letter 23 - why I've been afraid to be a woman
Dear boys, February 17, 2014
These letters are getting progressively more cathartic... and harder to write. Hence why it's taken so long for me to post another. At twilight I sit on the cinderblock wall around our porch, scuffing my flipflops in the film of sand on the tiles. Mom comes to join me and I open my mouth and out pours this cascade of frustration and fear, of anger that I feel I can't escape expectations even when I am "home" in the missionary community, of surprise that delving into my grief is unearthing so much anger for me. I am thankful for her listening.
In my last letter I wrote about the conflict I feel between my ability to deliver to others' expectations, my sense of powerlessness, and my desire for sincere self-expression. Much of my anger is about those three themes. That conflict is central to why I've never been able to fall in love. I am swimming in this conflict during my visit to Niger, rediscovering what I thought womanhood was and why I thought it. Africa, America... I have lived my whole life afraid of womanhood because I thought that to be a woman was to be a victim of how others rated your physical appeal; a voiceless, helpless, dehumanized sex object. There was no way I would embrace that. I thought that being a woman was living your life around three principles: objectified visibility, selective invisibility, and displaced affinity. I can remember when I first discovered these principles so much more clearly here in Niger than I could remember in the States.
I'm three years old, shifting to rub the itchy impressions the palm frond mat has left on my dusty legs, glancing up at my father in his white tunic and red beanie. He often sits here in our Tahoua yard under the shade of the thorny desert-date tree, studying Fulfulde with his language interpreter. Today he is entertaining a Wodaabe visitor from the bush, a middle-aged man I don't recognize. I've brought my plastic tea set to play in the shade near them. Dad gets up and goes inside for something, leaving me outside with the strange man. I have a strange sensation and turn to find the man staring at me. I don't understand the concept of sexual objectification yet - nor should any three year old girl - but I know that his look makes me feel invaded. I stare at him. He takes my white teacup, slides it into his canvas bag, and smirks superiorly at me. He can take things away from me. I don't know what to do. I am paralyzed, no longer able to play, sitting on the mat looking at him, wanting to tell my dad when he returns but somehow unable to explain. This was my initiation to my African experience of being female: objectified hypervisibility. In fact, it probably set the foundation for my concept of womanhood. In Africa everybody saw my body, but nobody saw me because they only saw what they wanted to see. My womanhood belonged to their smirking faces and their violating eyes.
Nigerien culture centers on relationships. Even their status symbols imply relationship. Dating or doing the daughter of the only white man in town would have been a big status move. Nigerien culture is also realistic. In the absence of food - let alone porn - a woman's natural beauty and indicators of fertility are valued. I've always been a curvy girl. Hence, even though I was always a commodity, at least I was a hot one.
So what about my American experience of being female? Flip side of the coin. I went from getting everyone's unwanted attention to getting almost no attention.
I'm five years old and my dirty-blond hair brushes the sleeves of my Christmas-plaid dress as I peer over my shoulder, past the other kids in the Hershey Free Homeschool Co-op Choir, looking for the tall boy in the back row. I had little-girl crushes on Noah and Joseph Gallop throughout my childhood, because they were the only unrelated boys I knew. But Lance was my first real little-girl crush. I don't remember anything about him, except that he was tall and had dark brown hair and never saw me. I used to look at him sometimes when we sang and feel perplexed that I always looked at him and he never looked at me. Crazy that of all my childhood memories, this is one of the few that haunt me. Sixteen years later, during my first serious college crush, I had frequent flashbacks to the Christmas-plaid dress, the homeschool choir, and the first boy who couldn't see me. This is my first experience of selective invisibility - when the person who can't see you is the one you really want to be seen by.
When I'm ten years old, I discover that selective invisibility has a kissing cousin. I sit next to Nathan in Co-op Watercolor class, painting a toucan. Nathan compliments my use of colors and I feel warm and happy all over. I've had a crush on Nathan for three months. He's the reason I took Chess class, too. Nathan is nice to me, but I'm just part of the wallpaper in his world. Ironically, his younger brother Seth has a crush on me. Seth is one of Peter's friends, and he comes over to our house and follows me around while I hope that Seth's mom brings Nathan when she comes to pick Seth up. It's my first experience of displaced affinity - when the guy you think should like you doesn't, and the guy you think shouldn't like you does. Selective invisibility and displaced affinity are as paralyzing as objectified hypervisibility. With time and crushes I became convinced that it's dangerous to like anyone; anyone I liked was certain not to like me, but whomever I felt I didn't like would be certain to like me. I interpreted this as not being good enough, ever. I learned that majority American womanhood means that everyone disinterestedly checks out your sex appeal but nobody wants you unless you'd be a good accent to their own appeal. (Not so different from Niger after all. But I was too young to understand that.)
I spent years feeling confused because in Africa men wouldn't stop looking at me, but in America, they wouldn't start. My failed attempts to cope with the conflict of my African overdesirability and American underdesirability are a story all their own. Feeling violated by men's eyes and robbed of my childhood. Feeling invisible to every boy I liked and completely inadequate. Hiding behind my body veil, my owl glasses, my brideprice, and my assertions that my education/hobbies/culture/religion left no room for men in my life. Afraid of crushes and attraction because I associated them with not being good enough to be noticed and with vulnerability. Relishing when Dad could accompany me on errands, or begging one of you boys to go to the market with me when I had to grocery shop. Throwing a tantrum and refusing to wear a trainer bra because in my mind it meant I was surrendering to womanhood and all the powerlessness I associated with being seen as female - as nothing but female - but being unable to formulate this fear into words until I was out of college. Finally, never suspecting that my failure to attract the guys I liked (always the visibly smart, confident, outgoing, funny, leader-types) was not because I was inadequate, but because I saw myself as inadequate. Putting so much effort into self-improvement routines that would hopefully convince me and others that I was worth seeing as desirable, as human, worth being seen at all. Anorexia, bulimia, meal-skipping, veganism, obsessive workout routines, 1000-calorie-elliptical sessions in the gym at TIU.
Many majority American men live in a priveleged world of sexual narcissism that is a spin-off of our pragmatic culture. Americans live busy, fast-paced, crowded lives where we maintain our personal space by minimizing engagement with the world outside our heads unless getting what we want forces us to interact. (If you don't believe me, walk through the grocery store and count how many people you meet. Attempt to make eye contact with all of them and keep track of how many times you succeed and of those, how many people appear uncomfortable or apologetic for the eye contact. Text me your observations; I'm curious whether I'd get more or less eye contact than a handsome guy your age does.) American culture conditions its young to prioritize relationships after money, jobs, travel, food... On the sexual level, porn sites, graphic movies, over-exposing fashions, "hook-ups" and one-night stands, and digital communication help eliminate all intimacy from sexual gratification. Women competing with this are so hungry to be noticed that they will date or be engaged infinitely. In the US, selective invisibility is just how people function. This explains the current US reality - to many Americans, most people they walk past will never be "enough" to be "worth" being seen. It's not a personal problem for us - it's a problem in them. But I didn't know that.
It didn't help that for a while Mom and Dad - unaware and just sincerely trying to raise us right, bless their hearts - bought into the propaganda from Vision Forum, ATI, Keepers at Home, Michael and Debi Pearl, and others like them. I believe they meant well, that they actually believed what they taught, and that many of their ideas came from true principles. But the patriarchy they preached and the matriarchy they practiced have - pardon my French - bigtime screwed up the male-female relationships of our generation of homeschoolers. They squelched women into watered-down whispering versions of themselves so that the men won't feel threatened. They shoved men into abstracted, arrogant intellectualism that is easier to fake than the kind of leadership their version of patriarchy demands. We didn't need to puff ourselves up or shrivel down. We needed to build open, honest, trusting relationships with the people we love so that we could develop healthy self-confidence and mature self-expression. Now I see homeschooled boys angry at their mothers, emotionally distant from or even timid of women, attempting to hide how lonely it is to be the authoritative leaders they were raised to be, terrified to pursue relationships (and who wouldn't be when the girl has been trained not to encourage and her parents are peering over her shoulder?). I see homeschooled girls running away from home or turning up with unwanted pregnancies, contracted into emotionally-deprived "courtships" or marriages, trying to hide their beautiful bodies under jean skirts and billowy button-downs, heartbroken over crushes because it wasn't their place to "pursue" the guy by appearing even mildly interested in him... the list goes on. You guys hear the stories too. Maybe you also have friends who are broken this way. A lot of us turned out fine, or at least resilient, but so many of us are conflicted. (Are you? We've talked a little about this, but only in criticizing the movement. How did it actually affect you?)
Dehumanization is dehumanization, whether or not anyone lays subordinating hands on you. And who wants to ground their gender identity in being dehumanized? So I saw womanhood as victimization and my personhood as inferior, powerless. If I was good enough to truly have value, men wouldn't just be able to take things from me or dismiss me with their eyes while I sat helplessly by - would they? But I wasn't just a victim. You'd think that of all people I'd have been sympathetic to Seth. But no, I ignored him most of the time. And then occasionally I paid him a little attention - enough to keep him strung up crushing on my unpredictability. And I did this over and over again without acknowledging what I was doing until last year. I learned in Africa that if you play the game better than the men, you can gain power and can get things you want from them without losing anything yourself. I learned to flirt, to body-language-suggest, to manipulate, and to act innocent about it all. When you compartmentalize your emotions, you can be everybody's whore and they still won't know you at all and you won't have to feel guilty for living to someone's expectations only or for devaluing them in your mind. It doesn't fix your powerlessness, your inability to say what you really want to say or to demand the basic human respect and love you crave. But it makes you feel like you still have a little bit of power in this big wide world where your womb/hormonal activity belongs to God and the pro-life movement, where your heart belongs to one - potential, unknown - man, where your time and career life belongs to your husband, where men can steal your humanity and break your heart by looking at you - or not looking at you. That sentence is victim-talk. I don't believe it all the way anymore. But now you know what it might sound like inside a "good girl's" head when she manipulates and strings you out.
Four years ago I spent a summer supervising teenage staff at a youth camp. I shared the job with a very dominant male co-supervisor. We were extremely dysfunctional, playing out our gender roles and miscommunicating. At the end of the summer I broke down crying about my miserable relationship with him while talking to an older MK who was also working at camp. She listened gently and then she said, "What you don't redeem about your past, you will repeat." And she added, "You have to find your voice to redeem it."
At the time I didn't understand. But I get it now.
The year I was an RA I wrote myself up for bingeing and purging and turned myself in for counseling for the eating disorder. When I stopped abusing eating and exercise to cope with anxiety, I had to confront the flashbacks and the anxiety triggers. With time I started apologizing to the guys I had previously manipulated for attention. Then I decided I was no longer going to watch a boy I liked hopelessly from the far side of the room or live in the wallpaper of his world. I started liking that I have curves. I started seeing God as someone who could be good because He wanted to be, not just because He was trying to manipulate or dominate people (Rousseau was right when he remarked that we make God in our own images; no wonder I didn't like God). And I figured out why I haven't fallen in love. "You can't love her, because you can't give what you don't have." (Fireproof)
What did I really want all along? What would it have taken to convince me that I could embrace being a woman? I wanted to be certain that a woman is a person who possesses strength, beauty, and dignity. She desires fearlessly and she doesn't fear being desired. She doesn't conform to expectations, but she is kind. She is fearlessly sincere about her thoughts and desires. She is able to fall in love because she trusts. She is an equal, assertive party in all her relationships. She exists respectfully outside all the cultures and all the -archies, matriarchy and patriarchy and monarchy and anarchy and hierarchy and oligarchy, those long words that distract us from their meaning: power distribution. She doesn't construct her life around maintaining manmade divisions of power. She doesn't take sides in intersex conflicts because teeter-totter solutions hurt everybody. She has wise boundaries - not frightened walls - and she emotionally engages with God and others. She has a voice and she knows it.
I love the words of these songs - some of my favorites - as you no doubt know from hearing me play and sing them on repeat. But look at them... the longing to just be known for who you are, to be seen and recognized, to honestly speak what's inside you - I love these words:
"And I don't want the world to see me
cause I don't think that they'd understand:
when everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am" (Iris, GooGoo Dolls)
"Saw your face in the crowd, I called out your name, you don't hear a sound-
I keep tracing your steps, each move that you make,
wish I could read what goes through your mind,
wish you would touch me with the colors of your life....
if I was invisible, wait, I already am"
(Invisible, Clay Aiken)
"You can be amazin'; you can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug;
you can be the outcast; can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love
or you can start speaking out.
Nothing's gonna hurt you the way the words do when they settle 'neath your skin -
kept on the inside, no sunlight, sometimes a shadow wins.
But I wonder what would happen if you
say what you want to say, and let the words fall out, honestly.
I wanna see you be brave" (Brave, Sara Bareilles)
"Your telescope eyes see everything clearly;
my vision is blurred but I know what I heard, echoing all around.
While I am tuning you in, you are deciphering me -
not such a mystery, not such a faint and far away sound.
Oh can you see the gravity falling, calling us home?
Oh did you see the stars colliding, shining just to show
we belong?" (Deciphering Me, Brooke Fraser)
So what do I want to say? Well... I think I said most of it. I want to say why I couldn't embrace being a woman so that I can come to terms with that part of my identity. The braver and more honest I get, the more I can envision the woman I can be. She's not a victim and she's not a perpetrator. She is trusting but not naive. She loves and she is loved. She knows she has something she can offer and she offers it when she so desires, not when she feels obligated. She can know God intimately because she feels safe asking "what pleases You?" and not just "what do I have to do?" She's the part of the teacup story I haven't told because it wasn't the part I lived in for years.
I sit on the mat staring at our guest, still wordless. Our guest says he is leaving now, and Dad gets up to walk him to the compound gate. I trail along, staring at the canvas bag that is carrying my teacup away. Near the gate I feel desperate... for justice... to defy that smirking man... for my teacup. I slide my hand into Dad's, drawing courage from the way he closes his big fingers around it, tugging for attention. "Daddy," I say, "he put my teacup in his bag and I want it back." Dad laughs and asks the guest something. The man looks at me and then he pulls the teacup out of his bag and hands it to Dad, who gives it back to me. I clutch it in my free hand and meet the man's eyes as he says something to my dad. The man leaves and I walk back to the house with Dad. "What did he say?" I ask. Dad looks slightly amused. "He said that my daughter is unusual in how she trusts me, that most children wouldn't have said anything. "
Unusual in how she is loved, trusts, says something.
That, right there, is what it comes down to... I think.
Next time I get to talk with Dad I'll finish the story. I'll tell him he doesn't have to remember but that man eyed me up and I was glad I was safe with my dad. I'll tell him that sometimes Ruthanna and Sarah will be eyed up but not know how to ask for justice. When they seem angry or afraid or wordless... sometimes they might need someone to ask them about it. You can be that person too, to them or to other girls. For that matter, so can I. And I'll tell Ruthanna and Sarah that they don't have to just take the visual gropings or feel devalued by the diverted eyes.
This is the part of the story I want to live in. I will be unusual in how I trust and I will say something, not to react, but to love things that matter. Men... Job... Niger and beyond... Whatever. I won't be a victim of people or circumstances anymore. I'm not waiting for anyone to look or look away. I will be the protagonist in my own story, I will tell the whole story, I will tell it honestly and not just the way I'm expected to, and then I'll own it. I hope.
Three letters left.
Sai enjima, Tabitha
Tab & Boys with Grandpa (1997)
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These letters are getting progressively more cathartic... and harder to write. Hence why it's taken so long for me to post another. At twilight I sit on the cinderblock wall around our porch, scuffing my flipflops in the film of sand on the tiles. Mom comes to join me and I open my mouth and out pours this cascade of frustration and fear, of anger that I feel I can't escape expectations even when I am "home" in the missionary community, of surprise that delving into my grief is unearthing so much anger for me. I am thankful for her listening.
In my last letter I wrote about the conflict I feel between my ability to deliver to others' expectations, my sense of powerlessness, and my desire for sincere self-expression. Much of my anger is about those three themes. That conflict is central to why I've never been able to fall in love. I am swimming in this conflict during my visit to Niger, rediscovering what I thought womanhood was and why I thought it. Africa, America... I have lived my whole life afraid of womanhood because I thought that to be a woman was to be a victim of how others rated your physical appeal; a voiceless, helpless, dehumanized sex object. There was no way I would embrace that. I thought that being a woman was living your life around three principles: objectified visibility, selective invisibility, and displaced affinity. I can remember when I first discovered these principles so much more clearly here in Niger than I could remember in the States.
I'm three years old, shifting to rub the itchy impressions the palm frond mat has left on my dusty legs, glancing up at my father in his white tunic and red beanie. He often sits here in our Tahoua yard under the shade of the thorny desert-date tree, studying Fulfulde with his language interpreter. Today he is entertaining a Wodaabe visitor from the bush, a middle-aged man I don't recognize. I've brought my plastic tea set to play in the shade near them. Dad gets up and goes inside for something, leaving me outside with the strange man. I have a strange sensation and turn to find the man staring at me. I don't understand the concept of sexual objectification yet - nor should any three year old girl - but I know that his look makes me feel invaded. I stare at him. He takes my white teacup, slides it into his canvas bag, and smirks superiorly at me. He can take things away from me. I don't know what to do. I am paralyzed, no longer able to play, sitting on the mat looking at him, wanting to tell my dad when he returns but somehow unable to explain. This was my initiation to my African experience of being female: objectified hypervisibility. In fact, it probably set the foundation for my concept of womanhood. In Africa everybody saw my body, but nobody saw me because they only saw what they wanted to see. My womanhood belonged to their smirking faces and their violating eyes.
Nigerien culture centers on relationships. Even their status symbols imply relationship. Dating or doing the daughter of the only white man in town would have been a big status move. Nigerien culture is also realistic. In the absence of food - let alone porn - a woman's natural beauty and indicators of fertility are valued. I've always been a curvy girl. Hence, even though I was always a commodity, at least I was a hot one.
So what about my American experience of being female? Flip side of the coin. I went from getting everyone's unwanted attention to getting almost no attention.
I'm five years old and my dirty-blond hair brushes the sleeves of my Christmas-plaid dress as I peer over my shoulder, past the other kids in the Hershey Free Homeschool Co-op Choir, looking for the tall boy in the back row. I had little-girl crushes on Noah and Joseph Gallop throughout my childhood, because they were the only unrelated boys I knew. But Lance was my first real little-girl crush. I don't remember anything about him, except that he was tall and had dark brown hair and never saw me. I used to look at him sometimes when we sang and feel perplexed that I always looked at him and he never looked at me. Crazy that of all my childhood memories, this is one of the few that haunt me. Sixteen years later, during my first serious college crush, I had frequent flashbacks to the Christmas-plaid dress, the homeschool choir, and the first boy who couldn't see me. This is my first experience of selective invisibility - when the person who can't see you is the one you really want to be seen by.
When I'm ten years old, I discover that selective invisibility has a kissing cousin. I sit next to Nathan in Co-op Watercolor class, painting a toucan. Nathan compliments my use of colors and I feel warm and happy all over. I've had a crush on Nathan for three months. He's the reason I took Chess class, too. Nathan is nice to me, but I'm just part of the wallpaper in his world. Ironically, his younger brother Seth has a crush on me. Seth is one of Peter's friends, and he comes over to our house and follows me around while I hope that Seth's mom brings Nathan when she comes to pick Seth up. It's my first experience of displaced affinity - when the guy you think should like you doesn't, and the guy you think shouldn't like you does. Selective invisibility and displaced affinity are as paralyzing as objectified hypervisibility. With time and crushes I became convinced that it's dangerous to like anyone; anyone I liked was certain not to like me, but whomever I felt I didn't like would be certain to like me. I interpreted this as not being good enough, ever. I learned that majority American womanhood means that everyone disinterestedly checks out your sex appeal but nobody wants you unless you'd be a good accent to their own appeal. (Not so different from Niger after all. But I was too young to understand that.)
I spent years feeling confused because in Africa men wouldn't stop looking at me, but in America, they wouldn't start. My failed attempts to cope with the conflict of my African overdesirability and American underdesirability are a story all their own. Feeling violated by men's eyes and robbed of my childhood. Feeling invisible to every boy I liked and completely inadequate. Hiding behind my body veil, my owl glasses, my brideprice, and my assertions that my education/hobbies/culture/religion left no room for men in my life. Afraid of crushes and attraction because I associated them with not being good enough to be noticed and with vulnerability. Relishing when Dad could accompany me on errands, or begging one of you boys to go to the market with me when I had to grocery shop. Throwing a tantrum and refusing to wear a trainer bra because in my mind it meant I was surrendering to womanhood and all the powerlessness I associated with being seen as female - as nothing but female - but being unable to formulate this fear into words until I was out of college. Finally, never suspecting that my failure to attract the guys I liked (always the visibly smart, confident, outgoing, funny, leader-types) was not because I was inadequate, but because I saw myself as inadequate. Putting so much effort into self-improvement routines that would hopefully convince me and others that I was worth seeing as desirable, as human, worth being seen at all. Anorexia, bulimia, meal-skipping, veganism, obsessive workout routines, 1000-calorie-elliptical sessions in the gym at TIU.
Many majority American men live in a priveleged world of sexual narcissism that is a spin-off of our pragmatic culture. Americans live busy, fast-paced, crowded lives where we maintain our personal space by minimizing engagement with the world outside our heads unless getting what we want forces us to interact. (If you don't believe me, walk through the grocery store and count how many people you meet. Attempt to make eye contact with all of them and keep track of how many times you succeed and of those, how many people appear uncomfortable or apologetic for the eye contact. Text me your observations; I'm curious whether I'd get more or less eye contact than a handsome guy your age does.) American culture conditions its young to prioritize relationships after money, jobs, travel, food... On the sexual level, porn sites, graphic movies, over-exposing fashions, "hook-ups" and one-night stands, and digital communication help eliminate all intimacy from sexual gratification. Women competing with this are so hungry to be noticed that they will date or be engaged infinitely. In the US, selective invisibility is just how people function. This explains the current US reality - to many Americans, most people they walk past will never be "enough" to be "worth" being seen. It's not a personal problem for us - it's a problem in them. But I didn't know that.
It didn't help that for a while Mom and Dad - unaware and just sincerely trying to raise us right, bless their hearts - bought into the propaganda from Vision Forum, ATI, Keepers at Home, Michael and Debi Pearl, and others like them. I believe they meant well, that they actually believed what they taught, and that many of their ideas came from true principles. But the patriarchy they preached and the matriarchy they practiced have - pardon my French - bigtime screwed up the male-female relationships of our generation of homeschoolers. They squelched women into watered-down whispering versions of themselves so that the men won't feel threatened. They shoved men into abstracted, arrogant intellectualism that is easier to fake than the kind of leadership their version of patriarchy demands. We didn't need to puff ourselves up or shrivel down. We needed to build open, honest, trusting relationships with the people we love so that we could develop healthy self-confidence and mature self-expression. Now I see homeschooled boys angry at their mothers, emotionally distant from or even timid of women, attempting to hide how lonely it is to be the authoritative leaders they were raised to be, terrified to pursue relationships (and who wouldn't be when the girl has been trained not to encourage and her parents are peering over her shoulder?). I see homeschooled girls running away from home or turning up with unwanted pregnancies, contracted into emotionally-deprived "courtships" or marriages, trying to hide their beautiful bodies under jean skirts and billowy button-downs, heartbroken over crushes because it wasn't their place to "pursue" the guy by appearing even mildly interested in him... the list goes on. You guys hear the stories too. Maybe you also have friends who are broken this way. A lot of us turned out fine, or at least resilient, but so many of us are conflicted. (Are you? We've talked a little about this, but only in criticizing the movement. How did it actually affect you?)
Dehumanization is dehumanization, whether or not anyone lays subordinating hands on you. And who wants to ground their gender identity in being dehumanized? So I saw womanhood as victimization and my personhood as inferior, powerless. If I was good enough to truly have value, men wouldn't just be able to take things from me or dismiss me with their eyes while I sat helplessly by - would they? But I wasn't just a victim. You'd think that of all people I'd have been sympathetic to Seth. But no, I ignored him most of the time. And then occasionally I paid him a little attention - enough to keep him strung up crushing on my unpredictability. And I did this over and over again without acknowledging what I was doing until last year. I learned in Africa that if you play the game better than the men, you can gain power and can get things you want from them without losing anything yourself. I learned to flirt, to body-language-suggest, to manipulate, and to act innocent about it all. When you compartmentalize your emotions, you can be everybody's whore and they still won't know you at all and you won't have to feel guilty for living to someone's expectations only or for devaluing them in your mind. It doesn't fix your powerlessness, your inability to say what you really want to say or to demand the basic human respect and love you crave. But it makes you feel like you still have a little bit of power in this big wide world where your womb/hormonal activity belongs to God and the pro-life movement, where your heart belongs to one - potential, unknown - man, where your time and career life belongs to your husband, where men can steal your humanity and break your heart by looking at you - or not looking at you. That sentence is victim-talk. I don't believe it all the way anymore. But now you know what it might sound like inside a "good girl's" head when she manipulates and strings you out.
Four years ago I spent a summer supervising teenage staff at a youth camp. I shared the job with a very dominant male co-supervisor. We were extremely dysfunctional, playing out our gender roles and miscommunicating. At the end of the summer I broke down crying about my miserable relationship with him while talking to an older MK who was also working at camp. She listened gently and then she said, "What you don't redeem about your past, you will repeat." And she added, "You have to find your voice to redeem it."
At the time I didn't understand. But I get it now.
The year I was an RA I wrote myself up for bingeing and purging and turned myself in for counseling for the eating disorder. When I stopped abusing eating and exercise to cope with anxiety, I had to confront the flashbacks and the anxiety triggers. With time I started apologizing to the guys I had previously manipulated for attention. Then I decided I was no longer going to watch a boy I liked hopelessly from the far side of the room or live in the wallpaper of his world. I started liking that I have curves. I started seeing God as someone who could be good because He wanted to be, not just because He was trying to manipulate or dominate people (Rousseau was right when he remarked that we make God in our own images; no wonder I didn't like God). And I figured out why I haven't fallen in love. "You can't love her, because you can't give what you don't have." (Fireproof)
What did I really want all along? What would it have taken to convince me that I could embrace being a woman? I wanted to be certain that a woman is a person who possesses strength, beauty, and dignity. She desires fearlessly and she doesn't fear being desired. She doesn't conform to expectations, but she is kind. She is fearlessly sincere about her thoughts and desires. She is able to fall in love because she trusts. She is an equal, assertive party in all her relationships. She exists respectfully outside all the cultures and all the -archies, matriarchy and patriarchy and monarchy and anarchy and hierarchy and oligarchy, those long words that distract us from their meaning: power distribution. She doesn't construct her life around maintaining manmade divisions of power. She doesn't take sides in intersex conflicts because teeter-totter solutions hurt everybody. She has wise boundaries - not frightened walls - and she emotionally engages with God and others. She has a voice and she knows it.
I love the words of these songs - some of my favorites - as you no doubt know from hearing me play and sing them on repeat. But look at them... the longing to just be known for who you are, to be seen and recognized, to honestly speak what's inside you - I love these words:
"And I don't want the world to see me
cause I don't think that they'd understand:
when everything's made to be broken
I just want you to know who I am" (Iris, GooGoo Dolls)
"Saw your face in the crowd, I called out your name, you don't hear a sound-
I keep tracing your steps, each move that you make,
wish I could read what goes through your mind,
wish you would touch me with the colors of your life....
if I was invisible, wait, I already am"
(Invisible, Clay Aiken)
"You can be amazin'; you can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug;
you can be the outcast; can be the backlash of somebody's lack of love
or you can start speaking out.
Nothing's gonna hurt you the way the words do when they settle 'neath your skin -
kept on the inside, no sunlight, sometimes a shadow wins.
But I wonder what would happen if you
say what you want to say, and let the words fall out, honestly.
I wanna see you be brave" (Brave, Sara Bareilles)
"Your telescope eyes see everything clearly;
my vision is blurred but I know what I heard, echoing all around.
While I am tuning you in, you are deciphering me -
not such a mystery, not such a faint and far away sound.
Oh can you see the gravity falling, calling us home?
Oh did you see the stars colliding, shining just to show
we belong?" (Deciphering Me, Brooke Fraser)
So what do I want to say? Well... I think I said most of it. I want to say why I couldn't embrace being a woman so that I can come to terms with that part of my identity. The braver and more honest I get, the more I can envision the woman I can be. She's not a victim and she's not a perpetrator. She is trusting but not naive. She loves and she is loved. She knows she has something she can offer and she offers it when she so desires, not when she feels obligated. She can know God intimately because she feels safe asking "what pleases You?" and not just "what do I have to do?" She's the part of the teacup story I haven't told because it wasn't the part I lived in for years.
I sit on the mat staring at our guest, still wordless. Our guest says he is leaving now, and Dad gets up to walk him to the compound gate. I trail along, staring at the canvas bag that is carrying my teacup away. Near the gate I feel desperate... for justice... to defy that smirking man... for my teacup. I slide my hand into Dad's, drawing courage from the way he closes his big fingers around it, tugging for attention. "Daddy," I say, "he put my teacup in his bag and I want it back." Dad laughs and asks the guest something. The man looks at me and then he pulls the teacup out of his bag and hands it to Dad, who gives it back to me. I clutch it in my free hand and meet the man's eyes as he says something to my dad. The man leaves and I walk back to the house with Dad. "What did he say?" I ask. Dad looks slightly amused. "He said that my daughter is unusual in how she trusts me, that most children wouldn't have said anything. "
Unusual in how she is loved, trusts, says something.
That, right there, is what it comes down to... I think.
Next time I get to talk with Dad I'll finish the story. I'll tell him he doesn't have to remember but that man eyed me up and I was glad I was safe with my dad. I'll tell him that sometimes Ruthanna and Sarah will be eyed up but not know how to ask for justice. When they seem angry or afraid or wordless... sometimes they might need someone to ask them about it. You can be that person too, to them or to other girls. For that matter, so can I. And I'll tell Ruthanna and Sarah that they don't have to just take the visual gropings or feel devalued by the diverted eyes.
This is the part of the story I want to live in. I will be unusual in how I trust and I will say something, not to react, but to love things that matter. Men... Job... Niger and beyond... Whatever. I won't be a victim of people or circumstances anymore. I'm not waiting for anyone to look or look away. I will be the protagonist in my own story, I will tell the whole story, I will tell it honestly and not just the way I'm expected to, and then I'll own it. I hope.
Three letters left.
Sai enjima, Tabitha
Tab & Boys with Grandpa (1997)
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