It’s easy to condemn yourself to silence. This is a lesson that I have learned oh so well since coming to college, one I should have learned years ago, but I was oblivious to reality. “Passivity” is a term I would never have associated myself with, but the sun sets on certain ideas.
I was brash, I was obnoxious—I am still both of those things—so how could I be passive? No one ever heard the end of Lizzie Karpen, so there was no way that I—the girl who single-handedly argued with everyone she knew—to be passive.
What I have learned is that there’s a large difference between speaking out and speaking up. One is a skill I have mastered, the other is something that I am beginning to feel that I will never be able to do.
I never saw my inability to confront others about not doing their part of a group project, or even about putting the wrong ingredients in my salad. To me, it was being polite, the proper way I was supposed to be. My friends would do my confrontations for me, since they knew I was not going to do it myself, and in the end, I would feel as if I was wronging the other person.
It was not until college that I realized the extent to which my passivity has held me back. I began reading the works of Solnit and Foucault, and I realized that passivity and silence had been conditioned into me just like washing my hands before a meal. Being passive is a trait so instilled into women in the forms of being “nice,” “polite,” and “lady-like” that young girls often cannot separate it from the common manners they learned as children.
Especially in a university setting like Columbia and Barnard, being passive has proven to hinder more than help. Coming from a small New York City public school, I had no connections, so I have been forced to make my own. Networking becomes infinitely harder when you are afraid to slide your way into a conversation or do not want to ask questions that are too forward.
College is hard, but I can’t stop myself from making it harder.
I have slept in lounges because I am too passive, I have burdened myself with other people’s problems because I am too passive. I have prevented myself from getting ahead because I am too passive.
There is something so grossly addicting to being passive. I know it is wrong, I know when I am just doing it, and yet, I am completely unable to stop. Perhaps it is too ingrained in me to make the clean break I said I would at the beginning of the semester. As I begin to wean myself off being passive, I cannot help but think back to the lessons I learned in high school Model UN.
I learned quickly that in order to be respected in the room, I needed to wear the pants, literally. Any signs of traditional femininity were trampled on immediately. So I stopped wearing dresses and turned to slacks, and began yelling like my male counterparts. Sadly, it worked. When I learned to drop my inherent female-ness in Model UN, I was both working against and in favor of a strong stereotype. Women were seen as frilly, passive things. The issue was, I was a frilly, passive thing. When I was able to become the respected “man” in Model UN, I suddenly gained more power in the committee room.
Model UN is not real life. Unfortunately, my crisis arc leaves the second I exit committee, and I go back to passivity the moment formal debate ends.
I am struggling to reconcile my femininity with being more assertive. There is something so hard in fighting against your nature. Putting on a pair of pants and yelling is easy, but doing it outside of a simulation is much harder than I thought it would be.
There are small things one can do to grab a bit more assertiveness every day. One thing I started to do is not being the person to move away on the street (unless the person is pregnant, disabled, elderly, or a child). This exercise doesn’t require any verbal confrontation, but it allows me to stand my ground anyway. The one slight problem is that half the time, people expect me to move and then we end up colliding. By people, I mean men. It is always men.
That is something amazing about manhood, though. The sheer fact that assertiveness is ingrained in boys from a young age prepares them to go out and reach higher. Many men will apply for jobs that they only have 60 percent of the qualifications for, while most women will only apply if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. The type of self-assuredness that boys are taught needs to be taught to girls, too. As young women hit the workforce, many of them must be taught how to fight off their passivity—I need to be taught this lesson, too—or else we will always fall behind.
It is easy to condemn yourself to silence, but I am tired of doing what is easy.