most people think of building or creating their life. as an avid style, people, political, culture watcher i think about my life being styles. sometimes it’s styled with purpose and other times it just “happens”. long after i left behind evangelical christian beliefs, i literally fell into feminist/womanist teachings. i had alot to learn. with a violent father, passive mother, and a church theology that defined my womanness, i needed to learn more about the options.
sometimes it was raging against “the machine”. the machinations of patriarchy within my church history, family history and culture. other times i discovered options that were loving, and passionate, and evolving and removing boundaries. anyone who knows me, i love to push boundaries to see where i can go. wherever i go, i might not stay…but i have to explore.
Mary Catherine Bateson wrote Composing a Life. the book has had waves if influence and memories of who i’ve been for the past 20 years. it was required reading in school where i earned a degree in feminist psychology.
When I started writing Composing a Life, the issue that I wanted to write about was the issue of discontinuity. Part of my interest in this was based on two events in my own life. One was that I had just gone through the experience of losing, in a rather painful way, a job that I cared about. I had been forced to change jobs before, because of my husband changing jobs, and I had had to adapt to that situation. So what I set out to do was to look at a group of women who had been through a lot of transitions and who were able to cope with the changes. I was asking the question, “How on earth does one survive this kind of interruption?”"
this piece from her book is what i have found myself asking many times. perhaps it’s as time passes and i’m less flexible, or more demanding, perhaps just yearning for some stable quiet yet meaningful time period.
i’ve only been truly homeless one time (not including now). not counting the years in between semesters, or schools or relationships. after my mother died and i hadn’t yet graduated high school, my father long gone with his new family…our house was reposessed by the bank. no one was there to guide me, but i didn’t ask the question “How on earth does one survive this kind of interruption?”
now i’m asking.
Good luck on your journey, but I hope that you do not trade one set of extreme circumstances for another. My sense is that feminism is one of those “against” things. You could start seeing the world in those terms. It might not be all that different from the evangelical Christianity that you’re trying to escape.
Most of life is too big to fit under any label. And for me, I like just living it.
Good luck to you.