Have You Ever Been Excluded?
The cost of exclusion and what to do to benefit yourself when you are excluded
I just read a powerful editorial published yesterday in the New York Times written by Matthew Desmond, who is a professor at Princeton and director of the university’s Eviction Lab.
Desmond documented how the U.S. has made only negative progress in the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. I was a small child at that time.
So my life has been conducted during a time when all of the ideals I was taught growing up as a 60s and 70s kid have been busted down, one after the other.
I have lived this life of exclusion.
Because I am a woman, I was suited for jobs “helping” the poor. I am the former Executive Director (10 years) of Family Service Assn. in my hometown of Redlands, California, a small, conservative, and tight-knit Southern California community. A “famous” book author affiliated with the community is James Fallows, who also probably still writes for The Atlantic. I no longer believe my hometown is all that special. I’ve seen what many current residents say when the community attempts any type of inclusion. There could be few more exclusionary communities than the place I mostly grew up.
I also grew up partly in Hollywood, where my mother and father bought a home in the Hollywood Hills in the early 1950s when she worked as an animation art director for UPA, Playhouse Pictures, and at the end of her life, for Charles Schulz, working on the first Peanuts animated special.
I no longer feel exclusion as keenly as I did as a young teen. Most of my stories are about outsiders, misfits, and those seeking to find their own families. As an orphan raised by my grandparents, I became completely adrift after my grandfather died when I was 13 years old.
Writing Your Own Life
Back in the early 2000s, I wrote about a woman undergoing the type of extreme cosmetic surgery to “fit in” that is common today. I wrote about a boy who was abandoned by his family because of his “different” looks as a result of Human Mutational Virus. I wrote about a found family with Joshie the Clown, Gyla the Wolf Girl, and Little Bear, the changed toddler boy, all changed through the virus.
Kent Bash, a self-taught So Cal artist, illustrated the cover story I published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Look at that! Me, Bruce, and Gambit! I’m the wolf girl who married Joshie the Clown and adopted the little teddy bear boy.
I remember the visit I had with Kent. It was one of the first times I realized that creative people could be on the same wavelength, because Kent did the perfect illustration for the story without ever having spoken one word to me. One of my mentors, Harlan Ellison, knew Kent well and suggested that I go to meet him at his home in the San Fernando Valley. Kent’s house was filled with so many of his quirky, hyper-realistic paintings that they were on the ceiling and all walls. A VW Bug covered with Kent images took up much of the space in his living room. In frustration, Kent described how many times his paintings had been ripped off: the worst, he said, was when he saw his takeoff of Edward Hopper’s famous diner painting with cops seated at the counter on cups being sold by the LAPD — nobody paid him a nickel or even asked. Kent felt like an outsider in the art world, despite his massive talent.
Fitting In At Finishing School
Back in Redlands, as a young teen, my grandmother enrolled me in a “finishing school” called Kimberly Juniors.
I felt completely out of place in this group. I thought I couldn’t possibly make or have any friends among the wealthy young women who lived on “The Hill” and were from intact families. They had cute clothes I’d never be allowed to wear. They could wear makeup like bright blue Maybelline eyeshadow when I wasn’t allowed anything but a Dr. Pepper Lipsmacker. They could shave their legs. There was one other girl who had similar restrictions, but — in my immaturity — I wanted to exclude her since she, too, was a misfit.
To make matters worse, my grandmother forced me to cut my hair so I didn’t even have a potential to have long, stick-straight blonde hair like Marcia on The Brady Bunch.
The group met every Saturday from 9–12 a.m. I hated being forced to go to the ugly square building behind our town’s famous library and Lincoln Shrine.
We were taught “how to walk,” and how to go gracefully up and down stairs. We all had to wear a “sailor suit” which I loathed with all the power in my soul.
This club was founded by two influential Redlands residents: the heir to the Kimberly-Clark paper fortune, Helen Cheney Kimberly, and her daughter, Mary K. Shirk.
My grandparents had close friends, Imo and Howard. Howard was Mrs. Shirk’s chauffeur for her entire life and his entire working career. They lived in a small, 2-bedroom house (now “Historic” and “valuable”) near downtown Redlands. Imo worked at Harris’ Co. with my grandmother.
I loved Imo and Howard a lot.
I didn’t really “get” that he was the chauffeur. I didn’t understand “exclusion” and “inclusion” as depicted by Professor Desmond yesterday in The New York Times.
One Saturday, I glumly dragged myself into the KJ’s building at 8:59 a.m. That day, a lady was coming in to teach us how to do better makeup and other grooming activities. The prior week our lesson had been “dieting.”
She sat down and took us one in order. Everybody was getting their eyebrows plucked. The other unpopular girl went before me, getting some unwanted advice about the hair on her upper lip.
I sat down, expecting to hear something even worse.
The lady shone a bright makeup light on my face, and turned my cheek one side to the next. Then she drew her finger over my eyebrows.
“Hm!” she said. “Look, girls — this girl’s eyebrows don’t need any shaping.”
Suddenly, I wasn’t “invisible” in the back of the room, alone and morose. I felt the jealous eyes of the other wealthy girls from normal families burning into me.
“And, she doesn’t really need blush, her skin has a fresh tone.”
By this time, I was about to cry.
“And, she has very good bone structure.”
That was the second time in a week I’d heard that. My grandmother, whom my mother’s friends later informed me was “intimidating” and regarded as “the most beautiful woman in Redlands,” had taken me to a designer’s store in Palm Springs where she liked shopping.
A sales clerk said almost the same thing, and my grandmother had immediately become angry and taken me out of the store.
I swallowed my tears of shame and fear down the back of my throat as the woman finished arranging my — short, unfashionable — hair and had me apply some pink lipgloss.
There, I was finished!
And that was when I learned my lesson about inclusion. The popular girls who I thought hated and reviled me crowded around and began asking me questions.
All it took was the makeup consultant speaking positively about me and using me as an example.
I can see that today, there are three times or more the number of girls in this group, and they look both happier and more diverse.
At the same time, I’ve watched our society become much more exclusionary year by year, step by step, throughout my life.
I was a JTPA recipient: that’s what paid for my work as “the intern” at the San Bernardino County Museum. My family wasn’t poor, but neither was it wealthy. I lived a simple life, eating simple foods. I had many chores, from caring for animals (I was not deprived of that) to tending our garden, raising vegetables and fruits, and taking care of the yard.
After my grandfather died, at age 13, I drove the car to the grocery store to buy simple food. I learned how to write out checks so my grandmother could sign them and the bills could be paid.
All this happened almost at once. My grandmother fell into such a deep depression after my grandfather died that she barely spoke to me for a year. When I could take it no more, I moved to Hollywood to live with my Dad. I attended the most racially-integrated school in the U.S., LeConte Junior High, and for a brief time, Hollywood High School.
That was its own form of bad, and I realized that I had enough friends back in Redlands that even if my grandmother was deeply clinically depressed (she was) I could make it through high school. Even at that time, I had no idea how many scholarships I’d eventually be offered, or what type of opportunities I’d have for further education.
Even among those who are always “included,” our world is a gantlet of dangers, threats, abusers, and predators.
For someone like me, whose life and upbringing amounted to “exclusion” despite all the inclusion I have experienced, it has taken me a lifetime to truly comprehend the tenuousness of inclusion in this society.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, it’s hard for me to imagine any family in the U.S. who hasn’t felt at least some form of exclusion and unwarranted harm.
Ten million people lost their homes to foreclosure following the 2008 financial crisis. I was one of them. Before that, I went through the Family Court system in Los Angeles County following my baby’s death. If I hadn’t had my best friend and my daughter to care for, and also been fortunate to work at Beyond Shelter, I don’t think I could have survived it.
Then 2019 came and I was “excluded” from my 20 years of teaching at Saddleback College, after being named “Teacher of the Year” the previous year.
I realized, “I don’t fit in with these people.”
Why? Because the college had become overwhelmed by the monolithic trend of economic and social exclusion and intractably self-serving attitudes. In 2005 when my baby died, I felt completely supported by the entire college community. Thirteen years later? My husband had become gravely ill and instead of support, a full-time instructor voluntarily decided to teach a class I’d historically taught: that’s what happens when they are nearing retirement and want to augment their retirement income, based on their last semester of teaching.
That person, with full support of everyone there, could have made a less resourceful individual than me literally homeless.
Exaggerated? Hardly. Corresponding with my own poor treatment after years of faithful service, I had begun to be treated markedly worse by my “superiors” when I told them that I’d seen homeless teachers sleeping in their cars when I arrived to teach a 6:30 a.m. class.
That is what our society has come to. Those with more than they need, taking from others, unnecessarily, and even gleefully. A community college, not an Ivy League school like Harvard or Princeton. Princeton even has an “Eviction Lab” and a professor who is exhorting the nation to turn away from its hardcore path toward total exclusion of millions of people from any type of participation in larger society: owning a home, having decent clothing and food to eat, and having the dignity of friends, social activities, and a few amenities.
But it’s also no longer my reality. As I often tell Bruce, who is prone to depressive, nihilistic and apocalyptic beliefs, “I’m the impossible woman” (maybe not in so many words).
Did my ability to create my own reality and include myself begin that long-ago day in Kimberly Juniors when the makeup lady complimented me in from of girls I thought detested me and looked down on me? The day I learned I was wrong about them and myself?
Maybe. I had to do a lot of things for myself at that time, things both I and “society” traditionally would think were impossible, in order to survive.
Now I don’t just believe, I know — I am certain — that the single biggest determining factor of the quality of any of our lives — lies within our selves.
We can’t control what others say or do. But we can control our selves.
We have a society now that’s palpably off course and off-kilter. Our health metrics are going backward. Millions of people lack the necessities of life: in the world’s theoretically “wealthiest” nation.
I have done my time in terms of directly helping poor, needy, and homeless families. I have taught decades in diverse classrooms, giving my utmost to provide the education that students required and deserved. Now, I devote much of my time to my own health and well-being. In the process, I hope I can help others to be happier, healthier, and more fulfilled in their daily life, work, and relationships.
This is all I have ever written about in any of my fiction. Stories about someone discovering their own path to happiness and fulfillment. The most tragic are about someone who accepts that they made mistakes or wrong choices, and they need to come to terms with those mistakes and choices.
In other words, the first step in recovery.
After we have the basic necessities of life, we can then decide what it is we want as “optional” parts of our life. Our exclusionary U.S. society isn’t providing the basics necessities of life for far too many people, but this can change quickly: we witnessed how COVID-19 relief reduced poverty. We saw how the “Great Resignation” provided opportunity for millions to have more self-determination.
Those girls back at Kimberly Juniors were neither for nor against me. They weren’t deliberately excluding me from their group: I was excluding myself.
I can’t solve this world’s problems, nor do I want to try. But I can give encouragement and show examples to others that we can include ourselves — or exclude ourselves.
It’s long-overdue for everyone to stop the exclusionary and deeply harmful attitudes of elitism, money-worship, and discrimination that have cost our nation and our spirits so very much. There is such a thing as leadership — and that right now is our biggest lack. We need leaders and examples who can take the place of the makeup lady on that long-ago day.
I have everything I ever wanted. And you can, too.
Write what you want. Have the life you want. Just be sure it’s your life — not the one someone else tells you that you should have, or worse, makes you feel like you don’t deserve.
I saw today that
- Linda Caroll - had written about mistakes writers make with their publications.I’ve been more self-sacrificing with my writing than anything else in my life. I hope that will change, as I improve my own wellness and fitness.
If you like what you have read, here is a link one of my e-books you can buy and read which includes “Chromosome Circus” (cover image depicted above). It includes the best stories from the first ten years of my short fiction professional writing career. All were published in top sci-fi publications, and a couple have been included in college anthologies, like the Norton Anthology edited by Sylvan Barnet. PS - you can do me a solid by counteracting the review that Amazon will probably NEVER remove from someone who never bought the book or read it.
The people at Saddleback who got a thousand dollars extra month or so in retirement pay by taking the class I usually taught in the early a.m.?
They’re not in the Norton Anthology edited by Sylvan Barnet and are unlikely to ever be. Their dream must have been that money.
Mine? A bit different: and it’s a great one!