I have never been very scientific, as that would require more than my right-brained driven mind can handle. I do find myself becoming these days more of a social experimenter than a scientific one. The roots of this run deep within as my life experience throughout my childhood which caused me to be cautious and contemplative. I had to learn that there was more to life than just my young world view, and at age 18, I began to see things through prismatically spectrumed glasses that gave me vision far and wide. It unlocked doors that I never knew existed, even if I didn't cross the thresholds. I still carry the key around my neck.
Growing up on a backward Southern town in a lost part of the Tennessee Valley, I never found myself around who were different ethnically and culturally than myself. I went to school with, worked with, shopped with, and struggled through life with the same type people for the first 18 years of my life. Just like Socrates allegory of the cave, I had never really thought much about people on the outside. It was given that we would all grow up, maybe go to college, but probably not, and live, work and contribute to our small town, as generations and generations had done. A small town has a way of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates itself into a cycle of unrelenting pseudo-homogenized citizens. Even within that paradigm, there were societal rules in place.
Every small town has its own social structure and pretenses and ours was no different. There are the social elite who are legends in their own minds and pretty much nothing when it comes up to being measured against the world. These are the people who strive for the excellence that they have conceived in their own minds. They grow up to own the car dealership, sell insurance, sometimes become lawyers, teachers, doctors, and become esteemed members of the Lion's Club and Women's Auxiliary. They are the minority, yet act as though they are the upper crust of the world. As long as they stay in the boundaries of the town, there is no danger of them becoming less great in their own minds. They learned it from their parents, who learned if from their parents--a rite of passage. If you were to take those same people and stick them in a foreign setting such as NYC or San Francisco, the world would laugh and point fingers, relentlessly calling those people out for being the impostors that they are. So staying within their pre-con-scribed confines and reserving their rights to be masters of their own universe, those people coexist with an heir of entitlement that smells of resentment for those that are unlike them.
I was one of the "unlike" ones. I never fit a mold. I was like non-setting green Jello that oozed out of every conformist mold anyone poured me into. I was a clumsy, fat, intelligent, nail-biting, clarinet playing, free-lunch eating, rag bag clothes wearing disaster. I was the girl who was invited to slumber parties as the entertainment--the one who something "bad" would happen to. The one who was asked out by a boy, only to find that it was a joke followed with a rush of laughter that swept across the cafeteria like a wild fire. Then it would happen again and again, year after year, as I was stuck in this hellacious town with nowhere to go. It not only thickened my skin, it cemented it to stone, creating impenetrable walls that I wouldn't even let God inside of.
In this environment, there were norms that everyone was expected to participate in, regardless of their level of class. Everyone in the town hated blacks and seemed to be the point of no contention for most everyone that I knew. I never understood it and had never even met black person the entire span of my childhood. When we would venture to a large city for school clothes shopping, I was scared of the black people that I saw. There were some blacks that you could admire from afar. On channel 3 news, there was Fred Johnson, a news anchor, but he was an important black man because he wore a suit and spoke with proper English and Bill Cosby--how could Fat Albert be a bad thing? Nobody ever explained to me why it was ok to like these black people, but hate others.
In this town, beyond caucasian, there was one family where a woman had adopted several Asian kids and one family of Jewish people, but that was the extent of our cultural experience. It left me with invariably unanswered questions about so many things. So, when I, the first person ever on my mother's side to ever go to college.....EVER, went to a local college, it was indeed a social experiment of epic proportions. I came out of the cave and I became a careful observer of people. I became fascinated and enamored with the fact that there were so many people of different backgrounds, races, and cultures. In this collegiate environment, they all existed together and no one group was singled out above another. I was thrilled beyond words to see that people's differences did not define or prescribe what they were capable of being in the world. It gave me hope that I could be something other than what I was conditioned to be.
Which brings me to thoughts on where I am today. I am again lost in my own life, deeply embedded--a small town of my own making, within my own skin. I am looking to break free and find that courage and drive that helped me to walk away from my childhood. My young, single, freedom of adulthood was short lived, as I became pregnant and a mother, then a wife by the age of 19 by the first man who ever gave me a second glance. I had accepted less than what I deserved because society had taught me that it was the best that I could do. After a lot of years of heartache, despair and abuse, I have found that there is much more to this journey than mere acceptance of circumstances. It is time to start analyzing this and putting in the work that it takes make changes and begin to live a much more authentic and intentional life.
This will be a platform for me to think these things out and find my way. Join me if you'd like as I try to work through these next steps, a sojourner for the truth that exists for my life.
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