Privilege’s Bubble.

It’s funny, really, to think about how naive she really was. How little of the world she knew, how few places she had been; yet her belief that she could make up her mind about everything she encountered was so strong – without really knowing the full truth about anything at all.

She had great intentions, this we know. She woke up every day to her white-washed walls, did yoga to calm the anxieties of things being too perfect, smiled at people on the city bus. In her mind, she was changing the world – or at least she would someday. She was changing the world by being a pleasant person, and occasionally giving a homeless person some spare change. While she would never call herself a saint, she was a pretty damn good person.

The only problem was that her perfect world existed in a bubble. While she woke up in the morning to do yoga, another 19-year-old was down the street making breakfast for his 5 siblings. His life allowed no time for yoga to chase away the stress he had inherited. Her positive thoughts did not help him.

While she was sliding shot after shot down her throat on a Friday night, a family a few continents away was starving to death without enough food to eat. Her yoga mantra did nothing for them.

One day, years of traveling, of living, and being rubbed raw by the reality of the world under her belt, her bubble popped. She realized she was not so separate from the struggles of her neighbors. Suddenly, the red tape and the racism and oppression and judgement and the hardships of the world were not down the street, or a few continents away, but under her own skin. 

And from then on, when she thought about that girl, the one with good intentions, she felt a sense of sadness. She could have lived her entire life in that bubble, filled it with plants and pretty pictures, and danced every weekend until she forgot about the things she saw on the news. But after seeing the world clear as a cloudless sky through her own eyes, she knew that she would always choose to live her one precious life seeing things for what they are, and fighting for the people whose bubbles never existed.

Comments