Journaling prompt: Your moment of rebirth

What was the double-bind that first freed your mind?

Last week, I interviewed the writer Lauren Salles about her experiences with, among other things, obsessive-compulsive disorder and purity culture, and the ways in which these two topics intertwine. As Lauren shared in her interview, it was during her early dating years that she realized that the rules she’d been taught to follow were really just a list of double standards, applied to women but not to men:

Specifically, the “men of god” that I dated let me down in big ways. They led me on, broke my trust, and again made me feel like I was doing something wrong. 

Yet as a woman, there was always something to fix about myself…Women were, and still are, the cause of man’s downfall. 

For a religion that often claims that we are ‘saved by grace’ and that we don’t have to earn god’s love, there sure are a lot of rules. Especially for women. 

There’s a happy ending to this story: for Salles, these disappointments paved her path to greater freedom, in her mind and in her spiritual life. In many of the interviews about initiations I’ve done, in fact, there’s a moment like this, in which the interviewee describes a dawning realization that the rules they’ve been taught don’t apply to everyone equally. Therefore, if they continue to follow them, they’ll be collaborating in their own oppression. To attempt to transcend these “rules” will come with consequences, but so will continuing to silence the voices inside that crave justice, and truth.

Faced with a newfound understanding of the double-bind we are in, it is inspiring to see how many of us make the difficult and even dangerous choice to get free.

For Molly Bolton, for example, this meant calling off a wedding after invites had already gone out; for Das Rush, this meant severing ties with loved ones who were less-than-accepting of their trans identity; for Jess Van Wyen, this meant leaving the Mormon Church behind, as well as the worldview that her suffering was a “test” of her faith.

This kind of choice re-shapes our lives, and the lives of the people around us.

I think that many people who read here have had this kind of moment— what Paolo Freire would call a “rebirth” moment. A moment when, in the depths of a moment of oppression, our ability to create and resist suddenly surges back into our bodies, magnified by the wise actions and words of the allies around us, and change once again becomes possible.

Below, I offer my own journal entry on this topic — on an early moment of“rebirth” — and then invite you to try this yourself with a prompt below.

If you’d like to share some of your own insights in the comments, I’d love that! It’s also OK if you don’t show your journal to anyone at all, or even if you burn the page after this. Reflective writing is inherently useful because it is healing, even if the writing is only for you.

The power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn. And that rebirth can occur—not gratuitously, but in and through the struggle for liberation. — Paolo Friere

A mural snapped last spring in Asheville, NC.

My story of rebirth

My story of rebirth begins as my first birth began: with my mother.

Like me, my mother is deeply imperfect, but she tries to be good. Marriage felt oppressive to her, so she divorced my dad when I was ten, but single parenthood was no picnic either. She is a social worker who has worked her entire life to serve and protect people with disabilities, and this choice made it very difficult for her to also support two children on a very small salary, with very little extra time to spare to earn more. She was dedicated to my getting a good education, but like many lower-middle-class parents, she had to choose between so-so housing in a decent public school district, or more-decent housing in a so-so district.

So when I was in middle school, we moved into a small house at the edges of a district she deemed good enough. It remained half-unfurnished, because we could not afford to furnish it. But I bonded quickly with deadpan teachers like Mrs. Jones, who sounded exactly like the cartoon Daria when she spoke, and dressed similarly, and Mr. Lillywhite, a retired military guy who was always willing to challenge me with extra credit projects. In their spaces, I felt seen and heard and valued for exactly who I was. For a time, my mother felt quite vindicated in her life choices. See? Everything is going to be fine.

However, the honeymoon with this school district came to an abrupt end when the weather got hot in spring. 

The first spiky daffodil, emerging in spring.

That year, I was attempting to run for school office, hopeful that a nerdy writer like me could become powerful politically and socially by rising to the position of class secretary. But my seventh grade campaign imploded the day I wore the wrong shorts.

Our school in northern Utah had a dress code very similar to the one described here, with a length limit for shorts and other gendered prohibitions on clothing. Mine were khaki, dowdy items for which my mother and I had scoured the local mall for hours in an attempt to adhere to the code, but alas. At lunch, one of the Front Office Ladies summoned me to the front of the whole crowded cafeteria, whipped out a ruler, and measured the length from hem to knee. She declared they were not in fact long enough, and brought me into the office. Having never met me before, she then made the mistake of calling my mother at work. 

So began this moment of rebirth, for me and my mother. 

The dress code protocol then, as in many schools to this day, is to tell the parent of the offending student to either come pick up their child or to bring them a change of clothes.

Instead, my mother told The Front Office Lady, essentially, where she could stick her ruler. 

“My daughter is an honor roll student,” she said. “My daughter is beloved and respected by her teachers. My daughter is currently running for school government. And yet you are telling me that the most important thing about her is the shorts that she's wearing. You are telling me that because she has chosen to wear the ‘wrong’ clothing, clothing that I purchased for her and deemed appropriate as her mother, she is no longer entitled to her right to an education. If that is what you have said to her already, so be it. But I am not going to come and pick her up. Nor am I going to bring her a change of clothes. I am still at work and so is she. So you may as well send her back to class.” 

I don't remember if they did send me back. I do remember walking home in my offending shorts, awash with humiliation and bewilderment. I had tried to follow the rules. Yet that did not keep me safe. How could this be?

I do remember sitting with my mom that night and discussing the matter with her on the back steps of our home, as she flicked her cigarette ashes into the overgrown lawn in irritation. I remember that she was enraged, more enraged than I was. I still didn’t understand why, then.

As noted above, my mother did not have a plethora of other places to put me. Perhaps she too had felt paralyzed and trapped, at earlier points in her life, in moments just like these, under pressure to simply conform and stay quiet. But perhaps she also understood, as a fresh divorcee and a disability rights advocate, that the system of rules was permanently rigged, and thus permanently suspect. Under such a system, there could never be any permanent peace. For anyone.

So, my mother leveled with me. She told me what she had told the administration that day. She reminded me of my accomplishments, and of the adults who loved me. She told me for the first time, though not the last, that the current shape of my body and the clothing I chose to wear were not as important in terms of determining my worth as my actual ethical character, and the ideas in my head. She made it clear to me that this was true even if the grownups at school were trying to teach me otherwise.

I wish I could say that my mother’s revisions to the story the Front Office Lady told me about my worth led to my own rebirth as a feminist in a way that was instantaneous and complete. It did not. At least not right away.

First, some prior part of me had to die.

I did not win the school election that year, and the sting of that spring loss throbbed inside me all summer long. I associated my rejection by the student body with the objectification of my physical body. It was difficult for me to go back to the cafeteria the following year, so often I ate in the library instead. My friendships suffered. My grades tanked. If someone like Front Office Lady could so easily come along and strip my dignity from me, why work hard to have anything else to lose?  

However, seeing clearly now what lay ahead for me if we stayed in this school district, I was able to better embrace my mother’s decision the following year to cut her losses and move back to her native state of New York — a place which was and remains far more liberal in its regard for women’s bodies and agency than Utah.

Two years later, I went on to run again for student office in my New York high school, and this time I won.

For good measure, I was also voted the prom queen during my senior year, and given a sparkly tiara to wear for the night. I was proud. But I was surprised to find that it did not matter to me as much as it might have. Tiaras were given to girls who followed the rules. As such, tiaras could be taken away.

What mattered to me was the handful of college acceptance letters I had received by then to some of the country’s best journalism schools, sitting at home on my counter. These offers could not be so easily rescinded.

Just as my mother had taught me, what I wore was not as important as what I thought. 

Studying and working in journalism, for me, became one way that I could name things for others the way things had been named for me, by my mother. I could say what was wrong, and how people were resisting it. Becoming a middle school teacher like Jones and Lillywhite was another such way.

Now, I live to see these rebirth moments in all of the people I encounter as readers and students.

It hurts for me to see anyone’s oppression, my oppression, our oppression — which remains visceral and constant under white supremacy and patriarchy — as it must have hurt my mother to see mine. But it gives me life to see this same spirit of fight arise in the people I love, like new seeds rising from the ashes.

The hands of some of the teachers I’ve helped to train in mindfulness, SEL and social justice via Breathe 4 Change.

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THIS MONTH’S PROMPT:

How was your power to create and transform first thwarted?

Who gave you new words to describe what was happening?

What prior part of you did you lose in the gaining of this knowledge?

What new part of you emerged on the other side?

How did you know you had been reborn?

How did you learn to create and transform in a new way?

How has this changed the way you show up to the struggle for collective liberation now?

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