, white people have a way of doing this all the time. We think we know what is best for everyone because it’s what is best for us. But that is close minded. We need to understand not everyone is like us. Other lyrics are “I’m not a stranger, it’s just a strange land. It’s getting louder, I leave when I can.” That is how a lot of people feel being in school. We make them feel like strangers, we make them feel like outsiders. I remember the few black students we had in our high school fighting with other people. I always thought it was because they were troubled, but maybe we were the ones who were troubled. Maybe our perception of them caused the issues. We need to listen. We don’t know what’s best for everyone. 

Once again, I’ll relate this to the Raza Studies discussion. They wanted to create a space where they got to learn about themselves, a place where they didn’t have to be in a strange land. Where they didn’t have to be looked at as “other”. If I could have my drama club then other students should be able to have classes where they actually learn about their culture instead of learning about old white dead dudes like we are all forced to do from the time we enter Kindergarten to the time we graduate. 

[venuslungs-blog]

Dounia is a Moroccan-American singer from Queens who is both a singer and songwriter, as well as a model and she even painted the album artwork for this single LOWKEY GRL. The song is about how basically men want a girl who is lowkey but a boss bitch but also shy and sweet but also loud and sassy but also etc. They want a girl who is everything and nothing, but when they say they want a girl who can do things for herself and hold her own, they get insecure when that same woman doesn’t need them. 

This song reminded me of the movie Precious Knowledge with the Raza Studies program as Dounia uses her native language in this song combined with English verses. The students who were taking Raza Studies weren’t looking to exclude themselves from everyone else. Anyone could have taken those classes. But they were to empower Latina/Latino people. Just as I listen to Dounia and I am a slice of Wonder Bread but I love her music. The music not only empowers women, but it especially empowers other Moroccan and Muslim women. Embracing your culture doesn’t mean you want to be separate from everyone else, it means you want to know who you are and your identity so you can feel confident and so you can also share who you are with others. We should all be free to learn about ourselves and our culture. 

[venuslungs-blog]

Suicidal Town

An abusive stepfather stands outside

Eyes piercing his son in class

We watch him as he goes to hide

His pain in razorblades and ash.

We hear the lockdown siren ring

As the sun rises in the sky

In chorus we should sing

Without worry our friend would die.

Yet every soul I had come to know

All the blood in arteries rushing

Wanted to give themselves a fatal blow

To have corpses that died happily blushing.

Why did we all want to die in this town?

I’m grateful I escaped to see the sun go down.

Why did everyone I know want to kill themselves at some point? The school did nothing to stop bullying. The school did nothing to help any of them. They didn’t help them. They didn’t help me. We need to try harder. We need to recognize when our students are bullied online to the point where they want to die. We shouldn’t have students overdosing before they come to school and then we have to have a lockdown so they can be taken to a hospital to have their stomach pumped. Fathers shouldn’t tell their sons that they are a piece of shit, or that they are gay for liking purple because purple is a woman’s color. Men shouldn’t be told by their mothers that they are a bitch as they chase their son on a walk with their girlfriend. I turned around and told her not to call him that. She said he was her son and she would talk to him however she wanted. 

I know all the reasons that everyone wanted to die. They were everything from emotional abuse to mental health issues. That wasn’t the school’s fault, but when I had to listen to two sophomores in my photography class when I was a senior talk about how they told this guy to go kill himself and it was funny, I snapped. The teacher didn’t. The teacher told me to drop it. To stop arguing. I left the class. I didn’t go back until later in the week. The boys apologized to me. Sorry wouldn’t bring that kid back had he killed himself. They weren’t reprimanded at all. “We want to stop bullying”. 

[venuslungs-blog]

I didn’t know if I should be a theatre major. It wasn’t until being cast in my school’s spring production of The Crucible as Elizabeth Proctor that I really thought I could be a theatre major. I finally felt that true validation and confidence.

But it wasn’t always that way.

We talked about an article about how different students respond to authority differently depending on how they are brought up. Not all students respond the same to “tough love”. 

But what is “tough love”? 

I had the same chorus teacher from freshmen year to senior year of high school. At first I didn’t like her, and being fifteen I made it very clear that I didn’t really like her at first. After freshmen year, she grew on me a bit. But as we went through the years I always felt like she didn’t really appreciate all the hard work I did. One year when announcing our NYSSMA scores, she made it clear to say what placement we had. I had the lowest placement, as I cannot sight read music, so whenever I was judged on it, I’d get the lowest score for that part of it even though my actual singing and voice for my song would only get a few points off. I always felt not good enough for her, and all my friends were. I always felt overshadowed. She always gave seniors solos in the spring for their last semester. Not our year. I was one of the only loud senior sopranos. There was no solo that year. Finally, I was sitting her office with her organizing music and I asked her “Mrs. Davis, do you actually think I’m a good singer?” and her response was yes, she thought I was. I wasn’t like *insert incompetent singer’s name here* but I wasn’t like my best friend, Marie, who could always be guaranteed a major role in a Musical for her soprano voice. She always made me feel incompetent, and like I couldn’t do much because I couldn’t hit the same notes that Marie could. I always felt like I was being compared, or that I wasn’t what she wanted so I couldn’t be anything more than a side character. 

I came to college and had Professor Bria Walker my first semester as a college freshmen and let me tell you I never felt more roasted in my life. Everything from telling me over and over again to restart my monologue until I cried through it to telling me I was wrong and shouldn’t be doing certain things when I am performing to getting frustrated that I was too serious and couldn’t be funny. But there was something different about Bria. I didn’t feel like she was being tough on me because she thought I wasn’t good. She was being tough on me because she saw how much potential I had. She wanted me to get better. I felt that. She would tell me good things about the work. She would tell me if it was getting better. But I remember one day she asked to see me after class. I was almost crying because I was just sick of her grilling me and I wanted to go back to my dorm, into the shower and cry for an hour. I came out of class and she said “I just want you to know I’m not coming for you, and I don’t want you to recoil in class, okay?” She didn’t want me to go back into my shell because she was hard on me. She made it clear that her being hard on me wasn’t because she didn’t like me. It wasn’t personal. With Mrs. Davis it always felt personal. 

Tough love has to have the love component. A love of making people better. You can be hard on students even if they have had the upbringing of people being soft to them, but you have to do it with love. There is a balance that needs to be kept, just as if you are dealing with students that are used to harsh nature, you can be kind with them but you must also be harsh so they don’t take advantage of you. 

I gave Bria a card since she’s now leaving New Paltz. Wherever she goes they will be very lucky to have her. I know I was. 

[venuslungs-blog]

This is my body. This is my skin. This is not the body I’ve always had. I weighed 186 pounds at the most when I was in high school. I am only about 5′3″. Back in middle school, I was 5′1/2″. I was chubby, fat even. I was still human though. Every part of me. 

It hurt when I was in fifth grade and my supposed to be best friend looked at me in one of my favorite purple shirts and said “Isn’t that shirt a little tight for you to be wearing it?”

It hurt when in middle school one of my best friends in laughed with another guy from across the cafeteria at my thighs. The guy with him said “She’s too fat to be wearing shorts.” I suppose he was proven right when I was called into the principal’s office and she told me that my shorts “were riding up to my crotch” so I couldn’t wear shorts to school anymore. Shorts that other girls could wear because they had smaller legs and no ass to speak of. 

It hurt when my eighth grade English teacher with her skinny body decided it was okay to stop me in the hallway in front of my friends and passerby and say “Shayla, you should really put the puppies away” in reference to my breasts that were showing a bit due to me wearing a tank top under a hoodie. I was fourteen. Other girls wore those tank tops all the time. It was okay if they did it. They didn’t have breasts. 

It hurt any time I tried to have an argument or debate or discussion and I disagreed with someone and their first response was to say “Well, you’re fat so who cares?”

Then I lost weight. I was still targeted because my body is curvy. I have hips. I have those same thighs I had back then. Just a smaller waist, slimmer face, collarbones and less fat. A teacher came up to me in the hallway my senior year and said “You can’t be wearing that dress!” When I asked why, all she said was “I can see all of that!” and pointed at my back above my bra. My bra was covered. She was talking about my upper back. My fucking shoulder blades. She also had an issue with my keyhole neck that barely showed any cleavage. 

She was waiting for me when I got back from the principal’s office. I told her the principal said it was okay. She was still mad. I went to class. 

Young women shouldn’t be dress coded and sexualized in schools to the point where they are punished and are not allowed to learn. Why was it that my male classmates could wear whatever they wanted? Their nipples could show from the sides of their ripped up tank tops, but God forbid my back show. 

Ever since I left school I’ve gotten more comfortable with showing my body because it’s mine. I’ve worked hard to lose weight. I’ve worked hard to be comfortable. I have the right to be comfortable. Everyone does, especially in school. 

[venuslungs-blog]

Hajime & Chiaki's first meeting [Danganronpa 3 - Despair Arc]

Anime: Danganronpa 3 - Despair Arc - - - Episode: 01 Characters: Hinata Hajime, Nanami Chiaki

In my middle school we had a program called Talented and Gifted, also known as T.A.G. To be in the T.A.G Program you had to have very good grades and, I believe, have a particular interest in the program. The program came with it’s perks, including free trips to different parts of the country and skipping class to go work on “projects” for T.A.G. I always hated the program because it put students on a pedestal. It had nothing to do whether they were “talented or gifted”. It had everything to do with them being popular students or very smart students. One day I talked about the program with the man who ran it and he said to middle school me that my grades weren’t why I wasn’t in T.A.G, it was because he “didn’t think I would get along well with the other students”. It had everything to do with how I came off as a person. I wasn’t nerdy. I wasn’t preppy. I was a fat emo kid. 

This clip from the anime adaptation/prequel to the 2012 visual novel video game Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair shows this concept. Hajime isn’t stupid or unlikeable, he’s just average. He doesn’t have a field of expertise so he had to pay his way into Hope’s Peak Academy, a school that only accepts students who are the most talented in their field, who are then known as “Ultimates”. He’s talking to Chiaki Nanami, the “Ultimate Gamer” who we find feels very isolated due to her Ultimate status. She doesn’t have friends, she isn’t sure how to interact with others because video games aren’t always a social activity. She feels reduced down to her talent. That’s why she says that Hajime should, in a way, feel grateful that he doesn’t have a talent, he’s more free due to it. 

My school should have made the T.A.G program something that any student could join if they had an interest they wanted to pursue outside of the class to do projects for. It shouldn’t have been reserved to students who fit the mould that society wants. I don’t blame the students in the program, but it was unfair in my mind that many of the kids in the program were also some of the wealthiest in our school. They got to go on trips for free while poor kids in our town never even left the county. They still haven’t left the county. Thus, this program created even more resentment and divide in the student body, just as Danganronpa shows a divide between those with Ultimate talents and those without. Talent isn’t everything. Passion and drive should matter more.