I Have A Lot To Say...

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