Hiding 3
Don’t Be Afraid of the Unraveling. For The Mudroom.
Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had. – Richard Rohr
My sense of the self I try to project, the name I hope to make for myself, started to unravel one day when I was deep in my own thoughts, walking down Road Number 5 toward the market. I reached into the chest pocket of the bag where I kept my small bills, a habitual response to the rhythmic cry of “Allah, Allah” from the lady hunched over by the mosque entrance.
She smiled her crooked smile and started to say a prayer of blessing for me when I felt eyes on me besides hers. Four men sitting across the street, prayer mats neatly tucked under their arms, had their gaze intently fixed on me.
Their stares following my every move jarred me out of my daze and I looked up around at the bustling street. My mind started racing and I felt a flutter of worry. What did they see when they looked at me; what did my interaction with this woman who was begging communicate about me? What about all those times I was in too much of a hurry to stop and walked right by someone on the street? People were watching then too.
After that day I noticed it everywhere like that tiny loose thread on a sweater that turns into a hole once you start picking at it. I would often get in a rickshaw that would turn down our street before I said the directions; most people knew where the white family lived. I became acutely conscious of the assumptions people made about me and knew everyone was watching.
I also noticed my reactions to the attention —the way I could craft what they thought about me by the local clothes I chose to wear or the kind of places I frequented. I knew just how to act to be what people expected me to be in my various identities: non-profit worker (do-gooder), a follower of Christ (devout), family member (devoted), writer (deep), and on and on.
But there were only a handful of people who really knew all of me. It felt terribly lonely.
All of our lives are on display everywhere. From the people who interact with us at stores and on the street, to our online profiles, and in our own homes, everyone is making assumptions about us. And we are busy carefully molding our identities in their eyes by the choices we make and the things we say, by the parts of us we allow to be seen and the parts we keep hidden. We’re busy making a name for ourselves...
CONTINUE READING AT The mudroom
Calling Our Bodies Our Own (Coming Out of Hiding). For The Mudroom.
My breasts and bottom were fair game for open discussion; I learned this early in life. I was small for my age and the youngest in my class so I was teased for being a “shrimp” and called “2×4” when other girls had already started to develop but I had not. “Just give Nicole two band-aids to cover up those mosquito bites on her chest,” a male family member joked. Everyone laughed while I died inside.
As I grew, so did the jokes. If I was too thin, I was mocked for not being enough. When my curves started to fill out and I worked hard in private lessons for a year to gain the position of drum major of my large marching band, it was still my body (and not my talent) that was on display. I was then seen as too much. Comments about my large bottom in my white uniform pants made me blush, but by then I knew this was just normal behavior. Family, friends, and strangers—anyone—had the right to comment on my curves and their proportion to what others expected me to be.
Before I’d barely begun to realize the difference between boys and girls, my admittance into the dance world sent conflicting messages about my sexuality. Dress it up in sequins and put it on display with high kicks and gyrating hips. It was normal for drunken men to gawk at my teenage body dancing at the Superbowl halftime show.
Hide it under a waif-like ballerina body, the carefully placed neckline, and perfect posture. It was normal for my friends to starve themselves for a role, to be the perfect combination of desirable but just out of reach. But always the message was clear – your body is ours to look at, to scrutinize, and to judge. It’s your weapon to wield. It’s our prize to view.
The church added to the messages my mixed-up teenage self kept hidden like the A-cup bra straps I needed to keep tucked away under modest clothing. I was told not to let my brother stumble but my brothers kept coming at me anyway. Their comments were acceptable. People laughed them off. But somehow I had to keep them at bay with longer hemlines.
The night I fell asleep next to a friend on the bus and woke up with his hand under my shirt, I pretended I was still asleep. I just let it happen because I was too ashamed to call my body my own, too naïve to know to call it abuse. It was just another normal step in a culture that gave others ownership of my sexuality but asked me to be its guardian...
CONTINUE READING AT The mudroom
Letting Myself Be Known
I was painfully shy when I was young, unable to even take a bottle from my aunt. She had to leave it for me in an empty room before I would gather up enough courage to go retrieve it. I got over that shyness and most people would call me a “people person.”
Those people never know the fear underneath the surface, the way I struggle with each interaction to fight the desire to please everyone, scared of what others think of me. In the past I have let this fear disable me completely.
But in my writing I can be bold and brave.
There is also this magical thing called editing. I can take back my initially clumsy words, make sure my ideas are fully formed, my prose beautifully expressed.
I wish there was the ability to edit what comes out of my mouth, to hide my fearful eyes behind a screen so people can’t really see.
But then that isn’t really being known, is it?
In a year already full of exciting and scary adventures, I am about to embark on another trip that has me equally thrilled and frightened.
A week from today I will be heading out to Grand Rapids, Michigan for The Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. It is a gathering that happens every two years which brings together speakers and writers to discuss issues of “faith, ethics, justice, and the craft of storytelling.”
The over 61-page program I have been perusing highlighting the speakers, workshops, dinners, and networking times with writing industry professions has me reeling. I have a list already two pages long of people I hope to meet in the four-day period of the festival.
Many of these are people who I feel like I have gotten to know over the past couple years. I have read their words and peeked into the deep recesses of their lives, but not seen their faces outside of a photo on a computer screen.
These are people I have let know me as well as I have been vulnerable, poured my deepest feelings out onto the page and sent them out into the world.
There are writers alongside me in the Redbud Writer’s Guild, The Mudroom, and SheLoves Magazine (the three most frequent places I read and write). These ladies have prayed with me, counseled me, spurred me on when I was ready to give up, and shared the dark and scary parts of sharing your faith on the page with me.
Up until now they have been two-dimensional. Now they are going to become flesh. Continue Reading
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