It's not the fall, it's the getting up

Recently I sprained an ankle/my foot after a fall at work. I’ve been falling my whole life, and I’ve never broken a bone; I know how to take a fall. But this time, coworkers came to my aid and in “helping me up” they dug bruises into my skin and dropped me a few times. That’s how I sprained it. It wasn’t the fall that hurt me, it was the help getting up.

I’ve been to all kinds of doctors and specialists about my falling, for decades. They’re confounded. I am too, but I’ve learned to manage it, to live with it, to make it the smallest disruption I can, in my life. But just because I’m an expert at falling--and by extension, getting up—doesn’t mean everyone else is. And as this episode last week demonstrated, help from misguided do-gooders who don’t know what they’re doing can cause more damage than the initial fall.

There’s a lot of ways to parse what just happened to me: fat v thin, white v non-white, younger v older, educated v uneducated, but at the end of the day, I do believe those ladies were genuinely trying to help me. That’s the part I can’t let go.

I hadn’t called out for help (in their defense, I did yelp as I went down, from the shock of it). I asked them repeatedly to let me handle it, but they grabbed me anyway. I believe those women walked into the room believing they knew how to help me. That isn’t, in and of itself, a bad thing but that’s not the only belief they brought to the scene. As I flailed on the floor, struggling to regain dignity, composure, and coverage of my stomach by a wayward a sweater, I kept repeating: I’m fine, this happens all the time, I’ve got it, really—but they didn’t listen.

They believed they could help me and that I didn't know how to help myself.

Again, assigning no ill will towards my coworkers. They’ve only seen me a handful of times, and never writhing on an overly waxed linoleum floor. But I want to call a flag on this play because it’s something we see repeatedly in life: the inability or unwillingness to center how people ask for help, in a headlong rush to be the person helping. I’ve been guilty of this in the past. Maybe we all have been, if we think hard enough. It’s an easy enough overstep to take because the pattern is so deeply engrained in our society: think of how many times you’ve shouted at the news “we didn’t ask for this!” or think of how we care for children and elders—caretaker knows best is a biased mindset that disadvantages all parties.

My mind drifts towards publishing, with a chapbook coming why wouldn’t it? Last summer we saw a lot of energy around elevating Black voices and restructuring the way indie books get made so that the process is more equitable. There’s still a ton of work to do. Are we listening? Are we helping in the manner Black poets and writers have asked to be helped? Because I remember a lot of black squares, a lot of contest calls with fee waivers, and the lure of greater platforms for Black writers; but I also remembered those calls when the awards were announced, and many of those same contests went on to award non-Black, POC, writers their top prizes. Is this what was asked of the industry? No. No body asked for posturing. Among other things, the ask was for systemic change that makes inequity and abuse in publishing more difficult to sustain. Do fee waivers fall into that category? Sure they do, as step one of a multistep process that includes recalibrating editorial and reading staff composition, developing and platforming resources for emerging Black writers, and reframing the cannon to counteract Black erasure—to give very broad strokes.

What is a fee waiver without any structural support offered to Black submitters? It's giving content pipeline. And funny how that plays right kind of exploitative relationship with minority communities that Black poets and writers pointed out in the first place. 

Some publishers and presses were responsive and listened; but a great deal of them showed up to the room believing they knew best what Black writers needed, and they dropped the ball. HARD. We have to do better. We, whoever we are and whatever role we play in the landscape of publishing, have to do more to center the needs of those being “helped,” and decenter the understanding of “helpers” as reliable voice in constructing aid.

For the remainder of the year and the first quarter of 2022, I will be selling custom erasures of books to raise funds for programming at The Estuary Collective. Our goal, as a group, is to help emerging Black and brown writers, especially women, find their footing in publishing. We don't want anyone else having to fumble into an understanding of how any of this works, facing exploitation along the way. To that end, we hold events like "Why It Works: A Conversation from Both Sides of the Poem," and run the occassional zine with a generative submission model. We want to amplify these kind of offerings because they're what our community has asked for. We have big plans for 2022 and beyond and with our commitment to paying every writer and workshop lead who gives of their knowledge and time, that means we need to hustle now. So--buy a book, I'll be tweeting them out @jenidelao! All proceeds go directly to The Estuary Collective.