Origin Story

Or, what we're doing here

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Happy Friday, all! How was your week?

Mine was a little wacky, I’m not going to lie. Multiple jobs, two teenagers in the house, single mom. No rest for the wicked, as they say.

I once owned a whole herd of goats. Those mischievous, little critters and I are of a type. Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash

Still, there’s newslettering to be done! Conversations to be had! So, let’s do it.

We’ve had a bunch of new subscribers recently, which always makes me feel like I need to go back and reiterate what we’re about here. If you’re relatively new and want some more detail on discernment, reflective functioning, my definition of integrity, the deep wisdom of near enemies, or the role of the transcendent, you can find those via the links. Also, feel free to scroll the archives. There’s a ton of great stuff from the last 2+ years in there.

Today, though, I thought I’d approach the question of what the heck we’re doing here by offering an origin story for this particular obsession of mine. Here goes…

My parents were (are, in my mom’s case because she’s still around, thank goodness) deeply moral people, descended from long lines of deeply moral people— pastors and church ladies for generations. When I say moral, at least when referring to my parents, I don’t mean the narrative of morality that the Religious Right has been controlling via mainstream politics since the time of Reagan, all opposition to abortion and insistence on heterosexual, Christian family as the foundation for society. I’m talking about having a strong, deeply considered system of belief about right and wrong and living that belief out into the daily fabric of your life.

My mom participated in the early sit-ins in Chattanooga and stood alone to protest pro-McCarthy speakers coming to her college campus. My dad staged a hunger strike to protest the targeting of one of his college professors over his opposition to the Bay of Pigs and traveled to Morocco with other religious folks to participate in rebuilding efforts after a massive earthquake there. They ended up together in Tanzania doing development work because my dad couldn’t qualify as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He could have taken a pastoral deferment. That’s when folks headed to seminary, as he was at the time, could get out of actually standing up for what they believed by promising to stay in a classroom to talk about God. But my dad couldn’t do that because he was a stand up kind of guy, so he opted to do what was called “alternative service”, and they spent the next almost-decade living in East Africa, adopting two kids, and working in whatever way possible to change the world for the better.

Being deeply moral people, however, didn’t prevent them from also being deeply imperfect people, as we all are, though I didn’t understand that as a kid. All I understood was that our household— my parents, my two older brothers, and me, along with various other folks that my parents took in over the years— was awash in addiction, anger, and violence, despite our public professions of pacifism as a family of committed Quakers. I got caught in the crossfire of conflicts that had nothing to do with me and was the specific target of violence and abuse by my brother David starting when I was in pre-school.

Many of us are struck by the hypocrisy we encounter in the world, particularly when we hit adolescence and the world becomes more complex seemingly overnight. I am, however, temperamentally, a believer. By which I mean that belief is how I orient myself. Big questions of why and how we do what we do motivate me. So, this dissonance between my family’s public professions of faith and our private lives grabbed me as a kid and wouldn’t let go. I wanted to know how to live strongly held, aspirational beliefs about human beings and society successfully as a complex, imperfect person, but no one seemed to having that conversation. Not my parents, and not any of the other families struggling around us. Everything was hidden, kept behind closed doors.

We didn’t talk about shame in the same way in those days, but I can’t come up with a better reason for why everyone whispered about each other’s business, but never actually reached out to challenge or help each other. Shame is an integrity-killer, make no mistake.

As I moved out into the world I tried to find the answer to this question of how to live with integrity outside of the confines of my faith community. I took jobs that seemed to meet the criteria for being properly “of service” in the world— working in homeless shelters and domestic violence programs. I was deeply involved in leftist activism, planning and attending protests, and helping organize campaigns. I worked with a lot of great people, and watched them, just like my family had, say one thing publicly and then do another privately— to avoid conflict or protect their power, because they had secret shames or because they had never engaged in enough self-reflection to even notice their own inconsistencies.

Speaking of self-reflection, for all my attempts to do good work in the world, I didn’t really know who I was or what I wanted. I was so used to locating my sense of purpose and worth outside myself— in what my parents valued, or what my friends and fellow activists valued. Wanting things for myself that didn’t fit those rubrics felt selfish, indulgent, and utterly foreign.

By my late twenties, not only was my work to put band-aids on gaping social wounds sucking the life out of me, but the activist communities that I was part of were also deeply exhausting for me. Their opposition to unjust systems was absolutely justified, but they weren’t ever conceiving of real alternatives to those systems. They were simply saying no. This is wrong. This over here is unjust. This doesn’t work at all, for anyone. All true statements, but a damn depressing way to orient your life.

I needed to build my life around a yes, and was convinced that I could somehow, with no models and a minimum of self-understanding, do all the things I thought I was supposed to— marriage, parenting, community-building— better than my parents. So, I moved to a small community in Upstate New York, got married, bought an organic farm, and had a couple of kids. I also continued to go to a lot of therapy, studied astrology, and tried to make some sense of myself.

I was learning and growing and deepening throughout my thirties, but I’d also trapped myself in a marriage that mirrored the emotional dynamics— anger, violence, and orienting my sense of my worth and values outside myself— of the family I grew up in.

I remember asking my ex-husband, when he was still my fiancé, why he wanted to marry me, and he replied, I’ve never known anyone who worked so hard to live their beliefs. You make me want to be a better man. Maybe I should have run screaming in response to being offered the task of being someone else’s moral compass, but we were babies. He handed me his moral compass and I handed him my sense of worth and direction. It’s not a surprise to me now that it all fell apart eventually, but it sure was shocking to me then. See also: humbling, massively disorienting, and traumatic.

I was forty years old— no job, two kids to support, summarily jettisoned out of the life I’d been building with dogged determination. The life that would, I’d been convinced, prove all my ideas about the ways life and family are supposed to work. That would keep me and my children safe from harm. That would be simple, and loving, but also follow the traditional script. That would allow me to be my parents, but also somehow different, better, more honest, and more integrated.

[insert rueful chuckle]

If the universe were a chef with one of those enormous tenderizing mallets, then the last ten years since my marriage ended I’ve been the tough piece of meat getting beaten to hell in order to soften it enough to make it delicious. I’ve been continually knocked up, down, and sideways by really big questions: Who are you? What are you here for? What do you want? What really matters? Who can you trust with your most vulnerable, imperfect self? How do you build the sorts of relationships that support your integrity instead of undermining it? What are you willing to fight for? How do you do that while staying honest, accountable, and true to yourself,?

I have come to understand by wrestling with these questions and doing the work required to begin (begin!) to answer them, that integrity is both a process and a practice. It is a way of approaching individual situations ethically, and also a way to organize your life. It requires continual self-reflection, though that seems too tame a word, honestly. If you want to live with integrity, you have to wade into all the mucky bits of your own history and psychology, do some cataloguing and clean-up, shine some light in the dark corners, and develop some honest love for your imperfect self. Otherwise, all the neglected and unexamined parts of you will take control of the wheel in one way or another. Trust me on this one.

This messy emotional work, this questioning about who you are and what you genuinely believe, this work to build the kinds of relationships that support your integrity publicly and privately, is all essential to integrity practice, but it’s not the end. Integrity is not simply an exercise in self-awareness or a means to make your own, individual life super awesome and ethically impeccable. Your personal integrity work is ultimately for the good of your community and the world. It makes you capable of sitting with others while they muck about in their own messy emotional material and holding them accountable with compassion. It makes you available to stand up with strength and authenticity when it’s time to stand up. It gives you the critical faculties and the authority to challenge systems, and the discernment necessary to conceive of constructive alternatives.

I believe the world really needs us to show up in this way, for ourselves and for each other. I’m not sure how we will survive otherwise. But I don’t fool myself, and I won’t ever fool you. Practicing integrity isn’t easy. What it asks of us, the way it restructures our priorities, flies in the face of some of the most essential aspects of our modern social reality— individualism, capitalism, political tribalism, and our seemingly unending tendency to create hierarchical systems of human value.

We need each other to do this work successfully— to keep each other company when it’s hard, to hold each other accountable, and to cheer each other on when we somehow manage to knock it out of the park. Working together we can refuse shame, and provide vulnerable, loving, steadfast witness. No single person, no matter how successful their integrity practice may be, can transform the integrity of an entire community, a nation, or the world. But all of us working together can do that.

That’s what we’re about here at the newsletter. That’s what we’re doing. Thanks for being here. I’m so glad to have you.

XO, Asha