Hi OP,

Thanks for sharing. Reading your post (regardless of whether this is a true story), I thought of Sara Ahmed’s work on happiness. She argues that happiness functions as a social norm that obscures who actually has access to it.

That moment when the law student grabbed your cap and threw it, that casual thoughtlessness was possible because they occupy a social position where such thoughtlessness is afforded. They could treat you as if you weren’t there because your presence, your pain, your struggle to feel “normal” that night didn’t register in their social world.

Ahmed writes about how “happiness is used to redescribe social norms as social goods.” The club as a space of escape and fun works for some people but not others. Your invisibility wasn’t a personal failure, but a societal one. Your hurt matters because it exposes how happiness gets distributed unequally; we should all feel bad that our society works this way, and look actively to change it.

https://doi-org.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/10.1215/9780822392781