How I became a Gen X Snowflake
To be honest, I’ve already misled you. I am not 100% certain I am a fully-formed snowflake in all its individual beauty, just yet. A more accurate headline would have read How I Am Becoming a Generation X Snowflake but there you go, some artistic licence is in play.
To be clear, being called a Snowflake is considered a bit of an insult. According to the internet (ok Wikipedia) the term re-emerged in the 2010s to describe young adults at the time who were perceived as more fragile than their forebears. Collins English Dictionary made the term ‘snowflake generation’ one of their words of the year in 2016. They defined the group as those born from 1980–1994 and ‘viewed as being less resilient and more prone to taking offence than previous generations’.
In many ways, for those dubbing others a Snowflake the negative judgment is interchangeable with the other common charge of being woke. (I am woke too to be clear.) Actually, the meanings of each are different. To be woke is to be aware of and sensitive to issues concerning social justice such as racism and disablism and I’ve been pretty woke for a while, thank goodness.
The Snowflake thing however is different. As a Generation Xer, I am used to the hard knocks of life. I grew up not in the 1950s when children were seen and not heard, but in the late 1960s and early 70s when children were rarely seen and only sometimes heard. Those of us raised in that era can probably warm the cockles of our hearts on the memories of freezing winters, no central heating, *interesting* food, and parents who were exploring their own freedoms and each other’s like never before in history.
If you were lucky as a child, you probably got off lightly with some benevolent neglect. If you were unlucky it was worse. These were the years in which you had to have a licence to own a dog but you could let it take itself for a walk on the street. For a child, there was no licence. However good, bad or indifferent the parenting you got, you sucked it up until you left home (young) and then you just got on with it alone. Hardly surprising then that the key characteristics of Gen X are said to be independence and resilience. Basically, whatever you or life chooses to throw at us, we have learned to take it well, or at least pretend to.
Now I am a neurodivergent Generation Xer so it has taken me at least 10–15 years longer than my neurotypical peers to get myself organised. I didn’t go to university until I was in my early 40s, so no free higher education for me. I didn’t get on the housing ladder until my mid-30s (if we forget about the brief foray into near bankruptcy and house repossession in the late 1980s when all that ERM business was going on). I have, to put it bluntly, been behind.
Added to that, or perhaps linked to that, is my history of depression and then apparently bipolar which is now slowly seguing into adult ADHD. Throughout my mid-20s I was given a pure smorgasbord of SSRI medication, amongst other things. I also had therapy. Quite a lot in fact. But in true Gen X suck it up style I’ve kept on keeping on. I’ve worked my whole life, raised a family (in my own haphazard way) and once I got off the horrible medication merry-go-round barely took a sick day from year to year. I do not say any of this with satisfaction or pride. It is merely to highlight that I had a double dose of sucking up to get on with. Firstly, my natural inheritance as a Gen X kid; secondly, the effort of will it takes to function (aka mask) when you are wired to present in markedly different ways from your peers.
Imagine then my shock when I heard there was this new Snowflake kid in town. Apparently, this kid doesn’t go to work with a raging tooth abscess. Neither do they show up if they need a self-care day to balance their mental health. If they have family, they actually prioritise their loved ones. At work they like it to be flexible. They don’t bend to the power of the curve as I have spent more than 30 odd years doing. This Snowflake kid has good boundaries.
Ok, I’ll admit, I’ve spent a bit of time kvetching on the sidelines. ‘Who do they think they are?’ I might have thought. But the reality is who they think they are is who I have pretended not to be for decades and at what cost?
Today I felt an old familiar feeling creeping over me. My old frenemy Anxiety. It sort of starts in my arms and slithers round my chest until I feel antsy all over and my heart is racing. Before the outbreak of #WFH and the Great Resignation, I had this feeling almost EVERY SINGLE MORNING.
Every morning was an effort of will to ignore or in latter years ‘manage’ the feelings of anxiety and get the kids to school, myself to work yada yada. This morning I was working from home so I was able to sit with the feeling a little and not have to push through it and function as I have had to in the past. I was reminded of some emails I had recently from an acquaintance working on a project. They’d had to delay a few things to prioritise their mental health. At the time, I was a bit meh about it, although it made no material difference to me. This morning, I realised, I had changed, perhaps irrevocably.
After 50 years of sucking it up… I realised I don’t want to anymore. If I have a feeling about something, I too am going to bring it. Not for sympathy or to get out of my responsibilities but because I owe it to myself. Discharging my duty to myself puts me in a better position to do the same for others. An act of self-care is an act of love for another down the line.
And just working through that little anxiety and giving myself permission to not be ok was a little emotional. Fortunately, I had an online event to attend that was about Lived Experience Leadership. Now that’s another post, but I am here to report that there are places and spaces out there where people who represent everything that is Snowflake still honour and respect each other and get good, world-changing work done. So from now on, I am all about recognising the sensitivity of my inner Snowflake and championing their cause. To my thinking, we Snowflakes are the very fractals of nature and like our cousins of electricity, clouds, rivers and crystals, we have come to collectively heal our very broken world.
