Oh hello darling and welcome back to February on benpechey.com. This month I am exploring the behaviours we can apply to our actions to help us overcome the hurdles of 2021, placing you in the best position to achieve your goals.
Today I want to extol the virtues of nuance.
Nuance
noun
“a very slight difference in appearance, meaning, sound, etc.”
Nuance is something that I have really been pushing into my work for the last eighteen months, yet brands and organisations just don’t seem to be listening. Nuance covers the intersections of human existences that the patriarchy has spent centuries trying to wipe out. Keep reading to find out nuance can help you this year.
If you are new to nuance, or think you know what it means, but can’t work out how it can help you, then this is for you. In the context of human interaction, it means that more than one emotional state can exist at the same time. In basic terms, this is feeling sadness, but still being able to feel joy in moments.
There is so much discourse about marginalised communities that writes them off as one thing, without taking into consideration any nuance in their situation. This is very clear in the trans community because we are often seen as a set of statistics, and the narrative is that we are unhappy in the binary decisions made for us by society and traditional thinking.
This may be the truth, and many of us have felt the struggles of this emotional state, yet at the same time, we also experience gender euphoria, relating to the decisions we have made with the bodies we have, our own gender experience and the joy of living our full truth.
Yet this nuance is not being discussed, and thus so many experiences of joy and happiness in our community go unspoken. This makes it harder for younger members of our community to see validity in their existence, as all they see is sadness. It makes it harder for allies to make changes, as the ill-informed ally goes on to present a warped picture of who we are, and what we need.
If we allow time for nuance, we will create more positive, well-rounded pictures of communities and experiences. Through this, we might actually see some good, and see forward-moving change instead of treading water.
Thank you for embarking with me on this small self-improvement piece, I will be back next week to explore why adaptation is necessary. As always, I love you lots like jelly tots, until next time, uh buh bye.
Shot by Ruth Pechey
