Thirty Days
I can remember being in elementary school and showing one of my friends a story I was working on. It was probably about a princess who could both rule and fight, because I watched Star Wars a lot when I was little and my takeaway was that if you can be anything in this life, be Princess Leia. Or maybe it was a ghost story. I really loved the idea of ghosts righting wrongs in the world after this one, and I’m an October baby. Spooky is in my stars. But whatever it was, what I remember most from showing this story to my friend was her saying, “You wrote this?”
I remember the same reaction from some of the other counselors at the Christian summer camp I worked at when I showed them another piece of writing of mine. I can’t think of what it was, exactly, but I remember them pouring over it as a group, binder laid open on the meeting room table, and that same question of surprise coming from them. “You wrote this?”
This is not to say that my writing has always been superb or praiseworthy. I did, after all, get a 2.5 on the North Carolina Writing Test in 4th grade, the lowest scored you can get and still pass. The prompt told us to describe our favorite birthday and if I, a little white girl whose father still had a full time job with benefits, struggled to describe my favorite birthday, I can only imagine the fictions some of my classmates had to invent. I got points taken off because I kept repeating, “It was great,” but, like, we had a party at a putt putt course, which is now a Wendy’s and a gas station, and I got to be the director of my own Samantha the American Girl Doll play, which, in general, was great. I don’t know what else they wanted from me. It was a dull prompt.
I’ve also found my urge to write quashed over the past few years as I’ve come to terms with the church, the Purity Movement, and the spiritual harm it caused. No amount of surprised delight at my writing could lift me out of those depths.
See, I used to keep dense prayer journals, ones I’d write in daily with all my thoughts and hopes and dreams, my deep confessions and my honest questions. This was my primary spiritual discipline, the main way I connected with God. I would write and write until my hand cramped, memorizing the names on my prayer lists as I wrote out prayers for them daily. So much of my spiritual growth was done in these prayer journals, and I kept the practice up all the way from high school into my sophomore year of college.
Then, it was blogging. I wrote out all of my college angst about what to be and how to go be it. My fiction wasn’t ever very good, though I did NaNoWriMo year after year, but my blog posts, essentially stream-of-conscious essays focused around a singular topic, got a fair amount of approval when I shared them on facebook. I kept the blog up for years, shifting spaces here and there, and by the end, I had a few hundred people reading what I wrote. I held out a secret love for my writing and secret hopes that the right person would read it and launch my writing career. I wasn’t sure what genre I’d write in, specifically, but since most of the affirmation I received was from church people, I assumed that God had given me a gift and that, if I just continued to use this gift, good things would come of it.
As I entered grad school, though, my classwork took up most of the mental energy I had, along with some depression and anxiety. On top of that, I found myself in a new church setting, something different than any church I had been in before. There wasn’t a choir for me to sing in or an instrumental ensemble for me to play in. My efforts to get involved in the ministries I was used to participating in were largely ignored. And the church had split from the Church of Scotland over gay marriage. One of the first sermons I heard was about the nature of biblical marriage and God’s grand plan of fruitfulness in marriage.
I am truly thankful for those of you who are unfamiliar with those evangelical buzzwords. I’ll explain it all another time, but suffice it to say, I had, for the first time in my life, found myself in a church environment that was openly opposed to what I believed. Not just, “Oh, Carl didn’t nail the sermon this week,” but “Holy hell, I can’t believe this man is saying this.”
I don’t mean to paint a picture that I had never doubted or questioned my faith before. I had done a fair amount of tearing things apart and putting them back together as a physics and astronomy major and then informal science educator working in the Bible Belt. But I had always felt like church was home and that no matter how much I was wrestling with God, I would be surrounded by people who loved and cared for me, people who welcomed me and supported me. It was clear to me that this church wasn’t that.
Now, the cracks in my trust in the church had been there before I started going to this church, and this church wasn’t the one to break me wide open, but I know that the ground started to shake underneath me during the year I attended there. And it’s hard to put pen to paper as the ground shakes underneath you.
The full story of my unraveling soul is perhaps one for another time, but suffice to say, once I got out of the habit of writing, I couldn’t convince myself that I was good enough to come back, not routinely. As I finished one masters and started working on another, I also start digging into the painful places in my heart, places where evangelicalism and the Purity Movement had cut into me and left my wounds to fester. When your sense of worthiness is tied to your sense of physical purity, which is tied to your relationship with God, to which you have tied your ability to write, well, your blog gets a little dusty.
With the help of therapy and some antidepressants, though, I feel like I’m putting myself back together, better than I was before. I hope, and sometimes pray, that this is solid foundation I’ve been longing for. I’m tired all the way down to my bones from all this instability. And as I put myself back together, I’ve found myself dream of little stories once again, planning posts in my head, and aching for the keyboard under my fingers. I hope it’s time to start again.
So, in a fashion that you, dear reader, will come to know is distinctly mine, I’ve decided to jump back into the swing of things by committing to writing a post each day, no matter how long or short, for the month of September, following the United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Religion and Race’s 30 Days of Anti-Racism calendar. I’ve been doing a fair amount of anti-racist work in these past few months, but I know in my heart that I need to set aside time to reflect on it too. It’s just a part of being white in these days: listening, learning, doing, reflecting, all in a perpetual loop. This loop is important for most things in our lives, but in this time of increasing racial consciousness, it’s especially important now.
So count this for September 1, no matter how late it’s published. I’ve committed to prayer and I’ve committed to action, and we’ll go from there.
How about y’all? How do you feel God is calling to you in this time? What anti-racist work lies ahead of you? Has the church been holding you back or propelling you forward?