The Black Spot
Privilege, prejudice and unemployment in an ableist world
My roots are grown in Privilege. White, British, middle-class, privately educated woman. We had family money, a house in France, nice cars and fancy holidays with water-skiing, swimming pools and sailing. There was always plenty of food on the table - more food than emotional connection - and our birthdays and Christmases were full of presents.
I vividly remember my 6th Birthday which was held in the vast open plan sitting room of our modernist bungalow. An industrial lot in South West London that my parents had converted and designed themselves with skylights, a hexagonal hallway, salvaged wooden floorboards and concrete floors well before their time.
For this particular party I had designed the invitations myself and my Dad had got them printed in colour and sent out. Me and my friends sat on the floor at a long table covered in snacks and sandwiches and my Mum made me a cake in the shape of a toadstool, resplendent with red, white, green and black icing. Above our heads the ceiling was filled with helium balloons that the delighted invitees could carry home with their party bags. It was a party to remember.
I don’t remember much of my childhood, sitting here to write I can see images of it, many of them taken from photos we have in our family albums, if I sit and think on it long enough, other memories might come. A deficit of memory is often due to the presence of trauma, the total disassociation from and annihilation of that which cannot and will not be remembered on pain of death. But I digress, that is a story for another day. In many concrete ways there was plenty of privilege and as many such people brought up in privilege, a total lack of awareness of how lucky was, how much I actually had.
I grew up in the eighties and nineties. My parents were unusual in that they were at home a lot of the time. My Dad an ‘entrepreneur’ with plenty of family money behind him who was often found still sat in his pyjamas and dressing gown at his old Apple Mac well into lunch time.
I went to an all girls private school for the majority of my education, pulled out of the local state primary after a year because my parents ‘wanted the best for me.’ I still remember having to play in a room full of toys whilst people watched and took notes and naming pictures on cards as part of the ‘entrance exam’ aged just 5.
I also remember the rowdy jubilance of the local state school where I was taught in a porta-cabin, played kiss chase with the boys and jumped off the rickety wooden steps in our own versions of Fame. I remember the names of my best friends, Isabelle, Nancy, Rory and Jay-Jay. Small glass bottles of milk with straws and the stench of the terrifying dining hall over the road.
The private school was very different. A large old manor house with sprawling lawns, quiet corridors inhabited by small girls dressed in purple and white and clip on purse belts where we stored one and two pence copper pieces to buy biscuits at lunchtime. I was a quick learner, did well in school without really having to try much and had a circle of ever-changing friends. This despite being terribly shy and feeling incredibly awkward most of the time. The one negative that continuously repeated on my report cards was that I did not ask any questions, speak up more in class.
Looking back on it now, I see that my world shrank when I was removed from my local state school. I grew up in a cocoon of middle-class families and expectations. Work hard, do well in school, go to university, get a good job, get married, have kids. That was to be the trajectory of my life and I had no reason to think otherwise. I had no idea that there might be another life to live and dutifully threw myself into this pre-written script of trying to please the adults around me, protecting our veneer of perfection and doing what I was told. As a teenager I began to run wild. I started clubbing when I was 14, went to Glastonbury during my GCSE’s, had boys to stay over and held parties at my house when my parents went out for dinner. But I still worked hard and got good grades and stayed on my trajectory and that was all my parents really cared about so I got away with it all.
At that time in my life words like ableism, sexism, feminism, privilege and the patriarchy were all completely foreign to me. There was certainly no illness or disability or poverty in my tight circle.
This was just the way the world was.
This is the way my life would always be.
In fact what I have recently discovered is that my paternal Grandmother, the one who I just assumed was austere, strict and unfriendly had fibromyalgia. The diaries I was gifted after she died, tiny pocketbook details of her daily pain and wishes to die. She spent most of the time we visited sitting in her chair or pouring tea into dainty cups to be drank over saucers. I wish I had known as a child her story, had taken more time to appreciate and to talk to her. This woman sitting silenced in her pain in her perfectly manicured house with pristine carpets and perfectly matched ornaments.
I am almost ashamed of the young woman I was then and how naive she was and how much she took for granted but I also have compassion for her as she was not shown any other way. We happily called one of my best friends from school ‘half-caste’ as her mother was from the Caribbean and her father English (she is my still one of my closest friends today) and the local newsagent was sadly know as the ‘Paki’ shop. I lived a childhood free of isms.
This script began to unravel when I hit university. For the first time in my life I sort out a counsellor as I became extremely anxious at having to make decisions for myself. I struggled to keep up with my Psychology degree - mainly because I found it extremely boring and scientific - I partied lots, hooked up with an alcoholic, football obsessed lad from Darlington and had to take Betablockers during my finals when his Mum died unexpectedly. I scraped a 2:1, eschewing the 1st that had been predicted all my life. After graduation I was a mess. I had no idea how to inhabit the real world or what I wanted to do, there was no structure and I had no real blueprint for working.
Like I actually had to find a proper job and look after myself?
Where was the knight in shining armour?
To give myself some credit I had studied Psychology due to a deep burning desire to work with ‘disadvantaged’ young people. A flame that had been lit whilst watching a film on Children in Need about teenagers in a youth offending institute whilst eating sweets on the sofa with my Granny and an everlasting kinship with the under dog, the desire for all children to be safe and happy sucked in my bones. My ambition had been to train as a social worker but this was not deemed a ‘good enough’ profession by my family who said that everybody ‘hated social workers’ anyway. So I plumped for Psychology instead to then go on to train as the more acceptable Clinical Psychologist - I never made the grade.
Fast forward to today. Unemployed, chronically ill, in debt single mother I could go on with isms. I am being shown a world through a very different lens from that in which I grew up and it is filling me with a volcanic rage. I am desperate to find work, to earn money, to be in the world, I have a lot to offer but am I noticing how hard it is when you are unable to work full time hours. The constant stress of this a large spoke in the wheel turning my nervous system-dysregulation. I am desperate to get better and seeing how much money this costs. The privilege of alternative and pioneering therapies, supplements and healing only available to those who can grease palms with their silver.
My prospects severely limited.
Even small, friendly, community oriented businesses don’t want part time workers. The majority of part-time ‘small’ jobs want people who can work weekends or evenings - neither of which I can do as a single mum in sole charge of my child. Paying a babysitter would cost more than I would bring in so what is the point?
Where are the people really thinking about accessibility and making employment opportunities open to all?
I feel as though this mysterious illness, whatever it turns out to be (I am thinking histamine intolerance, MCAS with elements of CFS, possibly Long Covid and of course the endometriosis) has been placed on me like the Black Spot - a mark of death to the pirate, the mark of death to a life I previously knew. It is also the marker which is opening my eyes and showing me the world in which I grew up, all I took for granted and all the damage that can be done by trying to live up to unrealistic expectations, constantly allowing others to make your decisions and surviving a childhood of chronic PTSD.
I am reading Substacks written by disabled and chronically ill people and recognising that I have more in common with them, with their challenges, than with my peers. I am experiencing for myself the ableist perspective that is all around us; the friendships waning, the lack of understanding around chronic illness and how the capitalist, patriarchal methodologies of go, go, go, production over wellbeing are wreaking havoc and devastation.
I am a walking talking example of how the myth of mothering and doing everything else at the same time is a time-bomb to self destruction. I am just so fucking angry that it has taken me to experience this to see it all and that I am now once more going to have to find my own trajectory and swim against the current of what I know to find my way out, to find a place to breathe.
I found this post really hard to write as it brings up some very uncomfortable feelings about how I have inhabited the world up until this point and the need to be brutally honest with where I am at now. Learning to speak my truth is not as easy as all the sparkly IG memes like to make out but I know it is my way forwards, my route to change.
I also know that despite the upbringing that I had, despite all the privilege and programming, there has always been a pirate within me. The adventurer, the dreamer, the rebel, she is with me still this wild one who knows that there is more to life than what we are shown, what we are taught, so much more.
Now I must find the strength to speak my truth, walk my walk, stand up for myself and turn this black spot back to gold.