Rachel Cusk’s Parade has recently thrown my mind into turmoil a few times. Its prose can be treacherous, like a ragged mountain. But when it becomes lucid to me, it stabs. It has been quite some time since I’ve felt the need to make excerpts from a book as not to lose these nuggets.

One of them prompted me to write this post. Let me share it with you:

You’re white and you’re male and things just fall into your lap, and I’m not saying that’s your fault. You didn’t do anything to make it happen and you didn’t stop it either. You just let yourself be carried along like a cork in the water, always floating to the top.

This is how Betsy describes David at the end of a dinner among panellists invited to speak about art. I’ve jokingly said similar things about my life in conversation—although likely less eloquently. It’s something witty to observe, something to say half joking, something obviously based. It performs an aura of self-reflection that I’m not fully convinced is accurate.

Of course, I’ve read about these privileges and have thought about how they likely made a number of crucial pivots in my life go over with a quiet, assured success. And I feel that when thinking about my future. While I naturally plan and ponder, I sense that everything will surely go alright, that nothing too bad will happen, that I will always be lucky enough. This I can only either explain by these privileges or as baseless and probably it’s both.

Despite that reflection, the image of the cork speaks to me as an apt description of my experience. I’m aware of the floating, versed in its general mechanics, even have studied scientific literature on how it works, yet I cannot stop myself from at least partially perceiving it as a natural state. As the way things have always been and will likely continue to be. With the sure expectation that the current will drag me on.

Despite all the deserved critique of the patriarchal system that defines the physics of this metaphorical river, critiques I share and have worked on turning into action, the image of the cork also represents the hopelessness I often feel about that work. Overthrowing the patriarchy sometimes seems like attempting to change the material properties of the world we live in (and if taken as a Marxist pun, that’s precisely what’s required). Yet, I think I do that I do well to remind myself that this is not so. The privileges and the system that created them are not natural, are societal. They take effort to change, but they are not forces of nature, but of humans.

In that way, optimistic feminism requires rejecting the cork and thinking about what human invention makes me more likely to float and many others more likely to sink.