A Bit More on Balloons
Hi Again
Hi Again
As I wrote about in my last post, I feel like we all walk around the world with these cumbersome, unwieldy balloons tied to our wrists, full of understandings and assumptions about the world. And while I like the person I am becoming, my balloon can take up a lot of space in a room or a conversation. It can make it hard to really listen and connect with my neighbors.
With this in mind, I want to let some of the hot-air and bullshit portion out of my balloon. Not to hide anything, but rather to just bring my honesty and experiences into the room going forwards. In pursuit of being a better neighbor, the following is my reflection on some of the BS in my own car-wash-floppy-guy. If it doesn’t relate to your experience at all, that’s totally fine! I just want to practice sharing and acknwledging my own stuff.
The Best Part of the Apple
I am from Brooklyn; although there have been points at which I felt confused saying so. “I’m from Brooklyn,” (med household income: $59k) I’d respond to all the orientation week inquiries about my background. “Well, Park Slope,” I’d follow up (med household income: $135k). I haven’t made this caveat in a long time, but I think it’s worth interrogating.
I am 100% from Brooklyn, there is no doubt about it. While my actual birth took place in a hospital room in lower Manhattan, I lived at 140 8th ave, 4b, Brooklyn, NY from the day I left the maternity ward until the day I left for college. I spent Saturday mornings going to AYSO soccer at the parade grounds, or biking with my mom down Ocean Pkwy to Coney Island and back. I saw Cyclones baseball games on the boardwalk and waited every spring for the Celebrate Brooklyn set list to be released. I have biked, walked, ran, and scooted around Prospect Park more times than you can count. And while I eventually went to high school in Manhattan, I only truly relaxed everyday once I got home, off the 2/3 train, back at Grand Army Plaza.
And yet there have been those moments where I felt wrong being “from” Brooklyn. Maybe I was worried someone would think I was trying to claim the pop-cultural black history of Brooklyn as my own? Mostly I don’t think I was, but I have felt the capital one could gain in a conversation from whatever Brooklyn conjures up. Maybe I thought “where are you from” was just a coded way of ascertaining my class background? “From” means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I’m sure more than a few were trying to decipher my family wealth status.
Thinking back to those moments, I think most of all I felt a dissonance between myself and so many other Brooklynites. I attended the type of desirable “public” schools that some families lied about their addresses to attend. My family’s exorbitant medical bills (thanks ashkenazi genetics) always were heavily subsidized by generous company health insurance. And this is not the experience of many Brooklynites. There are so many Brooklynites who, while I was busy frolicking around, were struggling to make rent, find a job, and get food. And yet my privileges don’t negate their experiences. Brooklyn is big enough, and accepting enough to hold all of us.
Of course, being from Brooklyn is still complex. Racism, inequality, and classism push so many of my Brooklyn neighbors’ backs up against the wall. And those are the same forces from which I am benefiting. But if anything, being “from” Brooklyn means accepting the inequities within. It means caring about what other people are going through - investing in them, fighting for them. All of us Brooklynites share that.
In the moments I couldn’t claim Brooklyn, I think I felt like there wasn’t enough room for everything. I felt like simply being from Park Slope was the only way to leave space and respect how hard it is for so many people in neighborhoods not even a mile from my own. But I don’t think that is right or fair. Just being from Park Slope denies my responsibility for the mess that can be Brooklyn.
And even beyond responsibility, we all have a deep urge to belong to a place, to be connected to somewhere that we call home. I didn’t just grow up within the boundaries of Park Slope, I grew up in Brooklyn. In denying myself that, I am denying a part of my identity, of who I am.
I have lived many lives in my life so far; Jerusalem, Middletown, Los Angeles. But even as I start to slowly, cautiously build the beginnings of a new home here in Southwest Philly, it’s Brooklyn that I still call home. It’s Brooklyn that I dream about and will forever continue to explore. It’s Brooklyn, whose injustices flood the lives of so many, that is mine. And those injustices are mine as well, they have benefitted me, they are my fight and my responsibility.