Finding My Voice Again: Lessons Learned in Silence
In my years of writing, no matter what piece I’m working on, the most difficult part is knowing how to begin. Even now, after so much time away from writing for public consumption, I find myself overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities. Increasingly over the years, I’ve found myself struggling to overcome the inertia inherent within the writing process. I, along with Dr. Gordon Marino, find that “the attempt to write has always seemed like a confrontation with the void inside me, with my own emptiness.”
Accordingly, over the two years, I’ve taken time off from publishing any of my writings. In the span of that time, I’ve been intentionally and purposely listening to the myriad voices surrounding my everyday experience, taking in and trying to absorb as much wisdom as I possibly can from those around me. As such, at the beginning of this new writing venture, I want to take a brief moment to explain the purpose of this blog, and what I hope it may accomplish. But before we get there, lets address the elephant in the room: why did I stop writing for so long?
Writing for me has always been a cathartic and liberating experience. I was always the nerdy, bookish kid who found myself lost in the worlds of faraway lands that lay in the pages within my hands. Writing has helped me crystalize and process my own experiences of joy and pain, using the limited language at our disposal to convey transcendent, abstract concepts and emotions. I always felt that writing was indicative of a process, evolving alongside its author and subject to all the biases and beauty of its creator.
On the other hand, I am also a person who is incredibly uncomfortable with any form of conflict. Anytime I would hear people arguing with one another, a wave of panic would wash over me, freezing me in my place until it either passed or I could rationally process the event. Furthermore, being bullied for most of my developmental years, it was instilled in me that my voice didn’t really matter. True to my Southern roots (and it’s “bless your heart” passivity), conflict is constantly deferred, but always lingering under the surface, waiting to erupt. For most of my adult life, however, I’ve been able to navigate conflict whenever it has arisen, especially when it was sporadic and unpredictable. Yet, over the past few years, something began to change.
Wrestling with the Contradictory Components of the Self:
In the contentious political climate that we found ourselves in towards the end of 2016, visible conflict and vitriol became an everyday, embodied experience. No doubt, there are (and always have been) momentous social and political rifts that are real and immeasurably important. Yet, over the past few years, I watched lifelong friendships end and countless colleagues constantly criticize one another over the slightest differences. While disagreements and dissension are inevitable and can even be healthy, I began to witness an increasing agitation and intolerance toward any nuance or alternating opinion from every direction. And as someone whose identity is comprised of a eclectic patchwork of paradoxical paradigms, I had to dig deeply within myself to try to recover my own, unique voice.
As a personal example, I was raised in an incredibly conservative, evangelical home until I went off to university and read Marx, Baldwin, Butler, and Foucault for the first time, thus slowly adopting many more liberal ideals. Finding a home within this ideological edifice, I began to completely denounce and distance myself from every aspect of my more conservative/libertarian upbringing, treating it with remorse and disdain. Even though, at the time, I perceived myself as a staunch liberal in the middle of Appalachia, it wasn’t until I started my graduate school tenure at Harvard that I truly began to realize my own unique perspective.
Harvard Divinity is one of the few non-sectarian divinity schools in the nation, which means that people from nearly every major religious tradition (or no tradition at all) live and study side by side. Growing up in the rural South to a struggling, lower-middle class family, I didn’t exactly have many opportunities to interact with people who weren’t white, conservative, evangelical Protestants. As I grew up and traveled more extensively, I found that I thrived in environments where I’m the outlier, where I can listen, learn, and grow from those around me. This is one of the main reasons that I decided to attend HDS, as I find it much more rewarding and interesting to talk and live alongside people who are radically different than me. The promise of cultivating pluralism was, and still is, one of my central principles that I continue to strive towards (even though HDS tends to struggle with it in practice, which I will save for another post.)
Yet, there was a steady, unilateral thread that connected us all, which was an unrelenting affinity for self-proclaimed progressive politics. Unfortunately, this new environment just so happened to coincide with my gradual realizations of several fundamental issues that reside in left-wing populist rhetoric and thought, and my growing discontent with increasingly uncritical forms of liberalism, especially when coupled with blanket identity politics. I began to see too many glaring similarities between the politically/theologically authoritarian principles of my past and the new environment that I found myself within at Harvard (though their world views were supposedly the antithesis of one another).
Although I by no means advocate for a return to the right, am completely revolted by our current administration, and still identify and sympathize with the principles of radical leftism, I could not simply scapegoat every problem in American society upon my right-wing friends and family back home, no matter how fervently I disagree with their world views (just as it is wrong for my right-wing compatriots to scapegoat immigrants, socialists, the “gay agenda,” or whatever Other they perceive to threaten their structures of power). Systemic issues are much more complex and intersectional than we often assume, and we (both left and right) often blame the Other as a projection of our own dissatisfaction and guilt, covering over our own moral culpability.
Accordingly, as an empathic, Enneagram type-9, I felt an untenable burden to facilitate a mutual understanding between the two groups. Even though the truth may not lie in the direct middle ground between left and right (and I by no means am an advocate of a neoliberal “Third Way”), I still wanted to seek out a way to communicate to both groups. I saw that no one seemed to be listening to one another, each side of my newsfeed simply screaming into their own carefully curated echo chambers, so I wanted to be a voice to bridge the gap, critiquing our own presuppositions about the Other.
Yet, in a cultural moment when any uncertainty or pushback is perceived with vitriolic suspicion, my call for nuance was perceived as a vehicle for compromise, rather than conflict-driven understanding. My fear of conflict, coupled with my insecurity and desire for validation, put me in an increasingly claustrophobic space. This increasing fear of criticism from those I deem friends was further exacerbated by my history in ministry.
Ministry, Personal Branding, and the Fear of Rejection
After coming back to Christianity at the age of 16, there was nothing I wanted more than to be in professional ministry. Yet, in the evangelical world that I still found myself within, in order to be a leader, I had to be above reproach (Titus 1:6-9, anyone?). At the same time, I began to see many Christian leaders caught up in scandal, which furthered my superego’s imposition upon my behavior. I gave up several film and acting roles because of my strict, narrow view of my own “personal ministry,” which merely amounted to nothing more than another form of personal branding.
In my mind, there was always someone (whether human or divine) watching, waiting to see me trip up, to say the wrong thing. Then, in the age of social media, this presence of the Big Other came alive in the form of online content policing. In the present moment, I thought to myself, how could I possibly critique the increasingly uncritical forms of the utopian left-wing populism and the rampant abuse of identity politics I saw around me without being mislabeled or suspected of being a bigoted conservative, or worse, a complicit neoliberal (arguably the worst of heresies in HDS’s halls)?
This militant call-out culture absolutely paralyzed me with fear. I felt that no matter what I wrote, I would be caught in a lose-lose situation. Do I write what I honestly think, open myself up to attacks from every side, and become the subject of vehement criticism? Do I filter everything I say through carefully curated language, walking on eggshells and throwing in a few buzzwords to appease a certain segment of the population, skirt around any potential problematization, and win over some social credit? Or do I say nothing and be relatively ignored? For some reason, the latter option appeared the safest to me, and I’m only now realizing that I did so at the diservice of those closest to me, even if we fervently disagree.
In such a divisive and politically-charged time as this, I learned to rationalize my own silence. If my Harvard graduate school papers weren’t enough to deter my own personal writing, I also had another identity-centered excuse for not writing about my thoughts on the world around me. God knows the world doesn’t need another cis white man blogging his views and opinions into the abyss of the Internet, I would think to myself. This seemed to fit in nicely with the notion that I had internalized growing up, which was that in the end, my voice didn’t truly matter. Yet, another, darker motivation, lurked behind the facade of my own “wokeness:” fear.
Fear of being misunderstood.
Fear of being misquoted.
Fear of rejection and humiliation.
Social Media Madness and the Death of Nuance
The Internet culture that we’ve created for ourselves thrives on reacting to one another, rather than listening and responding. On one hand, we can’t blame ourselves too harshly. In the entire existence of the human species, we have never had the capacity to communicate with one another on such an expansive and instantaneous degree. This technology is still new to our slowly-evolving brains, and we’re still building the neural networks and social codes of how we are to operate within these technological advances. Just as how, in the 90s, we collectively, yet unspokenly agreed that it was rude to talk on our cellphones while interacting face to face with another person, I have hope that we will also slowly parse out our own relationship and etiquette to these new, emerging technologies.
Yet, we must also recognize and own up to our own collective culpability for the damage that we cause in this messy process. In a space that rewards virality and quick, unnunanced rants, we tend to crave the next controversial take on every hot-button issue. We reactionarily type our unfiltered thoughts into as few characters as possible, sacrificing nuance and empathy with militant, fundamental, and authoritarian declarations that serve no purpose other than to rally the troops to our own side so that we can identify and destroy the scapegoated enemy, whoever it may be in a particular given week. While the standard Western narrative insists that the Internet is a wholly democratizing force, we must also be attentive to the ways in which it can also be used for authoritarian means.
While I’ve dabbled in posting hot-takes on the hellscape that is Twitter, it always seemed contrived and forced, like I was performing a role rather than honestly speaking my mind. In my life, I’ve found that it’s all too easy to drift from one form of fundamentalism to another, which colors over all shades of grey, levels individual experience, and insists that every issue is simply black and white and reducible to a single cause. By contrast, I am hoping that this blog will serve as a catalyst of uneasy tension and honesty. Writing a blog like this, exposing oneself to the world, and being vulnerable with one’s thoughts is a frightening thing. The disorganized and readily inconsistent fragments of one’s own inner life is splayed out, naked in the open air, inviting criticism by it’s inherent existence.
And no greater criticism arises than through one’s own eyes. As I look back through previous posts, I always think to myself, “I wish that I had said that differently,” or “I can’t believe that I used to think that way.” And sure enough, I’ll probably think the exact same things about the words on this page in a year or two. In this process, we begin to see our lives, beliefs, and values not as static, fixed categories, but rather as amorphous, fluid, and ever-evolving sets of forms and figures. We begin to see our memories and experiences as shadows and fragments which are broken, never quite whole, but beautiful nonetheless. While this was something that I could easily grasp intellectually, it took me some time to put these beliefs into practice. But this process begins by learning to sit in the awkward silence of ourselves.
Be Still, and Know that You’re Not Alone
In the everyday business of our lives, we’ve lost the art of being still. And, again, we can’t blame ourselves too harshly; our brains crave stimulation. Boredom, which manifests itself as a weaker form of disgust and loathing, is all too easy to give into, especially with our ever-shortened attention spans. Studies have actually shown that we would rather experience a knowingly negative stimulus rather than experience the ennui of boredom. When we experience a negative stimulus, our primordial bodily reaction is for our amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for emotion, as well as the fight-or-flight response) to spin into hyperdrive, thus suppressing the function of our prefrontal cortexes (the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and complex decision-making). We get a small high from indulging in the instinct of our amygdala, thus reinforcing neural feedback loops of sharp, quick condemnation and rejection. Our brains, exhausted from the lack of stimulation, are readily aroused by new information and will quickly adhere to any stimulus, positive or negative, that will put it to work.
This manifests itself personally and most acutely when I catch myself watching specific media content that I know will enrage me, whether it’s the mindless rantings of political talking heads or the inane Facebook memes (often also political) that clutter up way too much of my newsfeed. There’s a sort of perverse pleasure that we get out of our self-inflicted pain. As much as we may consciously deny it, we tend to subconsciously get something out of our own disavowed misery. This manifests itself in several ways, including (but not limited to) wallowing in our own self-pity and despair, or by elevating ourselves above whoever we’re criticizing, pretending that if we could only get rid of that person/group/ideology, then the world would be a perfect place. This is the allure of fantasy that we try so desperately to sustain, which often leads to various forms of self-sabotage (but that’s another post for another day).
We do not know how to dwell with our own thoughts, to sit in the stillness of ourselves. To breathe. To simply be. It’s much easier said than done, so we often drown out our thoughts with the thoughts of others on podcasts or distract ourselves with repetitive, yet incredibly catchy music. We catch myself constantly returning to the ever-glowing screen of our smartphones, waiting as people addicted to slot machines to see if anyone likes anything that we’ve said as a shallow sign that at least for a brief second, at least one person out there in the world thought of us.
I catch myself running to my notebook, scribbling down any semi-profound thought that pops into my busy brain, immediately thinking about how I can turn it into a witty Tweet or a gripping blog post that people might actually find interesting and engaging. A halfhearted cast into the void, praying against hope that someone whispers back; a validation of my existence. Our brains tend to be filled with conflicting thoughts, feelings, and emotions that we tend to mask underneath a veneer of snarky certainty. Yet, this inability to resolve the conflict in ourselves manifests itself in our inability to have meaningful conflict between one another.
Holding a Space for the Untenable Other: The Necessity of Constructive Conflict
As a society, we’re currently figuring out how to have conflict. This seems counterintuitive in such a politically divisive time; it seems that one only has to turn the television on to see the newest ways in which conflict is wreaking havoc upon our own social order. Yet, it is precisely because we do not know how to have conflict that we see the deepening division in our current society. When we are approached by an incommensible worldview, one that is so fundamentally divergent from our own, our immediate reaction is to reject, attack, and destroy it. When we live in a fundamentalist society, the only way to progress is through the utter annihilation of the Other, justifying it through our own presupposed ideological superiority. When a group of people are defined more by an overarching ideology rather than complex, contradictory individuals, it becomes much easier to turn them into immutable objects, rather than fragile creatures with subjective experiences and nuances.
On the other hand, when we allow opportunities for conflict, we open up spaces for languages that can bring together disparate communities. Every position that someone holds tells us something about them, whether you find it reprehensible or not. The divisive rhetoric that we hear on every side often serves as a facade for deeper, more complex issues bubbling just beneath the surface. It is only when we read other human beings literalistically that we begin to level and eliminate all nuances of understanding (a principle that is well-accepted when we religious scholars apply it to sacred texts, but one we often have difficulty applying to our interactions with living, breathing people).
As such, I’ve begun the process of getting over myself, so to speak. I’ve realized that I cannot control other people and how they react to me. I’ve realized that despite my greatest fears, I cannot be friends with or be liked by everybody. And, perhaps, most importantly, I’ve begun to learn to take myself less seriously. The crux of my own religious tradition is all about death and resurrection, and it is only through the death of my own symbolic self, the idealized projection of myself, that true transformation can begin to occur. And I believe that if we were all open to this frightening process, then we could truly be liberated in our own discourses and personal lives.
In summation, I’m tired of idle chatter. On one hand, I’m over hearing talks of revolution and subversion without meaningful action. Similarly, I’m also weary of directionless, wanton action divorced from any meaningful constructive vision, instead finding its fuel in little more than unbridled rage, violence, and destruction. In short, I’m over the self-destructive nature of a social justice ethic divorced from empathy and compassion. Perhaps, in our current climate, it feels too soon to talk about construction and reconciliation. We, as a society, face systemic issues that are deeply rooted in the very fabric of the cultures we’ve created. Untangling the chords of oppression and evil will not be done overnight. Yet, we must also come to realize that every revolution, if it fails to contain and cultivate virtue, is doomed to self-destruction. As such, we must be attentive to our own individual culpability and responsibility.
In the constant noise and chaos of the world around us, it is easy to shut oneself in, retreating from the world and all of its struggles in the name of “self-care.” To fully engage with the world, though, we must also be attentive to cultivating the world within ourselves. Every person is a universe, with complexities and contradictions that nobody (not even the one holding them) will ever fully understand.
One of the key tasks of our cultural moment is to cultivate dialectical spaces where we can encounter the Other, listen to them, and perhaps be transformed by them. It’s an incredibly messy process. The Other inherently offends our sensibilities, challenging our own presuppositions and disrupting our own sense of selfhood. Our key task is to be able to listen and engage with the Other, resisting the automatic visceral responses of our amygdala, in order to create a space in which the possibility for growth and change might occur, no matter how unlikely it may seem.
We also need to find ways in which we can listen to positions that we hate, if for no other reason than to see ourselves more clearly. We need the eyes of the Other in order to see ourselves. We can only begin to see our own shortcomings once we see ourselves through the Other’s perspective. The central question of this propositions is this: can we angrily sit in a room with one another and produce something positive, even if we don’t like or respect the Other?
In all of this, I realize that, speaking from my position of relative privilege, it can be all to easy to propose such an open community when my existence/body is not on the line. There is absolutely a point where certain ideas cannot be accepted. Depending on your circumstance, it is completely acceptable to withdraw and remove yourself from an environment in which your very being is under threat. Also, this proposal can only work if both parties come to the table in good faith, not looking to demonize or outmaneuver the other. What I am proposing, however, is that if we’re up for it, to begin to expose ourselves to the Otherness of the Other, so that we can see the Otherness in ourselves. Only through this conflict, only by trudging through the Valley of Death, can we begin to see transformation and resurrection in our lives and the lives around us.
Final Thoughts: Why I’m Writing Again
In summation, that’s one of the fundamental functions of this blog. We, as human beings, have the responsibility and duty to take control of our own narratives. If we refuse to openly share our own experiences, then it is all too easy to have distorted stories projected onto us. In short, if we don’t offer up our stories, then others will do it for us. As such, my writing should not, under any circumstance, be taken as a source of authority from another “woke” white dude. Instead, this is a place where we can begin to process our own thoughts “out-loud,” in a sense, and where these types of conversations can begin.
Not everything I write here will be overtly political or cultural. While I do plan on writing about the sources and issues of both intrapersonal and interpersonal conflict, analyzing both the conflicts within ourselves and the conflicts between us, I’m also looking forward to reviewing the books that I’m currently reading, as well as any other subject/idea that I find interesting and worth processing alongside you all.
In the course of my writing, I am going to get things wrong. I’m absolutely going to say the wrong thing, make mistakes, and have to face my own shortcomings and biases. But I can promise you one thing: I will always be as open and honest as I possibly can in the hopes that my own Otherness serves as a catalyst for constructive conflict.
And I’ll hope you’ll walk with me on this journey, calling me out on my own short-sightedness, and offering a open hand of compassion and solidarity as we all navigate our way through this wide, weird, and wonderful world, in all of its complexity and beauty. Only by embracing one another, in conflict and compassion, can we begin to reach common understanding. So just one question remains:
Are you with me?