Managing Expectations

Today, I woke up before noon. I showered and put on clean clothes. I drove myself to my therapist’s office and back. I ate three meals.

In other words, I have had a monumentally successful day.

When I was growing up in the homeschool subculture, quite a few of the books and other media I consumed were historical accounts or historical fiction, and I still think stories are the best way to learn history. History was exciting, not just because interesting things happened, also because it proved that ordinary people could make a huge difference in the world and be remembered long after they died. I wanted to be a history-maker.

The drive to be great and leave a legacy is not inherently bad, of course. Still, expectations are powerful, and the greater the dream, the greater the grief when it fades. There is no cynic like the disappointed idealist.

Of all the life events conspiring to make a cynic out of me, the worst culprit has been depression. It’s like a parasite that sucks out energy and pleasant emotions, replacing them with loneliness and self-consciousness and pain. There are treatments but no cures. I will probably have this disease for the rest of my life. I can’t say that depression has had a positive influence on my life, but I can still respond by trying to learn from it and be a better person in spite of it. One of the lessons is to manage my expectations.

Managing expectations. What a dull, gloomy sounding phrase. It sounds so mediocre and passive, doesn’t it? When both the mainstream and evangelical cultures I belong to scream at me—

Make a difference!

Join the movement!

Dream big dreams!

Follow your heart (or God’s vision)!

Be a world-changer!—

managing expectations, in contrast, seems like giving up. Who wants less out of life? It’s failure.

Yet it’s absolutely essential.

Some days I don’t have the ability to dream big or the energy to get out of bed and eat something. I am still an acceptable person. Some days, if I think of the many things I probably should be doing but am not, life is impossible, but I might have the energy to do just one thing, and then a next thing. Some days, the one thing and the next thing are all the things I can do; other days, I can gain some momentum and do more. And I am still an acceptable person.

I mentioned to my therapist that I wish I didn’t have insomnia, or trouble eating, or anxiety in social groups. Sleeping, eating, and talking to others are Human 101; these should be basic instincts, not daily struggles.

Accepting that I can’t do everything I’d like to do, and not holding myself to unrealistic standards (standards that usually result in frustration and shame) is, surprisingly, incredibly freeing and healing. It makes space for me to celebrate when I drive, because driving made me anxious after my accident in May and I couldn’t do it at all for several months. I can feel proud of myself for doing a load of laundry, replying to a text message, or writing a couple paragraphs more of the novel that’s been almost eight years in the making. I am working out my motivation muscles in hopes that in time they’ll get stronger. I take less for granted.

I am probably not going to change history. But I am doing my best to craft my story, and I want to approach it with the same courage, determination, and patience that I once wished I had so I could change the world.

Covenant, rejecting children, and the false gospel of Biblical gender roles

It was a Sunday night in November 2013. I was sitting in the church service, waiting to make a promise and join the church. My church. I had been attending the independent Baptist church since my first semester away at college, and it was everything I had been looking for. I loved the sense of community, the hymns drawn from our Christian heritage, the Reformed Theology, the formal attire and deep roots in the community. I had eaten meals with these people, and even contributed to the breakfasts and lunches for the college ministry, donated money, and served in the children’s ministry. Now I was ready to make my commitment formal. I hoped I would be able to live up to what I was about to promise, and that the church would live up to what it would promise me.

It was several months later, late March or early April. By this time, I had come to know myself as asexual and bi-romantic. My crush on another woman had nothing sexual about it, but I had strong romantic feelings. This was right after the World Vision fiasco, when several thousand evangelicals had decided they would rather let children starve than let them be fed by people like me. I was deeply closeted, knowing that I could be expelled from my conservative Christian college, and that I wouldn’t be able to afford my degree without my scholarship there.

I showed up to church in a less dressy outfit than usual, a cozy androgynous hoodie with a skater feel. The message that the college pastor spoke on was about persecution as Christians, a theme that resonated with me ever since I wanted to be a missionary at nine years old. But his slant on it was different. What had happened that week was that the church had asked a child not to re-enroll in their elementary school, and the child’s guardians had gone to the media and gotten the church bad press. The reason for refusing to re-admit the student was their gender “issues”– either she was a girl who was not feminine enough, or he was a transgender boy, I’m not sure. The church had been flooded with critical phone calls and e-mails, some of them really nasty and threatening. This backlash was the persecution that we were supposed to endure in a godly way. Absent from the message was a distinction between sharing the good news of Jesus and rejecting people based on “Biblical” gender roles. The unspoken message was that standing up against anyone who wasn’t cisgender and straight was essential to being a gospel-believing Christian.

In talking afterwards with two people who were on staff at the church, one of them tried to list to me all the verses that anti-gay Christians usually go to to call homosexuality a sin– verses that I had already thought through and carefully researched in my journey to understand myself as queer. The other one told me that he believed that a commitment to Biblical gender roles was what would separate true Christians from false ones in the coming years. No true Christian would support gay marriage or people trying to be a gender other than what God made them.

I felt hurt and rejected, but this was my church, the one I had made a promise to.

The next week, I showed up to church in a long dress, too late for the college ministry, but just in time for the service.

I couldn’t make myself go in.

I felt like I was going to have an anxiety attack, or start screaming, or both. Strong emotion swirled around me like a storm. I sat outside on the curb, trying to calm myself. No luck.

Still upset, I ran some errands, not wanting to waste the gas I’d burned driving there. Distracted, I went to the hipster grocery store in town and bought coffee creamer and a mango, quite forgetting I didn’t have a real knife to cut it with. I went back to my dorm, changed into some shorts, and took my picnic blanket out to a grassy field, where I tried to get the soft part away from the tough part of my mango with a plastic knife– a sticky task that I felt was a perfect metaphor for the absurdity and frustration I was already feeling– and read nightmarish short stories from a Kafka anthology in the sunshine for several hours. Eventually the storm of rage, shame, and hurt calmed to an empty ache, and I was able to go inside and focus on homework.

I didn’t go back to church the next week. I still haven’t been back to that church. That church promised to bring me closer to the gospel, to Jesus, and that promise was broken. Even if they’re right about who men and women should be and love, heterosexuality and gender roles are not the good news. Honestly, I felt quite a bit of guilt at first for leaving– after all, I made a covenant before God. But a married person can leave if his or her partner is abusive or unfaithful, and I think that concept applies here.

Since then, I’ve tried to make Christianity something I can believe in and put into practice in my life, and I haven’t been able to make it work. For now, I’m agnostic. But I still believe in love, and in hope. And if I do come back to Jesus, it’ll be to the Jesus who welcomed children, and wouldn’t let anyone push them away.

Naturalistic Morality: Dialog Review

The other night, I had the pleasure of going to a meeting of Dialog, a local philosophy club. I felt like I connected with the people there pretty well, and despite being the only attendee with a degree in philosophy, I was also the youngest one there. Since some of the members have been studying this stuff for decades longer than I’ve been alive, it worked out nicely.

The topic for discussion was naturalistic morality, specifically the question of whether such a thing is possible. We read excerpts from a fictional account of a dialogue between naturalists in which one convinced the other of ethical nihilism (you can read the longer piece here), written from a Christian perspective.

In my first upper-level philosophy course, the question “does morality need God?” was the first meta-ethics topic we covered. Another student and I were assigned opposing views; I answered “yes,” he answered “no,” we debated in class, and we turned in research papers defending our respective positions. Thinking of cute, naive, little sophomore-Emily makes me smile. It was nice to return to the topic in a casual setting, with a mix of believers and atheists.

What the fictional dialogue is getting at, I realized as the group went ’round and ’round, can be distilled to the following syllogism:

1. Either the basis for morality is natural or it is supernatural.
2. If the basis for morality is natural, then there are no objective moral obligations.
3. Therefore, if there are objective moral obligations, then the basis for morality is supernatural.

Premise #1 is intended to be based on the Law of Non-Contradiction, and the justification for premise #2 is that we want to avoid the naturalistic fallacy– “you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.” Observation of nature, even the natural phenomena we find inside and among ourselves as humans, can only tell us what is, not what ought to be or what we ought to do. It’s a valid syllogism, so to get to a natural basis for real moral obligations, one or both of the premises has got to go.

One of the group members, the leader of a local humanist organization, was actually mostly okay with this. He argued that thinking of morality as something objective, something that exists outside of humanity, is a dead end– that the theist raises a need for “ultimate grounding” in order to stick God in the gap. Morality is a social and psychological construct, and that doesn’t make it any less real. Our experience of empathy, and our shared biological heritage as humans, is enough to base morality on.

The problem I had with this, and which I didn’t feel like I got an answer to, is that thinking or feeling that we are obligated to help others (or not to harm them) is not the same as actually having that obligation. While it may be enough for the naturalist who sincerely wants to be moral– and it was for this man, as he described enthusiastically– what about the naturalists who do not experience empathy or sense any obligation towards others? Are they off the hook when it comes to treating people with decency?

One naturalist in the group claimed that morality was culturally relative, but I think there are strong reasons for rejecting this idea: it makes all attempts to reform society immoral, it makes social progress an incoherent idea, and it leaves no grounds for preferring the ethical norms of one culture over another.

When the group leader, a Christian, was pressed to give criteria for what constitutes a basis for morality, he gave three, the relevant one being that a basis for morality engenders duty. I shifted the burden of proof by asking what it is about God that lets him engender duty in humans, and why humans don’t engender duty in one another. What relevant feature does God have that we don’t? He emphasized that God-given morality would be universal, not limited to any one human culture or individual.

I’m not committed to naturalism, but if there is a solution to morality without God, I think it’s premise #1 that I have a problem with. Sure, any basis for morality is either natural or non-natural, but non-natural is not the same as super-natural. Human consciousness and human freedom, even if they are the result of natural processes and not an ontological entity such as a soul, are not merely natural. We are subjects, not objects, and subjects can value things, act freely, feel pleasure and pain, and think about consequences. Furthermore, consciousness and freedom are universal to humanity, even if the content of our consciousness and the specific decisions we make vary. (If Sartre was right, this is the only thing universal about human nature.) Perhaps the fact that I am an aware, feeling subject is enough grounds for me to say that other subjects ought not end my experience by killing me or cause me gratuitous suffering. You ought not stab me, for instance, not because of the mere, natural fact of chemicals transmitting signals through my nervous system, but because it would cause me, the person, to experience being in pain.

This topic certainly calls for a lot more thinking and discussion, but I felt like we got off to a pretty good start the other night. I’m certainly feeling accepted in the group, and I think that the other people there are worth listening to and learning from. Next month’s topic is free will vs. determinism, so it should be fun!

The Dawn of Convalescence

Among the many peculiarities of Victorian society that have gone out of use is the practice of convalescence. People who were sick, at risk of becoming sick, or had just undergone medical treatment would stay in a countryside or seaside home for several weeks or even months to recover their health. It was thought that fresh air, sunshine, nutrition, and rest, with a generous dose of time, were what patients needed to recover their strength and well-being.

I’m not sure why we stopped doing this. Perhaps it was a medical model that shifted to focus on eliminating infections and prescribing pills, perhaps it was a cultural emphasis on productivity, or perhaps a “work hard, play hard” attitude made even our vacations active and exciting.

In any case, convalescence is a good idea, and it’s too bad it went out of practice. I believe in living in a way that cultivates virtue and excellence, and while we know what excellence looks like in the context of physical strength, intelligence, and integrity, what might excellence look like applied to rest? In the face of depression and recovery from a restrictive eating disorder, what might resting well be like for me? For so long I’ve pushed through and prioritized achievement over well-being, I don’t know how to attain the rest my body and mind so desperately need.

So that’s why I’m entering this season of healing. There’s a certain paradox about it– actively abstaining from activity, setting out each day to do very little– but I am willing to embrace the absurdity even though it means postponing my education and dreams by a year.

How do you balance rest and activity? How do you rest with excellence? Share your thoughts in the comments below.