Go slow

My phone and I are very compatible. My phone is an iPhone 4 with two previous owners one of which was a four-year-old. I am a white girl born in 1988. We are both getting old. We are both slow. Apparently.

After learning that I have an iPhone 4 people often ask me if it is slow. Yes it is slow, but also idk, it’s the only iPhone I’ve ever owned and it’s always been a little slow and maybe it’s gotten a little worse since the beginning but I’ve never known anything faster so, I don’t know.

It also took me a while to realize that I am slow. Slow is a relative term after all, so learning that I was slow required years of comparison, but yes it proved to be true, I am slow at most things: getting ready in the morning, responding to text messages, walking, eating, filling ketchup bottles at work.

I remember the day that I learned that slowness was a punishable offense. I was in kindergarten and I hadn’t finished copying the alphabet from the chalkboard so the teacher kept me and one other girl inside during recess to finish the task. I remember the classroom, strangely quiet and dark because one set of lights had been turned off. I was disappointed, but also I was surprised. I hadn’t realized until then that going slow was bad. (In my defense I bet my alphabet was one of the neatest alphabets in the class.)

Recently a friend told me about the characteristics of white supremacy culture. I had not heard of this list before. It included, she told me, quantity over quality, and a sense of urgency, and some other things she couldn’t remember at the time. And she said that one of the reasons she did not want to go back to school was because she had realized, as an adult, that school taught her these things. The conversation reminded me of the kindergarten classroom and I lamented how it starts so young, teaching each other how to conform, and then it takes a lifetime to undo. I’m working on it still. But the going slow part–I got that down.