Yep...this quip of a nickname followed me around the playground, the cluster of lockers, and even the dorm rooms of my first college. In case you didn't catch the supposedly witty wordplay, the people in my life were trying to insinuate that I was a pushover...I can't deny that it was true. I used to approach every situation with the "yes dear" attitude that I was certain stemmed from a place of respect and goodwill. And while my pushover approach might of had the semblance of integrity, in retrospect it came from a place of covert cowardice and not-so-fantastic self esteem.I believe that everything happens for a reason and that everything serves a purpose; that every experience, no matter how unpleasant, can be looked at as an opportunity to better yourself or to become more of who you want to be. I think that as long as you have an intentionality about your life, there is never a reason to regret or minimize what was.
When I was 19, I got the "call" to full-time ministry and a few months later I changed colleges and headed off to seminary. I had this overwhelming and undeniable desire to change how the church functioned and I was committed to doing everything I could to empower myself to be the best person I could be for that job. For me, achieving that goal meant getting an education in a place that fundamentally disagreed with who I was, what I believed in, and what I stood for as a woman, as a Christian, and as an individual. As a very smart and suave man once said, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere..." and I fully believed that placing myself in such a differing environment was the smartest and most effective mode of action for achieving the kind of results I wanted to see.
The school I choose to go to was conservative, to respectfully say the least, and it was also very small. If you were different, or believed in different ideals, everyone knew it. But I didn't let that stand in my way. I left my "Kerry for 2004" sticker on my car. I took on leadership roles in Campus Ministries and lead Bible Studies that the faculty would have disapproved of, if they had known about. I verbalized that I didn't desire pregnancy. I even served as Student Body President, during my second year of attendance, to a school full of people that believed I was damned to hell. I knew that if I was really going to make a change, or even just survive, that my pushover approach to life wasn't going to fly, and I was going to have to grow some balls. So...I did. And it didn't lead to where I thought it would.
Currently, my interaction with religion is nonexistent and my relationship with God might never be what it used to be, and the majority of all of that assuredly came from the fact that I placed myself in such a conservative environment. My memories and feelings about that time in my life are brutally unhappy, but I don't regret it...because if nothing else, I learned how to stand up for myself and to stand up for the person I want to be. That lesson is invaluable, no matter what classroom I learned it in.
In a little over four months, I am going to leave the safety and comfort of Portland, OR, a city I've lived in for 14+ years, to attend journalism school in Brooklyn, NY. There are very few people in my life that think that this is a good idea ... It's not exactly a great time, economically, to leave a stable and career-building job for a move cross-country and it's not like print media is a thriving industry at the moment. I haven't been saving up for a big move. I know very few people in New York, none of whom are reaching success or financial stability. And I know, with everything that I have in me, that this is my opportunity to be the kind of person, the kind of writer, I want to be; the kind of person who doesn't limit her life merely because some people asked her to. This life decision is just about me STANDING UP for what I want my life to look like.
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