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| Album cover for "Different Kind of Free." Image source. |
ZOEgirl was a Christian band that was active in the early 2000's, around the time I was in high school. It was one of my favorite bands; my favorite song was Different Kind of Free.
Take my life, my liberty
It's all but a breath in the grand scheme of things
Oh I have found eternity
It's a different kind of free
And they can't take it from me
Big words about one's commitment to God, how it's so much bigger and more important than anything else, how it's worth dedicating your life to.
Anyway, what are the members of ZOEgirl up to now?
Well, Alisa Childers is an author, publishing books like Another Gospel?: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity and Live Your Truth and Other Lies: Exposing Popular Deceptions That Make Us Anxious, Exhausted, and Self-Obsessed. She's all about responding to progressive Christianity and telling everyone why it's bad and we need to stand firm on the truths that conservative/evangelical Christianity taught us. Uh, as a queer ex-evangelical Christian I don't really agree with her on that.
(no idea what the other 2 members of ZOEgirl are doing now- I'm just writing about this because Childers came to my attention recently)
Anyway. Apparently Childers recently made a podcast discussing Sheila Wray Gregoire's book "The Great Sex Rescue" (which I reviewed here). Gregoire wrote a blog post in response: Alisa Childers Owes Evangelical Women an Apology for Dismissing Their Pain. "The Great Sex Rescue" calls out the conservative Christian teaching that wives are required to have sex with their husbands on demand, because men need it, and the wife is obligated to do all the work to make it a good experience for the husband, and nobody cares about women's orgasms, etc. It's very good that "The Great Sex Rescue" is responding to this teaching; it's extremely messed-up that the typical marriage advice from conservative Christians says things like that. But anyway, apparently on her podcast, Childers said no one's actually teaching this "obligation sex" message, no one's telling women they need to prioritize their husbands' "sexual needs" even when they haven't even healed from childbirth, etc. (Fact check: They ARE teaching that!) And apparently the podcast also spent a lot of time wondering if it's even okay to talk about sex and orgasms.
I don't know why this bothers me so much. I sang her songs expressing my feelings about my devotion to God, and 20 years later she has bad opinions about Christian teaching on sex and marriage... Why does this bother me so much? People are allowed to have bad opinions on things; it's not like this is some kind of massive betrayal of me personally because I was a fan of her music when I was in high school.
I guess it makes me realize that... the music, and the experience of enjoying the music, was a different thing than I thought it was. Singing those worship songs, I was fooled into thinking it was an environment where I can be completely honest about my deepest emotional, intimate feelings about God. When I sang those songs, that was real; those were my real feelings. And now, 20 years later, she's the sort of Christian who would condemn me for being a queer Christian- it's not emotionally safe to tell her my feelings about God.
I don't want to show my most real and raw feelings about how I love Jesus, in front of Christians who will judge me and say I don't really love Jesus because I don't hold the "right" beliefs. I don't hold the "right" beliefs about so many things, spanning the whole range of evangelical Christianity, but we can make it simple by just saying I'm queer.
Again, this isn't really something that Childers is doing wrong- as if our favorite singers owe it to us to agree with us about all the big important things in our lives, just because we find their music to be emotionally meaningful. It's more about... like... me wanting an environment where I can express how I really feel, with complete trust that the people seeing it would accept me for who I am, falsely believing that ZOEgirl's music was that environment, and now realizing it wasn't. Realizing I should have my guard up a little more. That I always have to think about who sees me and what they think of me, and filter my expression accordingly.
(See also: Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival")
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I should also admit that there are people who would find *me* "not emotionally safe" to talk to about certain topics. Here's an example I've mentioned before: I read a blog post where a Catholic woman talked about her belief that it's a sin to use birth control, and how it was so hard for her, and she was constantly terrified of getting pregnant, and she already had several kids, and she was trying so hard to "obey God" and not use birth control, but it was stressing her out so much.
My feelings on this are, hey good news, it's not a sin to use birth control. Problem solved!
But it would not be helpful to just go and say that to her. She's putting so much effort into following this belief; it's very important to her. You can't just tell her it's wrong. She needs someone to empathize with her, to understand her feelings about why it's so important to follow this Catholic teaching about not using birth control, and to understand how difficult it is for her. I think I'm not the right person to do that. I hope she has somebody who can help her, but it's not me.
Or, suppose a parent has a kid who comes out as queer, and the parent has a lot of feelings about it. The parent is sad, because it means their kid's life is not going to match the expectations that the parent had.
It makes sense that the parent would have complicated/negative feelings and need someone to give them emotional support. It's totally understandable to have those feelings- those are real feelings, and the parent is not doing anything wrong. But I'm not the right person to talk to, because mostly I'm thinking of the larger political narrative where people treat the parent's feelings as more important and more valid than the kid's. Sometimes people even seem to believe 'it's bad for you to come out as queer, because it will make your parents sad.'
It's about viewing the situation in terms of the larger culture war, vs viewing it as a specific event that this specific person is experiencing and has feelings about.
Hopefully there is someone they can talk to, who can understand and support them. But I'm not the right person for that.
I've seen an example of this, actually. A while ago, on the internet, I saw a trans person having a conversation with someone whose kid was trans. And this parent was unhappy about it, and this trans person on the internet talked to them about how they felt, and really wanted to understand them and give them emotional support. I think this is really good- they did the right thing, talking to this parent to understand how they felt. But I'm sure other people on the internet criticized them for it, because of the larger "culture war" context where parents' feelings are wrongly treated as more important than queer people's freedom to make our own choices.
If it's just a one-on-one conversation, it should be about that specific person, and their situation and their feelings, not about the "larger culture-war context." I *hope* if I was in that situation, I *could* be nice and understanding, but I don't think I'm good at it.
You personally are not obligated to talk to them and try to understand their feelings, but hopefully they have someone they can talk to and get support from.
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A few years ago, I read the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The big sales pitch for this book is that the narrator of the story is autistic, so supposedly everyone should read it to learn how autistic people think.
My thoughts while reading it were: Yeah, the way this character thinks and talks, this is totally natural. Totally totally normal to think like this. But, you need to have someone come alongside you, as a child, and explain to you that you can't express yourself to other people in this way. You can't just say what's in your head. You have to filter it into something that can interface with other people's paradigm of how to communicate. Didn't this character have a trusted adult to explain that to him, like my mom did for me? Kind of cringey that he's just saying what's in his head, and it's going to come across to other people in a way he did not intend at all.
For example, he wants to talk to everyone about the Apollo moon landings. Relatable! He wants to talk about this all the time. Of course! I totally get that! The Apollo moon landings were really cool; of course one would want to talk about that all the time, rather than whatever small talk things people normally talk about. *I* would like to ask everyone what their favorite dinosaur is. But I don't do that, because generally people aren't interested in talking about that.
(My favorite dinosaur is triceratops.)
And I don't mean this in an "isn't it terrible that society forces autistic people to mask? we should just let autistic people be themselves" way. It really *is* necessary to filter, rather than just directly saying the thoughts in one's mind, because they would come across as rude or insensitive. That's not the intention at all, but to people hearing it, that's how it would come across. We live in a society; we have to be aware of the commonly-expected ways of communicating, and format our speech into something compatible with that. Everyone has to do this! Perhaps it's a lot more work for autistic people than for neurotypical people, but it *is* necessary.
So my ever-present desire to have a setting where I can just honestly say how I feel, and I don't need to have an awareness of "hey, tone this part down, think about how this is going to come across to other people"- there's an element of autistic masking in that. And there have been situations where I've been fooled into thinking I can just share my honest thoughts, and that people are genuinely interested in listening to me and understanding me- so then I didn't mask at all- and then people misunderstood it and took it the wrong way. It's not even their fault! If I say something that interfaces with their way of thinking, in a way that ends up misrepresenting what I meant, well, neither of us have done anything wrong, it's just a mismatch in how we communicate.
What this all leads to is, there's not really any such thing as a person so objective and neutral and open-minded that I can just tell them my thoughts and feelings, with no filter, and they will totally understand and not take anything the wrong way. It doesn't really have anything to do with them being "objective and neutral and open-minded", as if the way I communicate is just the baseline obvious way to communicate, and people need to stop being so pesky, reading into it things that I never said. No- the way I communicate is not "neutral"; it's based on my own particular way of thinking. The people who really understand me, even when I don't put much work into filtering myself, are the people who know me really well, and know the quirks of how I think, and how I communicate.
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This has always been one of my most important requirements for being in a romantic relationship. I want to be able to just tell my partner whatever I'm thinking about, rather than stopping myself because I know most people aren't interested in whatever topic happened to surface in my brain.
Yeah, I do this with my husband all the time. He gets to hear about all sorts of random things that are on my mind. He does a great job listening to me and not telling me that my interests are boring.
Still, it's not exactly the perfect romantic "I can tell him anything" that I always imagined. Sometimes I don't tell him something because I know it's going to make him worried or stressed. That's fine- he's a person with his own feelings; it makes sense that I consider that and not force him to talk about things that are going to stress him out.
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Communicating across languages is also like this. When I was in college (in the US) and started making friends with a lot of international students, I found that I had to pay attention to how I talked to them in English- I had to talk a little slower, had to avoid words that they probably don't know, had to avoid deeply American cultural references that they don't know about. When you communicate with someone, you want them to be able to understand what you're saying, so yes, it is necessary to filter yourself like this, if you're talking to someone whose English ability is lower than yours.
And when I came to China and worked as an English teacher, we were trained to not just chatter incessantly at the students, because they can't understand all that, and so it's not helpful to them. We were supposed to carefully consider how much to say. You want it to basically be at a level they can understand, but with a little bit of challenge so they can continue to improve.
When I talk to my husband- whose first language is Chinese- sometimes I avoid using English phrases or idioms that I don't think he'll understand. Sometimes I just use them anyway though. While writing this blog post, I asked him "do I sometimes use English idioms you don't understand?" And then he said "what does 'idioms' mean?" and I explained it and then he said, "Oh, you mean slang." And then he said he doesn't understand them, but also I don't understand a lot of Chinese idioms.
I'm sure I come across differently when I speak Chinese than when I speak English. And I've totally seen this in other people too, lots of times, how they come across as awkward in English, but really confident and fun when they speak Chinese.
Hot take: Speaking a second language is like masking, because you can't say what *you* want to say; you have to translate it into something that your audience can understand.
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My advice, if you want to learn to speak a language and communicate with people in that language, is you have to accept that you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and it will be awkward and people will laugh at you, and you have to just keep going and not let that embarrass you.
It's one thing to take a class, and practice speaking and writing in that classroom environment, but then the first time you go and try to talk to a native speaker and they give you a blank stare because they have no idea what you're trying to say- well, I can see how that experience can be so unpleasantly awkward that you would want to avoid it at all costs. But you can't learn that way! If your goal is to be able to talk to people, you need to practice talking to people. (If your goal is something else, like reading, this advice wouldn't necessarily apply.)
Sometimes you *will* misunderstand and say something completely wrong. Just laugh at yourself and don't treat it as a big deal.
In China, I have had to rely on the kindness of strangers a lot- times when I'm trying to do something, and I don't know how. For example, going to pick up a package from the locker in our apartment complex, where deliveries get dropped off- there's a computer screen and you have to click some buttons to get the right locker to open. There have been times I couldn't figure out how to do it, and I had to ask whatever other random person happened to be nearby. Things like that, little daily-life things that I have had trouble with. I'm not scared to go find some stranger and very earnestly describe the problem to them in Chinese that's maybe not totally correct. (That happened a lot when I first came to China, but now I've been here more than 10 years so I don't usually need help with stuff like that any more.)
At the beginning, I did worry that "they'll think I'm a confused white person, they'll think I can't speak Chinese" but what I've found is, if I'm acting awkward because of those fears, then it will be awkward for the other person too. I just have to act confident and focus on "let's figure this out together" and be grateful for their help, and not worry about their opinion on my level of confused-white-person-ness.
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So, back to ZOEgirl and expressing one's deeply personal feelings about God in front of other people.
I'm not saying you should never express your feelings publicly/ in front of strangers/ in front of people who could misunderstand. It makes sense, as part of an emotionally healthy life, to sometimes be in situations where you *do* express your feelings and there *is* some level of risk because you don't know how people will view it. What I'm saying is, you should have an awareness of the situation and the risk. It should be an informed decision. And you don't just share the raw feelings, but choose how to show it, based on your understanding of your audience.
I'm pushing back against the idea that it's not necessary to have any kind of awareness at all about who can see you and what they think. In church, people used to say during the worship time, "it's just you and God"- that we were supposed to be totally real and raw and it would be wrong to filter our expression because of what other people might think. And also, people talking about "authenticity" like it's always a good thing. And "vulnerability"- yes, lots of times I've been in Christian groups where we were told to "be vulnerable" with each other, to share our real feelings and problems, pushing past that innate hesitation.
I guess this can be good advice, if it is meant as "we all feel pressure to pretend we're perfect and don't ever need help- but that stops us from actually connecting with people and being able to truly understand and support each other. If you want to have meaningful, deep friendships, you *do* have to tell people your real feelings and problems." Sure, that's true, and if the point is to keep that in mind, and think about your goals, and go at your own pace, then that's good advice.
Ah, and I'm thinking about my audience right now, and I'm like, maybe I'm the only one who took it to mean we should just not care who hears and what they think. That I took "be vulnerable" as a command to just turn off that sense of caution. Like I don't need to do any consideration at all about what to share; that's all outsourced to whoever said "be vulnerable." The blog posts about autism are the hardest ones, because of this exact "should I really publish my honest thoughts, or is it going to come across in a way I didn't intend" problem. (My target audience is people who have had similar difficulties in navigating the interplay between wanting to express their honest thoughts and wanting to avoid being misunderstood. Maybe people outside that target audience will indeed misunderstand this blog post/ take it the wrong way.)
"I don't care what people think" can be interpreted 2 different ways. It could mean that you have a general understanding of the possible range of what people might think and how they might judge you, and you have decided that the benefits of being able to express yourself outweigh the risk. This can be a good thing; plenty of situations where it *is* a good decision to say how you really feel, even though people may misunderstand or judge you. Or, it could mean that you haven't done that analysis at all. For some reason, you believe you are in a situation where you are "supposed" to just honestly express how you feel, and you're not "supposed" to put any thought into the normal social dynamics of how people communicate. Well, I'm here to tell you, that's a bad idea, don't do that.
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And my controversial hot take is, even with God, you have to consider your audience.
Is God a real Being, who actually exists and has opinions and a personality, Who existed before I came along with all of my opinions about what's "obvious"? Or is God just something I made up based on how I imagine an all-knowing Being who perfectly understands me?
Why should I assume that God understands what I'm talking about, and agrees with all the background assumptions which are necessary to understand what I'm saying? (This is why I don't pray.)
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So, this is kind of a weird paradox: wanting to be understood, and also wanting to be able to just say what's in one's mind, without filtering it based on one's audience. How *can* you be understood by someone listening to you, if you haven't formatted your speech into something compatible with their way of taking in information?
The only way this could happen is if you're talking to someone whose way of thinking is pretty much the same as yours. And this is exciting when it happens- sometimes you meet someone with a very similar way of thinking, or similar experiences, and it's awesome because you can just say something without going to all the trouble to explain it like you normally would, and they just *get* it.
I've been on the other side of this too- someone is telling me something that they've clearly thought about a lot, and they're very enthusiastic, with an attitude "finally I've found someone I can talk to about this!" and it turns out I'm not that interested and I don't get why it's such a big deal to them. Sorry to disappoint. Whatever weird quirk makes them so obsessed with that specific idea, I do not share it. I have different weird quirks that make me obsessed with different weird ideas.
I do appreciate that they tried, though. Good to try to connect with people. And this shouldn't just be about "I want someone to understand *me*"- other people also deserve to have someone understand *them*, so it's good when you do the work of reaching out and trying to understand what's really important to other people, even if you're not interested in it yourself.
(Sometimes I'm the one helping random Chinese strangers get their packages out of the machine.)
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Filtering, masking, translating. It's always necessary to some extent, when you're interacting with people. The greater the similarity between yourself and your audience, the less filtering you have to do. Or, the more they know you as a specific person with your specific way of thinking, the less filtering you have to do. I always want to find someone that I can just tell my honest thoughts to, without considering any of this filtering at all- and this is pretty much how I am with my husband- but in general, that's not how it's going to work.
I wanted to believe that ZOEgirl's music, or worship music in church, was that magical safe space where I could just show how I feel and not consider other people. But it's not. There's no "safe space" that is just going to automatically be a safe space because someone defines it as such- you always have to do the work of considering who is there and how you come across.
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Discussion question for the comments section: What is your favorite dinosaur?
Or, share a cool fact about the Apollo moon landings.
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Related
About Vulnerability, Boundaries, and Oversharing
Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"
My Parasocial Relationship With God
Full-Service Movers (a post about being in charge of your own life)
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