Outted and Out

I am feeling uninspired today, so I'll just share a true story of mine. A couple of years ago, I was working in this place and they did a diversity training for all 60 or so of the staff. One of the exercises they did was to have us all line up, shoulder to shoulder, out in the parking lot. So, there we were, facing the building, with the grass behind us.

In the place I worked in at the time, I wore suits sometimes. I've got a terminal degree, which doesn't mean you die once you get it, but it certainly feels like you will as you're headed toward it. I'm blondish and have blue eyes. This is just to give you a point of reference for what happened next.

So the facilitator asked us questions, and if the question applied to you, depending on what it was, you'd either take a step forward or a step backward. I don't remember what all of the questions were, but they were things like "If your parents expected you to go to college, take a step forward," or "if a relative of yours was killed by gunfire, take a step backward."

By the end of the exercise, everyone was standing in a different place than they were before. The facilitator asked us to look around and see where people were. One of my friends called out, "Hey, where's Oleander?!" This was because I was the farthest back, way back in the grass and almost hidden from view. Despite my terminal degree, assumptions based on how I look, and stylish suits. I should mention as well that I am short, so I don't take particularly big steps.

Insofar as diversity exercises go, it was a good one, and helped people to visually see things they hadn't before. But I left it feeling outted in some way. Like there are things I know about myself and who I am and how I grew up that I know and my friends know about me, but I didn't necessarily want 60 people at work to know about me.

I was irrationally irritable for the rest of that day. I could have stayed there with it, but at the time I was working on the Summer of Pomba Gira, and so I took some of what I was feeling related to that and put it in the story.