I was brought up to be a Snob. Not with any real conscious intention, but just because that’s the way my family’s beliefs lay.
I believed that people who said ‘hay’atch’ instead of ‘aitch’ for the letter H were intellectually inferior; I believed that those who called supper ‘tea’ were common, likewise if napkins were called serviettes. I believed there were strata in society between humans and that our family was thankfully nearer the top than bottom.
I believed this because generation after generation of my family had all believed something similar for far too long.
At 18, I left my privileged echo chamber of private school (and I say this not without gratitude for the experiences and opportunities it provided) and fell into the real world. Not the real real world mind you. Public relations could hardly be called that, but a more culturally diverse environment than I was used to for sure.
In this world, the two A levels I had scraped were deemed major qualifications rather than the desperate failures by my family and academic peers. I was mixing with people whose backgrounds afforded me a window into lifestyles and upbringings that contrasted drastically to my own (and I, who thought I came from the broken side of the family, the rough edge of posh).
And then I dived further… over the years I waitressed and travelled and met more and more people who showed me over and over again how ridiculously narrow my familial belief system had been; how I had been raised to judge people by meaningless standards instead of learning to look into their hearts and meet them human to human.
I see that my family had no malice in their own judgements, they were products of their own upbringing, a continuation of the lineage of pomp and snobbery and done with as much kindness and love as those beliefs can afford.
But now I am entering a new era, a time and age where my own children are beginning their natural formation of opinions about the world around them and I am constantly checking in with myself as to the values I am modelling. Am I carrying old, unhelpful, unkind, judgmental beliefs that I am passing on to my kids or am I shifting the familial system to compassion, acceptance, difference and diversity? I know what I wish to model, but I’m sure my parents thought similarly too, I bet they thought they were raising progressive kids through their own shifts of self awareness and yet I feel their burden of unnecessary opinion heavy on my back.
I feel reactive and triggered by any form of superiority, be it qualifications, age or otherwise. I know now that the humblest and wisest of voices can come from any direction, without a cloak of ego announcing their arrival.
I wonder how my children will view me in another 30 years, what they will perceive to be antiquated notions and what they will choose to do differently.
As I say to my clients, as long as we are moving forward, no matter how slowly, we are still moving forward.
On, on I step, smashing my institutionalised snobbery, one day at a time.