From Peonism to Peasanthood.

I realize one of my last posts was about not being a peon, which is pretty similar to not being a peasant. But the past several weeks I’ve been thinking even more about peasanthood (#historymajorproblems) as I’ve reflected on what I’ve learned this semester regarding life, history, and German. So I thought I’d return to my favorite topic. 

My range of emotions seems to be pretty limited compared to most people; my strongest and most common feelings are those of peasant or peon (yes, those are feelings), though I also experience fair amounts of complacent bourgeois-ness. During my time at BYU, I have had many instances of feeling like a peasant, but I have learned that I am not literally (or figuratively?) an actual peasant.

I was trying to think of a good story to illustrate this principle, but I mostly just thought about the times I’ve spent lying on the ground in my room, looking up at the ceiling and trying to contemplate life. For some reason, such pondering has always made me feel less like a peasant, or at least has helped me think that I have a chance to change my peasant condition if I keep trying—I just need to get off the floor.  #growthmindset

The thing about being a peasant is that you don’t see a lot more than what is right in front of you. You accept what life gives you, no matter how rotten it may be, and keep your head down. I started out the semester feeling quite vulnerable in such a position—thinking I’d probably lost chances for lots of important things: relationships changed, I went through a 7-month-home-from-my mission-crisis and thought I’d accomplished nothing in that time, and I felt like I’d misplaced my dreams so maybe it was better not to have them.

That was the peasant talk in my head. Maybe not the things traditional peasants worried about, but the feelings were similar. Things that make you feel less and lower. I wanted to evolve from that condition and break barriers, to do something with my life. (Here we must ask ourselves, can “peasant” be a feeling, condition, and social class?)

So I went to the city and tried to leave myself open for others to mentor me, to help me become more than a peasant (and to feel beyond peasant), to figure out what I wanted to be/do if it wasn’t peasanthood. 
And hey, even if I did feel like a peasant, I wanted to at least be a proactive one. (Here we should note that most peasants who tried to rock the boat ended up being ostracized or killed by their fellow peasants who didn’t want any trouble or by authority figures who supported the status quo, but fortunately this was not the case here).




For me, that meant I spent a lot of time talking to people who I didn’t consider to be peasants: professors, work supervisors, parents, wildly successful friends and roommates, etc. That was really valuable for me and gave me good escape mechanisms from peasanthood. 
Still in the process of applying them.

And so I continually try to remind myself that I am not constrained to being a peasant forever, that there is always room to change and grow outside my self-imposed status quo. This semester more than ever, I’ve realized how important that is to know—to know I don’t have to know everything and that I escape peasanthood by being proactive and seeking out opportunities and people who can help me change and grow.


This one truth I have learned—everyone is born a peasant and spends his/her whole life accepting that state or fighting against it.


How do you deal with peasanthood?



Peasanthood. It gets messy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things I like about Indiana

So actually my brother Taylor started this list. But I liked it and decided to write it on my blog so that the whole world can have a taste of Hoosier Terre Haute and my family here. Some are about Indiana, but most are about the Woodward side of my family. My grandparents just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary so a bunch of my aunts and uncles and cousins and cousin-in-laws were here. The way my grandpa always tells too many details and it bugs the daylights out of my grandma. Today she told me that he skipped the days of school where they taught kids how to write short sentences. The way that my grandpa always walks hunched over. Kinda like my brothers. They'll be lucky if they turn out like him though:) The way my aunt April says "hey listen to this" when she wants people to hear a funny story. It's like a loud speaker announcing an anecdote. The way that you can escape the billions of people at family gatherings when you need some alone time. How y
Read more

A Little Death and A Lot of Grief

Image
  “A short list of what died that day: my daughter, me, my dreams, her future, all my gods, my laughter, the cabbage I covered my engorged breasts with, and this part of my stomach where I keep her sadness.” -Sarah Agaton Howes in “Lessons from Dying” I thought I knew what it was.  I didn’t know what miscarriage was.  Wasn’t it just a heavy period in the privacy of your home, maybe before you got too attached to the little one growing inside you? I knew the stats, memorized them when I got pregnant with Teddy. 20% chance of the pregnancy ending within the first 6 weeks.  10% between 6 and 12 weeks.  5% after the first trimester.  I learned new stats this time around.  1-3% of pregnancies end in the second trimester. 1-2% result in stillbirths (after 24 weeks). These stats are, of course, raw data, without accounting for race, socioeconomic status, or previous health conditions. Among Black and Indigenous individuals, these rates are much higher, as well as among those experiencing pove
Read more

How to feed your child and get repeatedly ill while doing it

Image
When I was pregnant, I was not sold on the whole idea of breastfeeding. I mean, I knew the recommendations, but it just seemed so burdensome on one partner and not the other. Going into it, I was thinking I would try to do half breast milk and half formula because that seemed a way to make things more equal between partners.  I also knew that breastfeeding doesn’t work for everyone--your milk doesn’t come in or there isn’t enough, there are issues latching, it’s painful, other medical issues come into play, there aren’t enough maternal support structures after baby comes along (short maternity leaves), the mere mental and physical toll of being on call 24/7 (though pumping can help alleviate some of these problems), to name a few. Anyways, everything I thought I wanted went out the window when Teddy was born. I had no idea how badly I wanted to breastfeed this tiny little newborn until he had problems latching and I physically couldn’t. I pumped every three hours for the first two week
Read more