Why the bad dinner guest

When I was 22, with my newly minted professional credentials, I was told I needed to develop a better poker face. I looked at my supervisor and told her I didn't want to. Another woman, one who ran our clinical trainings, hearing this, spoke up. She told me that I'd always be hired, in part, because I refused to have a poker face, because I am willing to name the proverbial elephants in the room and in fact can barely keep myself from doing it. Thirty-six years later I find myself exhausted from being that person, from filling that role. How many times have I spoken up at meetings or wherever else and articulated what appears to me to be the obvious—the thing that is right in front of us that nobody is saying? How many times have I blown up the administrative gaslighting in a calculated way, one where I know it will work but where it also isn't directly confrontational—where I use that ability to "state the obvious" in a way that would leave them looking like they couldn't see the obvious if they pushed back? I leave those meetings and inevitably someone thanks me for saying whatever I did and I wonder—sometimes ask them—why they didn't speak up. It makes me tired. I've slowed down, but I can't seem to stop.

There's a particular kind of social exile that comes from bearing witness to the unbearable on a daily basis. After nearly three decades in urban public education and social work—in a city that holds the dubious honor of ranking third nationally for childhood poverty—I've discovered that authentic human experience and polite conversation are fundamentally incompatible.

The title isn't hyperbole; it's a survival mechanism. When your workday includes realities so stark they sound fictional, when the gap between what you've witnessed and what others can imagine becomes a chasm, you learn that truth-telling is a social liability. The stories that shape my days—the ones that are most real, most urgent, most human—are precisely the ones that clear dinner tables and end conversations.

I hold severl graduate degrees and TBH, I don't see them as all that relevant or necessry. They come from institutions and traditions butild on and of white supremecy. Those graduate degrees? They're in a drawer somewhere—maybe a box in the crawl space, I honestly can't remember where. They represent a specific kind of intelligence, the kind that navigates academic hoops and theoretical frameworks. But they feel increasingly irrelevant when measured against the raw intelligence required to navigate systems designed to fail you, the exhausting resilience some friends, family and people I work with demonstrate daily—the kind of intelligence that rarely gets degrees but deserves them most.

I'm read as and identify as primarily female, though I don't really. I just don't not. What I am is direct and attached to logic—I want shit to make sense. But I'm also empathetic to a fault, incapable of not reading people, not processing everything around me in a way that often lets me predict the next behavior, know the subtext before it surfaces. It's a practiced skill born of necessity. I am constitutionally incapable of ignoring injustice or things that are harmful. I don't always have the energy to respond, but it makes me crazy when people somehow function as if they don't see, somehow go on about their lives as if everything is fine.

This creates a peculiar form of displacement across multiple worlds: I've taught at the post-secondary level for about 25 years—nearly 20 of those at a progressive institution that was, in some senses, genuinely progressive until it closed. At the same time, I taught and still teach at a small private liberal arts college, a place far from my comfort zone where they are decidedly not my people. I've become bilingual in worlds that don't translate to each other, an orignially inadvertent and now intentional participant in communities that have learned to survive through necessary resilience—a kind of strength that's both inspiring and heartbreaking in its exhausting constancy. I live in the "not quite." Not quite fitting here, nor there, but able to mask well enough to live at the fringes of whatever world I'm standing in at the moment. 

As an artist and organizer, I've developed fluency in moving between spaces where my directness is valued and spaces where it's seen as problematic, where my empathy is understood as strength versus where it's dismissed as weakness. The academic world that credentialed me often feels disconnected from the ground-truth of human struggle. The social circles that might welcome my education recoil from the stories that give it meaning.

The vicarious trauma isn't just about what I've seen—it's about carrying stories that demand to be told but can't be heard. It's about the impossible choice between authentic response and social acceptance. When someone asks "How are you?" they're not actually asking about the child who came to school hungry again, the family facing eviction, the teenager aging out of foster care with nowhere to go. They want "fine," and anything else makes me the problem. In academic circles, that's where the conversation dies. In other circles, engaging in what interests me artistically and academically doesn't fit either—it's seen as frivolous, pretentious, irrelevant to "real" concerns. So I'm either too raw or too cerebral, too much or not enough, depending on which room I'm standing in.

The older I get the more I make intentional choices about which hills I'm willing to die on. Mostly I avoid dinner parties all together. I don't enjoy making people uncomfortable but I loathe small talk. It's exhausting. It feels pointless but I know everyone doesn't feel that way, so I usually just step aside unless I can't. 

So I've become a bad dinner guest—someone whose authentic self disrupts the comfortable fiction that these realities exist somewhere else, happen to other people, can be safely ignored over wine and appetizers. Someone who can't pretend not to see what's happening right in front of us. The choice is stark: be real and be alone, or perform normalcy and disappear.

This webpage exists in that space between—where the stories that can't be told at dinner parties find their voice, where the intelligence that doesn't fit academic molds gets recognized, where the daily reality of working in America's most forgotten places gets documented without apology or sanitization.

Because sometimes the truth ruins dinner-but only if pretense and pretending are valued more than honest conversations. Only because we are not practiced in sitting with discomfort and challenging ourselves to look at where it comes from. In fact, we are trained not to in the name of social decency. 

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