I've had this on my mind for a while now, and I haven’t
really known how to put it into words. But it keeps buzzing around in there,
trying to make its way out. So, here’s my attempt to make some sense of it all.
Ever since I took a sociology class a couple years back,
I've viewed the world just a little bit differently. Understanding the workings
of society and culture gave me a different perspective on my own life, and has
helped me to understand myself and figure a few things out. Here is what I've
concluded: we are all just a product of our culture. When I say “culture” I’m
not referring to the culture of our country, but the small, specific type of
culture we were raised in. Maybe there’s a better term for it, but I’ll stick
with “culture” for now.
The culture I was raised in was a very religious, Christian
culture. A southern Baptist community nestled in the southernmost region of the Bible
belt. It was saturated in the over exaggerated smiles of Sunday morning church
goers, with words so sweet they make your stomach churn. But for my family, it
wasn't just a Sunday event; it penetrated every aspect of our lives. And that’s
how they teach it to be. But it’s a strange culture; it’s a culture where there
is only one correct way to live. Where there is only black and white, right and
wrong, good and evil, and no in-betweens. It’s a culture where you ‘love’ the
sinner, ‘hate’ the sin; where you push your beliefs and good intentions onto
other people, and use scare tactics to encourage them to listen. It’s a culture
where “theology” is a normal topic of discussion, and everyone always loves to argue about the details of their “theology” and how
it is undoubtedly sound.
Here are some examples of what it was like for me, being raised
in this kind of culture:
I was never allowed
to celebrate Halloween. October was an awkward month for me, to say the least. My
friends would all get excited about the upcoming holiday, discussing what they
were going to ‘be’ that year and where they would go trick-or-treating, and I
was left wondering what it would feel like to be someone else for a night. One
year, when the school was having some Halloween festivities during the day, my
parents requested that I sit in the library because we didn't ‘celebrate’ that
holiday. So there I sat, with one other student (who coincidentally went to the
same church as me), quietly reading books and doodling while my classmates sang
silly songs about ghosts and made pumpkin crafts. I was raised to believe that
Halloween was evil and, as a side-effect of that instilled belief, I silently
judged anyone who celebrated such a depraved holiday. So, being ‘left out’
didn't bother me so much because I always had the mind set of “I’m right, and
they’re wrong.”
It was the same thing
when the Harry Potter books became wildly popular. I was in middle school, and
I was essentially banned from reading them. I’m not sure if a single person who
was opposed to them actually read the books, but all manner of wild rumors were
flying around the religious community regarding how ‘unholy’ those books were.
I was never very comfortable in my body; from a young age I
was taught about the importance of modesty and left grossly uneducated in
regards to the physiology of the female everything. As a child I suffered through
a few bladder infections because I was too scared to talk to my mom about
something that was wrong “down there”. Not because I didn't think my mother
would have helped me, but because I was scared of my own body. Being a tall,
leggy girl it was nearly impossible to find a pair of shorts that were ‘decent’
enough for church events. Let’s just say capri pants and baggy tees were my fashion of choice as a budding pubescent. Though there was nothing specifically terrible that anyone
ever said or did to make me feel inferior because of my female form, it always
seemed to be in some unspoken rule of order hanging in the air, so thick it was almost tangible.
And of course, there was always the pressure to ‘witness’ to
my ‘secular’ friends at school. In this culture, ‘secular’ was the term for all
things non-Christian. For example, I grew up only listening to ‘Christian’ artists, which, coincidentally,
is why I am so unfamiliar with a lot of the popular songs and artists of basically
every decade up until the early 2000's. That might explain some of the
‘deer-in-the-headlights’ looks I get when asked if I know of...(insert band
name).
Tasked with sharing my beliefs with others, I often tried
encouraging friends to come to church with me. I didn't realize at the time how
awkward and painful that could possibly be for them. It was all I knew, and I
thought that everyone should feel accepted there. I also didn't realize that “love
the sinner, hate the sin” meant that we’re still silently judging all of your ‘sins’
and are expecting you to clean up your act. Because this was how I was raised,
and this was what I had been taught my entire life, I never considered that my
world view might actually be pretty fucked up.
What do you think happens when you step away and sever
yourself from this kind of culture for long enough? I can tell you what happened
to me: perspective.
The older I got, the less the culture I was raised in made
sense to me. As a young artist I began to find myself in life’s gray areas,
and often times torn with emotion because of it. I would beat myself up over
not being ‘good enough’, over not meeting the absurd standards of my culture. I struggled with depression and quite a bit of
self-loathing that resonated in my life for many years to come. By my senior
year of high school, I was starting to feel the ties that bound me to the life
I knew fading away.
A year after I graduated High School I married my love and
moved away from ‘home’. For the first year I tried to attend new churches, but
something had changed once I walked away from the culture I had been immersed
in my entire life: it suddenly sickened me. I found myself choking on the
preacher’s words and seething at the music that was all so repetitive. The more I was disconnected from that culture, the more
I hated it. I felt like I had been forced into this tiny, neat little mold when
my nature is to be a big, fat free floating blob.
I felt like life was
so much more complex, and colorful, and beautiful, and painfully complicated than
how it had been perceived in my youth. I suddenly wanted to experience
the things that had been barred to me my entire life because they were viewed
as ‘wrong’. And what did I find? I found that humans can have a lot of goodness
in them without having to be identified as ‘Christians’. I found that I love
Harry Potter, and all things fantasy. I found that I love the natural world,
and the human body, and art in all forms, and the sciences, and facts. Oh, how
I love facts…plain, unbiased facts. I don’t know nearly as many as I would like
to, but I never want to stop learning. I never want to stop searching. Most of
all I NEVER want to stop questioning, because the moment I think I know all the
answers is the moment I will know nothing at all.
Last year marked 5
years that I have been completely separated from my culture of origin, and
something significant has happened in this past year. I had some kind of
quarter life crisis, where I struggled with everything from depression, to
self-doubt and loathing, to what could best be described as an identity crisis. I had identified myself
in this weird, twilight zone-esque, Christian culture for my entire life, and
when I left it behind I wasn't really sure what remained.
Around Christmas time last year I was watching Prancer with
the kid. There is a part in the movie where one girl says to her friend that
she doesn't believe in Santa anymore; she doesn't even know if she believes in
God. In my crazy, emotional crisis state I found myself crying at this,
because I realized that was exactly how I felt. For as much as I had come to
appreciate the actual tangible things in life, I realized that there will
always be a part of me yearning for the wonder of the unexplainable.
This was when I realized that I could still have my faith without the burden of
my past life.
I began the process
of reassessing everything I had ever known from a less biased and more educated
point of view. Now that I’m no longer surrounded by people telling me what to
think, I’m learning the rather difficult and extremely liberating process of
thinking and deciding things for myself. Deciding what is right for me. Figuring out what I believe, and why I
believe it. I’ve rediscovered my faith, but it’s personal to me and very much a
moving target; I want to always be wondering why, because I think there should
always be some wonder in the world.
Have you stepped away from your culture lately? Maybe just
long enough to wonder ‘why?’
“Oh, you should never, never doubt what nobody is sure
about.”
-
Willy Wonka
