Today is International Women’s Day. As such I’ve been seeing many posts highlighting women’s struggles in already marginalized groups (i.e. women of color, queer women, disabled women etc.). While I am glad to see that these articles exist I keep noticing how a lot of them are written by white women and they seem to be missing a key point when they write things like “just be yourself”: sometimes being your true self is dangerous simply because of the color of your skin. I love activism and activists and encourage everyone to be vocal about creating a better world for the powerless in our society but you’re fooling yourself if you think white activists face the same amount of danger during a protest than activists of color.

It’s a fact every child of color learns at some point in their lives,sometimes even before becoming school aged, whether explicit or implicit: your life will be inherently more dangerous/stressful/doubt-ridden due to a physical characteristic you cannot change, in a society which can change but does so slowly and with A LOT of violence along the way.

As a kid, I was constantly told by my family to stop doing certain thing or that certain thoughts I expressed were “weird.” I came to accept that I was (am still am) “the weird one” but as an adult I realized that I could’ve been waaaaaaay weirder. One of the reasons I’m not is because my parents taught me the secret language of “safe behaviors around white people.” I didn’t realize this was what they were doing whenever they reprimanded me for being too loud, too expressive or too effusive. They probably didn’t realize they were also doing it when talking to their friends about how I’m “so quiet and well behaved ” (code for doesn’t question authority, avoids conflict and doesn’t express own thoughts/ideas for fear of being labeled weird or worse). Another thing that added difficulty to my experience of life is that I’m pretty intelligent. Yes, it did make certain things like school and finding patterns in behavior I could emulate so as to not fly above the radar but it also made not thinking about why very,very difficult. Why did everyone seem to buy into societal norms so easily? Why couldn’t they take the data in front of them, process it rationally, as well as emotionally to some degree, and then make a decision on how to behave so that it benefits the world as a whole? Trying to think about all that while navigating an American school system and Guatemalan/Mexican-American home made life as a teen interesting to say the least.

My parents had a sense of the difficulty I would face for stepping too far outside the “normal” (cisgender, heterosexual, traditional female) and tried to get me to behave accordingly. When I pushed back they did not put up a fight and let me be a bit of a “tomboy” sure, but they still always made me wear dresses to formal occasions. I remember being in grade school and getting some sort of Christmas-shopping-gift-experience for low income students. As we were walking down the sidewalk one of the chaperones announces we have to pair up 1 kid:1 chaperone. One of the chaperone chuckles and tells me and my all girl group of friends “One of you can come with me but you might end up with all boy clothes since I have 3 sons.” Now, at this point I had firmly rejected the idea that girls were bound to the traditional female gender role but, the idea that a girl could actively pursue the boy gender role,even if merely in dress??? My pre-pubescent heart leapt at the thought however, was quickly shut down by the oh so active Super Brain, which reminded me that I was already weird and didn’t want to draw more attention to myself for fear of ridicule from peers and siblings, rejection from parents and other things I couldn’t name because I had never been introduced to any ideas that weren’t “safe.” My parents made the usual gay jokes, so common in the 90’s but “obviously didn’t mean anything by it.” They were not purposefully malicious, just had never been exposed to, or cared to find out about LGBT culture because they were too bust doing things like earning money to keep themselves and their family alive. All these experiences are far too common for queer people of color.

All the thing discussed above are pretty much magnified 1,000,000,000x when you’re autistic. I believe it is even more difficult for those of us who were not aware of their autism until adulthood. When my girlfriend called me autistic on out third date there was a brief moment of confusion followed immediately by denial. Being a therapist however, I decided to stop and really think about it because, obviously, “I’m way too socially competent to be autistic right??!?!” All of a sudden it clicked, “All the “weird shit” I do is in fact, autistic, *breathes sigh of relief* The reason I know how to be socially competent is because it was drilled into me thanks to traditional gender roles and my anxiety around displeasing people AND THIS IS COMPLETELY WRONG.*breathes sigh of resignation*.” As I was going through my memories trying to collective evidence for or against an autism self-diagnosis I remembered back to one of my early meetings with a then-SO’s friends. This SO had a weekly dinner with pals at a local burger joint and we went as often as we could. I would always stay in the car while he went to get in line because 1) I needed to mentally prepare for being around these new people, in a loud environment where most of said new people and I had pretty much nothing in common and 2) in order to aid this process I would load my sativa cart into my vape pen and take a few meditative puffs before heading inside. Now, of the 10 or so people that showed up every week only one of them shared my interest and enthusiasm for cannabis. One week, the mostly male get together actually had enough women so we could sit at our own table. I was reflecting on the rarity of an all woman space when someone asked what I was thinking and in true autistic fashion I launch into the thought process that led me to reflecting on the immediate happiness I was feeling at being in a female space, calm enough to enjoy it yet also wishing I could express my delight in finding that cannabis helps me get out of my head enough to enjoy the present moment. This, of course, fell upon deaf ears as most of they did not care about cannabis and were so used to men dominated spaces that it did not bother them. (Again, why not?!?! Do they not feel the same freedom in women only spaces? If they do, do they not care?) So I returned to my happy little shell, eating my delicious garlic cheeseburger and enjoyed observing the neurotypicals do their thing.

Cannabis helped reduce symptoms of anxiety enough for me to process other feelings or think more objectively about situation XYZ. Maybe, this is because my brain is wired different, maybe this is because cannabis plays on emotional and physical parts of our system but the end result stands: cannabis can be a tool to alleviate anxiety related symptoms when used in non-excessive amounts.