A little grace
See that woman over there? She likes to drink pumpkin spice everything.
And that one? No, not that one; the one next to her, in the yoga pants. She puts up her Christmas decorations on November 1.
And you know what? It’s okay. You don’t have to judge them for it.
This world can be hard on people, especially women, and they should be allowed to find moments of joy where ever they can. You don’t have to make fun of them, make jokes at their expense.
I’m feeling a bit punchy, because Mayim Bailik—one of my favourite nerds—wrote a reflection on her apparently divisive nose, and how it was mocked in Mad magazine and on Saturday Night Live back in the day and, how a reviewer of her breakout TV show Blossom spent way too much time talking about how her face didn’t seem to fit together properly and not enough time talking about her comedic chops. When she was 14-years-old.
We need more grace, people. We need to be able to say “that person is different than me, and that’s okay.” We need to be able to accept that other people do things and like things that are different than us, and that’s okay. It’s okay to like the colour pink. Or not. It’s okay to like pumpkin spice. Or not. It’s okay to love Christmas. Or not.
It’s okay to not be 18 years old and a size zero. It’s okay to have a Jewish nose or a British Chin or Chinese eyes. It’s okay to have brown skin, or black, or red or yellow or white. It’s okay to have an accent. It’s okay to have big boobs or small, red hair or blonde, big feet or small.
What’s not okay is making fun of other people because of what they like, or what they look like. Because that treads awful close to bullying, and that’s not cool. Yes. It’s just a joke. But as someone who expresses his own anxieties and self-doubt through humour, I know that humour can often be a mask for deeper issues. Real issues. If a clown punches you in the face and breaks your nose, it’s still abuse. It’s still violence.
But maybe we need to define grace. The word comes from the Latin Gratia, which means favour or kindness. It has come to have a variety of other meanings (from God’s unmerited Grace, freely given, in Christianity, to the prayer said before food, to a way of moving in a relaxed, elegant manner.
But it’s that idea of kindness that I’m going for. There’s a meme that keeps making the rounds that illustrates this point:
Grace is kindness extended to others, because we don’t know what they’re going through, and what they’ve had to overcome to get here. We make assumptions, and frequently those assumptions are wrong. We make jokes, and frequently those jokes are like fiery darts that wound.
Myself, I walk a fine line; I grew up on British Humour, on “Hobbitry”, where you show your affection for someone by gently teasing them. But I know it’s very easy to step over that line. I’ve done it before, to my greatest dismay. And I try and warn everyone that I will make jokes because I want to see them smile, but like the same nerves that tell us we’re being tickled are also the same ones that feel pain, sometimes something meant to amuse instead causes pain. We need to think about what we say, and how we talk about others, and what it says about us.
I’m not saying that you have to go out and start drinking pumpkin spice lattes. I mean, I personally think coffee tastes like satan’s urine, but I’m not going to judge others for drinking it. But I love pumpkin pie, and I love the pumpkin pie blizzard at DQ. But others aren’t fans.
Nor am I saying you should go put your Christmas decorations up now (though there is research that suggests that people who decorate for Christmas early are happier).
All I’m saying is that it is part of our basic nature to create these stories of us vs them. But it is part of our higher nature to be able to get past classifying people who are not us as “other.” We have the capacity to accept and even to celebrate people who are different than us, and who like different things.