On a Serious Note...
Jan. 31st, 2012 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thulcandranI had this in a personal journal, but it was more... personal. So I've trimmed it and chopped it and polished the rough bits off, and here it is-- for your irregularly unscheduled dose of hastily constructed fiction, see next post (as soon as I finish it, that is).
See, here's how my siblings and I, and all the kids in our church, were raised. Obey. Obey your parents, for that is God's Will. Obey God, in all things. Submit to the authorities that God has placed over you; questioning that authority is disobedience in and of itself. The only time this is incorrect is if an authority gives you a command that is clearly against God's commandments-- and in that case, God's direct authority trumps the earthly ones. Over time, and talking to others raised in this subculture, I've learned that for a lot of people, this was what drove them to question. They asked questions, and got smacked down repeatedly, and this only made them question harder, and in the end, rebel. My older sister is one such woman. I am not.
Obedience and submission were overwhelmingly easy for me. Obviously, since I was a kid, fairly smart and active, I got into trouble, did stuff I shouldn't have, snuck around with my brother, etc. I'm not saying I was Elsie Dinsmore or anything like that. It was just that, although I questioned the physical world around me, I never even considered questioning authority. If my parents, or the pastor, or the church adults, said it, it was true. Always. If the Bible (KJV, of course) said it, it was true. Always. This was a fact of the world, as surely as the Sun came up every morning and rain fell from the clouds and mulberries were delicious. (We had a tree in our backyard. One of the happiest memories of my childhood is climbing that tree to sit and read, and daydream, and eat mulberries until the ripe ones were all out of reach.)
Then my mother lost her mind. She fell, so gracefully nobody noticed until it was too late, from average, run-of-the-mill RTC paranoia, into Paranoid Schizophrenia (and, as we found out years later, Bipolar Disorder). Suddenly, authority became pretty absurd. My siblings disobeyed because it was the right thing to do-- sneaking my father's ammunition and guns out of the house, to him, for example. This became a running theme. I was blind to the abuses of authority that were going on around me, because in my mind, authority was never wrong. Somehow, none of the above had broken my trust-- even after my mother lost custody, and her issues were revealed. I categorized them under "Sickness," made an exception, and moved on.
One of the effects of our circumstances was leaving homeschooling for a private Christian school - our mother managed, if I recall, to get scholarships for the older three of us. This was a nightmare for all of us; we were the weird kids, the outcasts, the ones who wore dresses even after school, who could quote the KJV from memory but had never watched ten minutes of television. But I was good at classes - I could read very quickly, and grasped concepts pretty well. Even terribly broken ones, like "The world is 6,000 years old, and dinosaur bones/Mesopotamian culture can be used to prove it," or "Physical contact between males and females is wrong."
But in fourth grade or so, something changed. When I was much younger, I'd read The Hiding Place, a book by Corrie ten Boom about her life, focusing on her family's efforts to hide Jews from the Nazis. I'd read it a few times since, and loved it, so when it was assigned in class, I was ecstatic. There's one part - one of the ones I'd nearly memorized - about a failed romance in Corrie's life. She falls for a man named Karel, he falls back, they spend days walking in the garden, talking, and then she doesn't see him for a long period of time. The next time they see each other, he's with his fiancee; he tells her, "I can't marry you. My mother would kill me." Corrie is, of course, heartbroken, and her father consoles her not with the 'false words' that 'there will be another,' but with sincerity and tenderness.
When our English teacher reached this passage, she told us that the point of it was that Corrie had gone against God's will by 'dating' a man not approved by their families. The point, she told us, was that courtship was the only Godly means of finding a spouse, and the heartbreak was God's way of punishing Corrie for disobeying him.
This made me unspeakably angry. I sat there, trying not to betray the thoughts in my head, which were screaming at how wrong that was. I'd been telling stories for years. To entertain my siblings, friends, or myself-- or simply because the story came to me and wanted to be told. To hear this-- to hear an authority, someone who I trusted, lying about a story... it broke something in me. Worse yet, the story was about someone's life! This was a woman, brave, accomplished, truly amazing, and this teacher, who I trusted and respected, was lying about her life story.
I was utterly furious. I never said anything aloud, not until years later, but it smoldered in me, and burned through the walls I'd built up around 'authority.' My mother had been wrong, I knew, because she was sick, somehow, in her head. This made it different. But now, other things showed up. My dad said things that weren't right. He wasn't always fair. My grandparents, in whose house we were living, were not always right. The teachers protected the school bullies (because they were usually their children), even when they were blatantly lying. The teachers lied about stories. What else were they lying about? My father didn't keep his promises. My grandmother lied to us. Sometimes she was unjust. My grandfather was unjust sometimes. The youth pastors said things that I knew not to be true. It was as though I'd been walking around with a content-filter over my eyes.
After a lifetime of trusting authority implicitly as an extension of God's Will, something inside of me snapped. I stopped obeying. I stopped submitting. I stopped trusting. Lesson learned: authorities always lie. People in power cannot be trusted. Everybody lies.
And so, I reacted to that change-- I became the person I am now, twitchy around authority, defiant, and incredibly untrusting. I intentionally went against the grain in highschool, and middle school. See, I was smart, and relatively shy, so teachers liked me. And I hated that, rebelled openly against it; I'd learned that they couldn't be trusted. They said things that weren't true, they used their power to hurt-- freed from those walls, I now saw that everywhere-- and I didn't want their, or anybody's, favor. There were some exceptions - the music teacher, the English teacher, who was pretty fair and sparked my continual interest in mythology. In highschool, things got worse. In classes where the teachers were honest with us, I worked hard and tried. In classes where I could tell the teachers didn't really care about questioning, truth, learning-- especially where they were openly dishonest or showed favoritism-- I actively worked to earn their dislike. I snarked openly. I asked questions, usually because I wanted to know the answers, but also because it drove them crazy. I did just enough work so I couldn't simply be failed. I was just a Problem Student.
In my senior year, for an English class that I loved, with a teacher who taught me, more or less, how to write, I wrote an essay about the role of Guildenstern, in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." I called it 'The Questioner,' and drew the conclusion that some of us in life-- such as myself-- could not help questioning, no matter what, even when the answers made no sense, even when there were no answers, even when the answers led to death. We questioned, or we died. We questioned even if we died.
In that respect, the breaking of that trust made me a better person. I like being a Guildenstern. It's important. It's not always fun, and it sometimes gives you a lot of enemies, but it's necessary.
The more I look back, the more sense it makes that pushing OBEY. OBEY. OBEY. on kids for their whole lives-- it ends with rebellion. It ends in loss of trust. It ends with adults with an endless need to question and tear down authority. Teaching kids to mindlessly accept authority-- it's a self-defeating philosophy. And for that, in the end, I am quite grateful.
See, here's how my siblings and I, and all the kids in our church, were raised. Obey. Obey your parents, for that is God's Will. Obey God, in all things. Submit to the authorities that God has placed over you; questioning that authority is disobedience in and of itself. The only time this is incorrect is if an authority gives you a command that is clearly against God's commandments-- and in that case, God's direct authority trumps the earthly ones. Over time, and talking to others raised in this subculture, I've learned that for a lot of people, this was what drove them to question. They asked questions, and got smacked down repeatedly, and this only made them question harder, and in the end, rebel. My older sister is one such woman. I am not.
Obedience and submission were overwhelmingly easy for me. Obviously, since I was a kid, fairly smart and active, I got into trouble, did stuff I shouldn't have, snuck around with my brother, etc. I'm not saying I was Elsie Dinsmore or anything like that. It was just that, although I questioned the physical world around me, I never even considered questioning authority. If my parents, or the pastor, or the church adults, said it, it was true. Always. If the Bible (KJV, of course) said it, it was true. Always. This was a fact of the world, as surely as the Sun came up every morning and rain fell from the clouds and mulberries were delicious. (We had a tree in our backyard. One of the happiest memories of my childhood is climbing that tree to sit and read, and daydream, and eat mulberries until the ripe ones were all out of reach.)
Then my mother lost her mind. She fell, so gracefully nobody noticed until it was too late, from average, run-of-the-mill RTC paranoia, into Paranoid Schizophrenia (and, as we found out years later, Bipolar Disorder). Suddenly, authority became pretty absurd. My siblings disobeyed because it was the right thing to do-- sneaking my father's ammunition and guns out of the house, to him, for example. This became a running theme. I was blind to the abuses of authority that were going on around me, because in my mind, authority was never wrong. Somehow, none of the above had broken my trust-- even after my mother lost custody, and her issues were revealed. I categorized them under "Sickness," made an exception, and moved on.
One of the effects of our circumstances was leaving homeschooling for a private Christian school - our mother managed, if I recall, to get scholarships for the older three of us. This was a nightmare for all of us; we were the weird kids, the outcasts, the ones who wore dresses even after school, who could quote the KJV from memory but had never watched ten minutes of television. But I was good at classes - I could read very quickly, and grasped concepts pretty well. Even terribly broken ones, like "The world is 6,000 years old, and dinosaur bones/Mesopotamian culture can be used to prove it," or "Physical contact between males and females is wrong."
But in fourth grade or so, something changed. When I was much younger, I'd read The Hiding Place, a book by Corrie ten Boom about her life, focusing on her family's efforts to hide Jews from the Nazis. I'd read it a few times since, and loved it, so when it was assigned in class, I was ecstatic. There's one part - one of the ones I'd nearly memorized - about a failed romance in Corrie's life. She falls for a man named Karel, he falls back, they spend days walking in the garden, talking, and then she doesn't see him for a long period of time. The next time they see each other, he's with his fiancee; he tells her, "I can't marry you. My mother would kill me." Corrie is, of course, heartbroken, and her father consoles her not with the 'false words' that 'there will be another,' but with sincerity and tenderness.
When our English teacher reached this passage, she told us that the point of it was that Corrie had gone against God's will by 'dating' a man not approved by their families. The point, she told us, was that courtship was the only Godly means of finding a spouse, and the heartbreak was God's way of punishing Corrie for disobeying him.
This made me unspeakably angry. I sat there, trying not to betray the thoughts in my head, which were screaming at how wrong that was. I'd been telling stories for years. To entertain my siblings, friends, or myself-- or simply because the story came to me and wanted to be told. To hear this-- to hear an authority, someone who I trusted, lying about a story... it broke something in me. Worse yet, the story was about someone's life! This was a woman, brave, accomplished, truly amazing, and this teacher, who I trusted and respected, was lying about her life story.
I was utterly furious. I never said anything aloud, not until years later, but it smoldered in me, and burned through the walls I'd built up around 'authority.' My mother had been wrong, I knew, because she was sick, somehow, in her head. This made it different. But now, other things showed up. My dad said things that weren't right. He wasn't always fair. My grandparents, in whose house we were living, were not always right. The teachers protected the school bullies (because they were usually their children), even when they were blatantly lying. The teachers lied about stories. What else were they lying about? My father didn't keep his promises. My grandmother lied to us. Sometimes she was unjust. My grandfather was unjust sometimes. The youth pastors said things that I knew not to be true. It was as though I'd been walking around with a content-filter over my eyes.
After a lifetime of trusting authority implicitly as an extension of God's Will, something inside of me snapped. I stopped obeying. I stopped submitting. I stopped trusting. Lesson learned: authorities always lie. People in power cannot be trusted. Everybody lies.
And so, I reacted to that change-- I became the person I am now, twitchy around authority, defiant, and incredibly untrusting. I intentionally went against the grain in highschool, and middle school. See, I was smart, and relatively shy, so teachers liked me. And I hated that, rebelled openly against it; I'd learned that they couldn't be trusted. They said things that weren't true, they used their power to hurt-- freed from those walls, I now saw that everywhere-- and I didn't want their, or anybody's, favor. There were some exceptions - the music teacher, the English teacher, who was pretty fair and sparked my continual interest in mythology. In highschool, things got worse. In classes where the teachers were honest with us, I worked hard and tried. In classes where I could tell the teachers didn't really care about questioning, truth, learning-- especially where they were openly dishonest or showed favoritism-- I actively worked to earn their dislike. I snarked openly. I asked questions, usually because I wanted to know the answers, but also because it drove them crazy. I did just enough work so I couldn't simply be failed. I was just a Problem Student.
In my senior year, for an English class that I loved, with a teacher who taught me, more or less, how to write, I wrote an essay about the role of Guildenstern, in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." I called it 'The Questioner,' and drew the conclusion that some of us in life-- such as myself-- could not help questioning, no matter what, even when the answers made no sense, even when there were no answers, even when the answers led to death. We questioned, or we died. We questioned even if we died.
In that respect, the breaking of that trust made me a better person. I like being a Guildenstern. It's important. It's not always fun, and it sometimes gives you a lot of enemies, but it's necessary.
The more I look back, the more sense it makes that pushing OBEY. OBEY. OBEY. on kids for their whole lives-- it ends with rebellion. It ends in loss of trust. It ends with adults with an endless need to question and tear down authority. Teaching kids to mindlessly accept authority-- it's a self-defeating philosophy. And for that, in the end, I am quite grateful.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-31 11:54 pm (UTC)I stopped trusting. Lesson learned: authorities always lie. People in power cannot be trusted. Everybody lies.
This... oh little fishies this. It hits like a gut-punch, but this is my experience too, and I am still trying to figure out how to work in a hierarchical, corporate space with this.
*offers hugs*
no subject
Date: 2012-01-31 11:59 pm (UTC)Jobbing is rough, when your first (internal) reaction to an order is "Why? What's your motive?" Luck, Sixwing, and my sympathies.
*hugs*