I never know if my white priviledge aesthetic is a secret weapon or a barrier; because it jars with the reality of who I really am - the opposite.
Because at face value, the person who wears the high end black brogues, and the nice casual suit, with the Apple Watch, and the lovely diamond engagement ring slid nicely next to a beautiful wedding ring sends the message - I'm one of you. In places like the Houses of Parliament, where I was today, (again!), I blend, in ways possibly some of my other lived experienced peers don't.
It's the elocution lessons I had to take when I was adopted, that have served me well. It's the etiquette of being a white middle class girl, raised by social climbing adoptive parents, well groomed, privately educated, univeresity graduated, says the right things in the right ways.
But let's face it; I'm Eliza Doolittle and I always have been, and my life is Pygmallion on loop.
I may well have been raised by posho's but I'm now a working class grafter, juggling freelance work, academic undertakings, renting a private house from a private landlady who owns more property than I can ever dream of getting a foot on the ladder, and making it pay cheque to pay cheque with a little leftover to give safety, sanity and space to not trigger my offending behaviours of financial instability panic. Some days it feels like I'm on top of the world and performing my A game, bringing home the future we have been working towards, for people like me, for wives like mine, for lives like ours. And other days, I feel like I'm treading water, weighed down by 3 decades of trauma, chaos and calamity that won't release me from it's chokehold.
Today in Parliament, I was met with the usual emotional conflict - be in the room where the real change happens, fly the flag for the lived experience women, tell the story, share the power, the pain, the purpose, hammer home the reality and the vitality of what it means to include the voices of a failed system - justice, care, education, social. Failed systems.
We are the walking wounded. And we walk into rooms like that all the same and bare our hearts and souls, for the greater good. That the picking of the scab of self sacrifice and retraumatisation is for a reason, it's not thankless, it's not thoughtless, it's not wasted, it's seen, it's heard and without us, the echo chambers persist.
So I shared, that I myself recognise I'm a cliche, that my white priviledge masks my true form - a ward of court, a care system child, a victim of CSE, rampant and organised abuse and exploitation at the hands of man who was himself a serving police officer - my father. Adopted into middle class surbubia as an accessory for ignorant ill-equipped rich people who wanted children and commandered two from the system, an act of charity that proved to cost them dearly.
It cost me more.
Emotional abuse, cold hearted cruelty, an abject disdain for all that I was, had been and became. The street rat my adoptive mother coined me. The slut. The sloven. The mothers daughter (biological), the proverbial apple that did not fall far from the tree.
I endured decades of ridicule at my size, my appearance, my trauma, my baggage, my sexuality and what evolved? My criminality.
Removed and voided from the family tree, and frozen into siberia, alone. The white middle class girl, who was raised to see value in money and not in people, now let loose on a world with no inbuilt guidance system. No morals. No ethics. No direction. No sense of self. An angry broken child, now havoc wreaking 20 something.
Where the allowance in the bank account disappeared overnight, the mobile phone was cut off, the credit cards no more. And this child of fragility and madness, was now an adult with no concept of the cost of anything. No financial. Not people. And so it was no wonder I became the selfish creature who defrauded people without real consideration of the harm - in my childs mind, it was always; self preservation.
Today, there was a barrister who had done alot of work around sexual exploitation and trafficking and how it served in mitigating criminal behaviour - note the word, mitigating, not justifying.
And all I could think was... I told the probation officer who did my pre-sentence report about my experiences in London, I told them of my sex work, of my trauma, of my tale of woe, raped at 19, pregnant as a concequece, distored and disintegrating as time went by.
Mitigation was not taken on by my judge. Not one iota. If anything, she seemed genuinely irritated anything that had come to pass in my life up to the point of commiting crime was not reason enough to explain my actions - I agree, in my madenned haze in 2016, I too could not justify my actions, let alone reason them but whilst in prison, and the years that have followed; I understand, I am a product of all that came before.
It was only during my prison sentence that I was truly seen for being a victim of anything; in the first instance, yes - trafficking
I am your text book female offender. If there was a checklist for knowing who would end up in prison and who would not, I tick all of the boxes. My biological family is rife with criminals, both my mother and my father - he's a bad bad man and pervert and she's an enabler who went on to commit murder. I was not made of good stock. More than that, I am the child of two devious but two broken people, who too, will have missed their stop in getting off the road to ruin. My mother is the product of her childhood as much as I am. Generational trauma, familial incarceation, child in care, abuse, trauma, drugs, prostitution, homelessness, mental health disorders. I am a cliche.
So when I articluated that today, it was with the private school tone of a posh northerner, and as I spoke, I heard how jarring it was, to look and hear me, and hear my words.
But hear them they did.
And I suppose that is the point of this rapid thought dump on the train home from London - perhaps, my white privilege is a secret weapon, because paired with my true form, it opens doors, ears, hearts and minds, in ways perhaps some may find harder.
I'm aware of that.
I'm also aware that I zoom home to Manchester, to my wife, my life, our little terraced house and ridiculous 14 year old cat, continuing on the fertility treadmill, working our socks off in jobs that are mentally exhausting, surviving, occasionally thriving, but always proud of who we are and how we got here.
I wouldn't trade this version of me, this true Fran, and this life we build, for all the bloody allowances and pretensious nonsense I was raised with. Not one bit.
