You can take the home from the boy
But not the boy from his home;
These are my streets, the only life I’ve ever known:
Who says you can’t go home? — Bon Jovi, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?”I’m tired of looking around rooms
Wondering what I’ve got to do
Or who I’m supposed to be.
I don’t want to be anything other than me. — Gavin DeGraw, “I Don’t Wanna Be”I thot: Whyd we come here? Whynt we stay hoalt up? Whynt we go somers far away?
Becaws you cant stay hoalt up.
Becaws there aint no far away.
Becaws where you happen is where you happen. — Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker
I thought it was normal.
I guess that’s what happens when you’re homeschooled in a conservative Christian home. You don’t know anything else, so you assume, early on, that the way you are living is the way it is supposed to be.
I thought it was normal to grow up in a large family, to be homeschooled, to memorize 100 verses a year, to “kiss dating goodbye,” to study theology and apologetics, to sing songs on Sunday in which I devoted my life to Christ, to pray, to be closely connected to a church group, and so on. Pure normalcy. Oh, sure, I knew on a factual level that most people didn’t do those things. But those people were strange and abnormal, to me.
I thought that being a normal man (especially a black man) meant being dedicated to God, a leader in the household and in relationships, and a person who asserted his own superiority over the women in his life.
I thought these things because I was told them and read them over and over again for 17 years, sometimes very painfully, sometimes with the fear of eternal damnation, sometimes with tears streaming down my face and begging God for forgiveness and mercy when my errant tendencies fell out of the realm of the “normal.”
When I left Christianity, I felt that I was becoming abnormal. That I was starting to step out of the regular life that seemed so safe normal into a foreign world that, for 25 years, I had thought was weird and strange. Uncomfortable.
The most exhilaratingly frightening and gratifying thing about it was the reality of reconciling myself to what seemed a clear Truth.
There is no God.
There is no great, omniscient judge saying what is and isn’t normal. It’s just us. So all that stuff about the importance of controlling my natural desires in order to fit into the “safe” realm of God’s normal suddenly became deeply challenged. And this caused no small source of angst for me.
Part of the angst came from the fact that, even though I’m an atheist, I live in a country that is mostly Christian. The fact that I’m an atheist doesn’t keep the Christian world I’m living from affecting me and affecting people’s view of me, because in the real world of friends, family, and coworkers Christian “norms” get reinforced in society.
And a lot of the angst came from that status of being in a world where these standards were perpetuated as “normal,” and realizing, the longer I have been an atheist, that my original version of Christianity was not just wrong — it wasn’t exactly normal either. And Christianity isn’t normal. Christian norms aren’t normal. I’m not normal, and the world I’m living in isn’t normal.
That’s hard to deal with, because being normal is what I tried so hard to be. And it’s not like I can simply shift from one normal to another normal. I mean, people say that you can, but the truth is that no one is God, and we’re all just agreeing among ourselves as to what we’re going to label “normal” and why. There is no inherent standard of “normal.” It doesn’t exist.
And yet…I still feel a pressure to fulfill a morality of normal “purity.” The Plato’s ideal of “normal.” The rest often feels like a dangerous venture, an experiment. And because I’m not a Christian, I feel some obligation to go on this dangerous venture, to experiment with the life I couldn’t have when I was a conservative Christian.
But even the pressure to go out and experiment — is that something I feel I have to do because I’m not a Christian anymore, and I was always taught that non-Christians were the polar opposites of Christians, so that even the obligation I feel to defy Christian norms is based on some Christian idea of what rejecting Christ ought to look like?
It’s complicated. And confusing, especially when I find that each and every group I check out, regardless of how it labels itself and how “free” it may look in the beginning, has its own set of norms that are baked into the attitudes and judgments of people in the group, and often completely foreign to my own; it’s not exactly easy to switch scripts.
To these groups, I’m weird. Not because I don’t “let loose” necessarily and still have conservative hangups, but because they have a whole different set of norms that I’m uncomfortable with. I’m not uncomfortable with those norms, necessarily, because I think they’re wrong — I’m uncomfortable in the sense of being forced to act in a play that’s different than the one you’ve been practicing for weeks.
But in the midst of this, I’ve discovered a truth. I’m not a formerly “normal” person who is now engaging in experimentation and exploration of a strange world that was always closed off to me.
I never was just “normal.” I was always weird. I was always strange. At least, from the perspective of who I am now, which retrospectively applies to the person I was then…
I think there’s a general truth here. If you see a group that looks strange on the outside and you spend enough time on the inside of the group, it will become normal to you, and its rules and customs will get into your blood. And the rest of the world will seem strange, when from another angle it’s just the rest of the world, with its own “normals.” Just how things seem to work.
Long story short…this is confusing. My normal — as far as the ideals hardwired into me from 28 years of hardcore Christian Fundie conservatism — is becoming increasingly odd, and it’s caused me to distrust the concept of the “normal.” So I feel a need to look for the strange…which also, once you tear the layers off, has a definition of “normal.”
The problem, in a nutshell, is that I’ve discovered that the entire world is normal and strange at the same time.
Which feels awkward to me. It makes me existentially anxious at times. And it’s not that I’m lost; I have a better map — I am just realizing that there’s no place I have an overwhelming desire to be on it. I don’t really want a new normal, and I’m uncomfortable with the strange, and the strange has within it a definition of a new normal anyway…so I feel a bit stuck. I know it sounds like a cheap conceptual paradox to you, maybe, but existentially speaking, living it can be a vexing contradiction, in context.
I’m working on the dilemma. But I’m not sure I have an answer, or that I really want one. I feel pressure to be normal, and pressure to be strange, but I’m afraid of both, and I can’t escape it because normalcy and strangeness are basically mirages of each other, and so I feel like solving the problem — if it even is one — is like dividing by zero.
And that’s why, when I look at my eyes in the mirror, I don’t know what I want or who I am so often these days, and I’m not sure I want anyone else, including me, to tell me, and at the same time (like someone close to you who may be harboring a deep secret) I want to know.
At any rate, dealing with the paradox feels better when I write it out. So…yeah. There it is.
Thanks for reading.
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