Comedian Vera van Zelm narrated Nails with Heads about all the times she thought it was her fault, but now she realizes she's not the problem. “Talent alone is not enough to rise above a system,” she says. “And how I fucking wish I had heard this when I was in my twenties.”
Her angry tears burned in thousands of throats. Women texted each other in short sentences: 'Do you have Vera..?' 'Yes, damn it.' 'True.'
It is absurd that her ultimate “rising above” has to be an angry and sad admission of loss. One of the hardest things about not accepting the role you have been assigned is that you have to keep reaching into the hearts, while you want to reach into the heads.
Being honest over and over again, being fragile, being angry from powerlessness. It drains you, and with the love that your supporters send you, you cannot feed mouths.
As you get older and have your future set in stone and children, it becomes increasingly impossible to resist. The risk of breakdown is too great. While rebellion can still be a way for many young women to get in, it already works against you a little later in life. I wrote an angry column here about women with careers and child-rich households who are struggling towards forty, had to silence the misogynist within myself to dare to post it and concluded that, according to the reactions on social media, I am indeed a privileged NRC-troela turned out to be.
I am not a privileged person NRC-troela. And believe me, it is hard work to be able to pass for Barlaeusmeid as a provincial without media parents, canal youth or jubelton.
I have had to bury my ambition, competitiveness and irreconcilable sides in the public eye, where I have seen male colleagues celebrate all their weaknesses. I have seen how they are repeatedly given room for 'journalistic experiments', where female colleagues with detailed, fantastic ideas receive no response. I see male columnists, in love with themselves, getting bogged down in inimitable No stylelanguage, pregnant with adjectives and endless cluttered sentences. We think it's wonderful. I see how some men get another chance again and again, after failing a hundred times, until once, almost by accident, something good comes out of their fingers. Applause immediately follows, a place in the canon, a big hat full of feathers.
I see how other men are taken very seriously, even when nothing more comes from their pen than autobiographical, boring exhibitionism. And if there is a disinterested silence, it is our fault, it is because they are white men, and they no longer get any chances in this world.
The only thing for women to do is to work hard. Like a plowing ox, blinders on, don't look back, don't remember anything unsavory, count the blessings, know who to avoid, know who to put behind your cart, keep telling yourself that you only have one life and that it is therefore nice not to to constantly feel betrayal and powerlessness. Be grateful on the outside, be strategic on the inside. And keep thinking: it has to be better, much better, but don't forget to be loving along the way, a wise woman, someone to lean on, someone they don't want to humiliate or break.
So, twenty-year-old women: talent is indeed not enough to rise above the system. In fact, rising above it only happens if you color within the lines a bit and tolerate a battalion of turds next to and above you. All that remains is plowing and skipping.
#Column #NRCtroela
