One morning while traveling I had a conversation with two older white men at the counter of a small-town Tennessee coffee shop. The wall said: “C.O.F.F.E.E.: Christ Offers Forgiveness for Everyone Everywhere”. This made me a little suspicious, made me wonder for a moment where their feet were planted on this political spectrum.
They asked me why I was in town. I stayed true to myself. I said, “I was at a women’s empowerment event last night.” One of the men said, “Empowerment, yeah there’s a lot of that these days. Everyone needs empowerment. He needs empowerment,” dryly pointing to the other old white man. The man behind the counter laughed.
I tried to let the part of me that tenses up relax. I tried to not project feelings on them or immediately place them in a box: friend or foe. I tried to not pinpoint if they were Trump supporters or where they stand on this issue or that. I just tried to listen and to tell my truth. I didn’t bare my soul to them, but I engaged in conversation and asked questions–just basic human questions to get a small sense for a person. I learned that one of the men had spent a summer in my hometown mapping the whole city.
Instead of shutting down, I opened up. It felt like a big, loud exhale. I left with a memory of connection rather than one of distancing.
The simple stories we tell
My dear friend Mandy issued a call to action several months ago that resonated deeply with me:
“Let’s stop telling simple stories about people, period…Are your life and the things that happen in it simple? Are you simple? No. And neither is anybody else. ”
Friends, we are tired. We are tired of holding up the cardboard-cutout versions of ourselves. We are tired of telling simple stories about each other and ourselves, stories that sound like:
You are racist, and I am not.
I work hard, and they are lazy.
I am complex, and she is simple.
I am good, and he is bad.
I am right, and you are wrong.
We keep ourselves comfortable when we make something either this or that. We put people in their neat piles. It is too easy, and it is not true. We are ready to push ourselves into a three-dimensional world.
The distance that my fear wedges
I’m guilty of it. I look at someone and stereotype them–their clothing, their age, their gender, the color of their skin– and I think “That person probably voted for Trump.” And even if they have smiled at me, even if they have made cute faces at my son, I all of a sudden put a space between that person and myself. I am wary.
Can I trust him? How friendly should I be? Do they hate people I love? Do they support people I know losing health care? Do they want refugee children denied from this country? Do they fly a Confederate flag? Do they brush off Trump’s sexually abusive comments as “locker room talk”? Are they sleeping comfortably in the dead of our winter?
I create distance. I respond from a place of fear and skepticism. I stay away. And this is not just with strangers. I’m staying away from people who have been a part of my life for years. Because everything feels shaky, and I feel like people I know have become strangers, too.
The stories that brought us here
My heart tells me that I can’t write off anyone. I can’t sign off on the story that I write for them in my mind. I don’t have to be best friends with them or invite them into my life or be vulnerable with them. I don’t have to agree with them or excuse them when they hurt others, but I can’t just write them off categorically. My heart tells me that I need to appreciate them as complex beings with a layered story, a history of lingering hurt and facets of pride that brought them to this moment. Something tells me to appreciate that they are bigger than the place where they stand in this moment.
I joined a dialogue group to practice deep listening and understanding with strangers. It doesn’t feel so personal as talking to family and friends. I practiced listening to their stories and reserving judgment. I practiced listening with curiosity and compassion. Slowly I feel my fear slipping off of me. Slowly I feel myself resting in the presence of a person like I did in that coffee shop with the two white men. As I feel humanity returning to the people around me, I feel it returning more deeply to myself, too.
I want people to understand the story of what brought me here to this moment. Shouldn’t I give others that same freedom?
How I was shaped for this moment
In high school I thought I wasn’t as smart as the people around me. I was friends with numerous people who made perfect scores on standardized tests, and my best friends stood up in front of peers to win awards for Speech and Debate. I listened to the way they debated the latest news, discussed what we were studying in Comparative Politics, or disputed each other’s answers on calculus homework.
Their ideas moved back and forth too fast for me to follow. All I could do was process their words. There was no pause for me to reflect and ask myself, “How do I feel about this?” What I heard was the confidence with which they crafted their arguments. It was a confidence that didn’t flow through my veins, didn’t power my brain.
For years I said I had a “fluid reality”. This meant that I could very easily put my own views aside and entertain the opinions or experiences of another. I didn’t see myself as being extremely committed to many viewpoints. I was very open to having my mind changed. This served me well in some ways and hurt me in others.
My fluid reality was composed of many different substances. One: I was self-conscious and didn’t know myself. Two: I lacked assertiveness and was very accommodating, even desperately people-pleasing. Three: I had a deep interest in understanding people and listened to understand what they said beneath their words. Four: I have a strong imagination, and my empathy served as an arm of my creativity. Five: I was figuring out “Who am I?” and wanted to be open to all the ideas the world offered.
Then over four years I had my whole life changed by a boyfriend who learned he could manipulate me to do things that were more in his interest than mine. He emotionally abused me. He gradually got me to give up more and more things that I valued and deserved, like my freedom to choose and see my friends, my freedom to decide how I spent my time, my freedom to decide what to do with my body.
After years of emotional and sexual abuse, I re-evaluated. I started to see my fluid reality as a bad thing. I saw that being yielding and willing to change my ideas got me somewhere really dangerous. I need to know what my non-negotiables are. I need to stand my ground. I need to defend myself. I need to be more true to myself than anyone else. I need some certainty. I need places where I won’t bend.
The places where I’ve swung
Now here I am in this current political climate. When I feel anger, I let it roar. Because once I wouldn’t let myself feel angry. When I feel disagreement, I cling to it. Because once I ran from it and rushed to find common ground.
It’s exhilarating. I want to fight back, to resist, to push against injustice. I feel my heart beating faster, and my blood pressure rising, and I think, “Yes! Here I am! I found it. I found the thing they won’t change my mind about. Finally I have something to fight for!”
When I am listening to another person or reading Facebook comments, I feel the voice in me rising in response that says, “No. You’re wrong. NO. That’s wrong.” And I let it fly. Because these are a few of the places where I won’t bend: police brutality against black bodies, a culture that perpetuates rape and chips away at a woman’s control over her body, laws that hurt LGBTQ people and their families. I won’t bend.
I have been swinging between two extremes. Before I was yielding; now I want the right-of-way. Before I sought quick peace and avoided confrontation; now I want to sit in this muck for awhile and don’t want you to tell me to meet you on the green grass. Because I lived on the green grass where you told me I belonged, and I made daisy chains and wore them like halos, and I am not that green grass and daisies girl anymore.
This is how I have swung. I am both scared to ask but want to know: Where did you begin? And where are you now? How did you find your way to the places where you won’t bend?
Becoming the person I need
At times in the past year I have responded to people with whom I disagree in an aggressive, defensive way that I know may not be the best way to accomplish our goals of effecting change. However, I think it has helped me meet another goal in those moments: it has helped me become the person I need to be, a person who is strong enough to believe in herself and actually play a part in effecting change.
I’m learning to exercise my assertiveness. I’m learning to let myself fall short and to disappoint people. Each piece that I publish is a voice lesson for myself. And like anyone learning to use their voice and to broaden their range, sometimes my voice overreaches, goes flat, squeaks, cuts out, hits the wrong notes. Sometimes I lose control of my voice. I imagine one person reading, and I think, “What I’m saying is not strong enough.” I imagine another person and think, “I’m going too far.”
This is what has brought me to this moment. I am more than my opinions; there is a life of stories behind my beliefs. I am more than a supporter of Black Lives Matter; I am a woman who held her newborn baby the week Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed, knowing that if my son were black, I would be terrified for his future.
I am more than a supporter of Planned Parenthood; I am a woman who always had access to birth control and shudders to think how my life would be different if I had a child with that boyfriend who abused me.
I am more than a supporter of immigrants; I am a woman whose mother was born as a citizen of another country. I am a woman whose grandmother’s family had to flee the country where she grew up.
Where does it hurt?
“Where does it hurt?” That’s what civil rights legend Ruby Sales recommends asking people with whom you disagree to get to the heart of the matter. Where it hurts for me is that there are people like my grandmother who are fleeing their country, and we won’t let them come to ours. Where it hurts is that the man who became our president has said about women, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”, and I have been forced to perform sexual acts on a man who thought he could do anything to me, too. Where it hurts is that my black friends have to wonder if their sons will survive to adulthood, if they will make it out alive in this dangerous culture that dehumanizes black men.
My beliefs have been shaped by the fear of what I’ve endured. My beliefs have been shaped by the fear of the trauma that others have to experience and from which I’m spared. And so, I have to believe that your beliefs, too, have been shaped by the story of your life. What life has formed where you stand in this moment? Where did you come from, and how did you get here? I want to start learning so I can stop living so angry and afraid. One breath at a time. Tell me a story. Let’s tell our truth, and we’ll leave fake news behind.
Where we’ll meet
Policy changes and leadership changes can only go so far in making a better world for us; we have a lot of internal work that needs to be done. Trump will eventually be gone, and we will be left behind. We will still be here. We’ll be the ones we’re left with.
We’re searching for a way forward together, for a path to peace and understanding. Many of us are past trying to create a shallow peace. We know that being a peacemaker doesn’t mean nicely “keeping the peace”. It’s not an exercise in politeness. It’s not meeting each other in the sunshine where the grass is greener. It means stirring up the dust we’ve brushed under the rug. It means starting difficult conversations and listening generously.
Being a peacemaker isn’t something that should feel easy or give us warm and fuzzy feelings every step along the way. It should feel uncomfortable. It might require deep breaths. It might feel like swallowing something prickly. It might feel like being brought to our knees. It might feel like a closed fist opening.
We want the deep peace that comes from the love of knowing–truly knowing–another person’s heart, with all its fears, dreams, and failings. We are strong enough to witness each other’s anger without handing hate back to them. We are strong enough to hold each other’s pain without shutting down when we fear our own wholeness threatened. We can soften in places and harden in others, expose our belly and find our spine.
Sufi poet Rumi writes: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” I’ll meet you there muddied, bloodied, defeated, and triumphant–triumphant simply for having survived the journey. I will meet you there. I will meet you there scared. I will meet you there not even knowing if you’re coming. I will meet you there crying and smiling. I will meet you there kneeling and dancing. I will meet you in that field. Will you come, too, ready to show the scars of your journey?
“When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ does not make sense.” I will meet you in the place where we stop making sense, where we have no plan, where our arguments are not outlined. I will meet you in that place where we search for each other and find ourselves.
This is how I resist. By searching myself deeper than I ever have before. By searching you deeper than I have before, too. Nothing about this feels simple.
Photo credit: Christopher Guider
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