You Don't Belong Here (a free post)

None of us do

Hope you can forgive two posts in one week, but I wanted to draw your attention to this piece titled What Broke the Evangelical Women’s Blogosphere.

Before I say much about the article, I just want to offer a bit of my own backstory—especially for those of you who are newer here.

I began blogging when blogging wasn’t a word, way back in the earliest days of LiveJournal, around 2001, where my assumption was no one was reading which was fine because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be read. I only knew I wanted to write.

Sayable’s first iteration came around 2005, named after one of Rilke’s elegies, which I read, sitting on a cold musty carpet, leaning up against the stacks in my conservative Christian college. I was nearly 25, ages older than my sophomore counterparts, my delay in schooling due to, well, my crazy upbringing and life up until that point. In those musty stacks I read Kierkegaard, Rilke, Lewis, and Kant. I discovered a love for poetry, philosophy, and the written word not as opportunity to bare all, but a path toward sorting through.

I knew from the age of 13 I wanted to be a writer (L’Engle’s Vicky Austin was the first person in the world who felt like me: insatiably curious, interested in art and science, poetry and theology, reason and feeling—never any of it to the exclusion of the other.), but by age 25, I was still trying to make sense of the fact that my family would never be like the safe and incubating cocoon of the Austin family and this makes a lot of difference for the writer.

Within healthy family units we learn to grow healthy attachments, mirror healthy emotional reactions, and are formed upon healthy platforms off of which we can spring into the world. Lacking a healthy family unit, we tumble into the world like a hamper of soiled clothes, having to do our own sorting, mixing, cleaning, washing, folding, and compartmentalizing. That’s where I was in 2005. My world—which had never been entirely healthy before—had completely imploded over the previous five years. The sudden and accidental death of my brother, the explosion of my parents marriage, the ensuing custody battle for my siblings that one of their many lawyers called ‘the worst custody case I’ve ever encountered,’ the forced delay of some aspects of my adulthood (a social security number at 21, then a driver’s license, a paying job, school, etc.) and the prematurity of other aspects of my adulthood (oldest and only daughter in a full-quiver, homeschooling, prepper household with an often absent/angry father, and a mother who was either pregnant or nursing almost every year until I was 21), meant I was both wildly responsible and also wildly ill-equipped for the real world.

Writing was the way I learned to attach all the disparate things in my life. There was such a chasm between everything for me, the world felt bewildering, and writing was the only way I knew to bridge it.

Years later, while undergoing EMDR to help heal my brain and PTSD from witnessing a shooting, a light bulb went on for me. As the pulses went from left to right, helping my left and right brain connect and rewire, I realized: this is what I have always been doing, trying to become whole.

I share all of that because it undergirds everything I still do as a writer. All I want to do in the world is bring two things together. Those things might be ideas, they might be people, they might be polar opposites, they might be near cousins. It might be ways of seeing the church or religion or politics or culture or people or places. What it is really doesn’t matter to me, honestly, it is everything. I see the world full of floating particles all wanting to be joined to one luminous whole. I see my work as a writer in it being one who thrusts my arm out into the universe and grabs hold of one small particle and does my best to wrest it out of chaos and into peace.

All of that said, in 2011, I found myself smack in the middle of the Evangelical Women’s Internet. I don’t know how it happened. I was in the bewildering first few moments of finding what felt like sensible Christianity, reasonable Christianity. I didn’t know or understand all of what was taught or embraced there, but it felt orderly to me and order is very important to many of those who grew up in chaos.

Plus, it seemed that there was something happening around Christian female writers and their work. I was being invited to exclusive gatherings of women, invited to write or speak, edit works by Christian giants, invited out for more coffees than I’d ever drunk before, put up in hotels, flown to conferences, famous and beautiful women seemed to want to be my friend—things that had never happened to me before and haven’t happened since.

It was, again, bewildering. All I’d been doing was trying to make sense of my life and putting it online. I had no ambitions to write a book or grow a platform or become an influencer. I was always just interested in the words themselves. I felt like a fraud constantly, like someone was about to tap me on the shoulder and say, “You don’t belong here,” and they’d be right.

But everyone kept saying some version of “You belong here!” Whole conferences were formed upon the idea that We Belong Here. Leave your sense of bewilderment at the door, settle in, get cozy on these plush floor pillows we bought from World Market amidst these scented candles, among these women who are praying and praising and crying and laughing. And I just sat there wide-eyed and uncomfortable.

The truth is, I didn’t belong there. I never did. I don’t think anyone did. I think a lot of it was a sham and I’m glad to have escaped it because it was just as dysfunctional as every other space I'd been a part of up until that point. It was corrosively controlling, full of gossiping women who shunned other women in private and gushed about them in public. Or shunned them in public and were Christian-nice to them in private. Everyone was called “friend” and no one really was. Once I was in a environment with 50 women who’d been invited to an exclusive spa for several days to envision a new kind of Women’s Gathering and it was full of women who were snubbing one another up and down all day online, but who demurred kindly over white wine and canapés in their social justice jewelry and highlighted hair. I, along with half of the other participants who were as bewildered as I by it all, didn’t belong there.

And it’s no wonder that I felt like that. Because none of us belonged there.

Maria Sibylla Merian, 1705, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium

When I read the piece this morning, What Broke the Evangelical Women’s Blogosphere, I could only think to myself, “Good riddance and thank God it broke.”

The article ends with,

Cultivating a more vibrant ecosystem of such resources may require evangelical women to intentionally give their attention to people who bridge differences and allow disagreement, but the current online climate fights against that.

“There is a quiet middle space with people trying to occupy it, but they are having a harder time than people who choose their camp,” said

Katelyn Beaty

. “‘Living in the tension’ isn’t a great brand. There’s no incentive to say ‘I don’t know.’”’

Incentive is the right word. So much of the evangelical women’s blogosphere revolved around incentivizing the work of women. It’s not surprising that this was also the golden age of the MLM, particularly among reglious women. GenX and Millennial women who grew up in the church, among those who eschewed feminism, who, if they went to college at all, went less for career reasons and more for MRS degrees, most of whom married and bore children early, the rest of whom longed for marriage and children wistfully, were finding themselves in a economic moment post-2008 where making money was becoming more important for their families, where making a living was becoming a shared burden in what had mostly been one-income families. This is why the magic word is incentive. It’s money. It’s always been money. Even for those who say it wasn’t, it was ministry—it’s still money.¹

When you take the lives of women—the look of their homes and households, their bodies, how they dress, do their hair, their marriages, children, theology, politics, and more, and tie each thread of it to money which comes through influence and influencing, right orthodoxy and orthopraxy, the right connections and networks, the kinds of friends who open doors and “make space,” you build a glass house that is certain to shatter.

And when it shatters, it shatters not just the platforms upon which those women stood, it shatters the women themselves. Which is why there’s a whole new swath of women influencers who are in the self-help genre. No one else is coming to rescue them, of course they have to help themselves, but they will certainly help you help yourself while they’re at it, which ultimately helps them help themselves…

As for me, I’m out of it. I’m not interested in helping myself or helping you, not ultimately. Living in tension might not be popular, or a great brand, and despite the lack of incentive, I’m going to keep saying “I don’t know,” because I’ve always been saying it and I still don’t know.

I read this quote from Jenny Offill recently,

“You never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, ‘Right now, I understand how this is done.’ That’s why so many talented people stop writing. It’s hard to tolerate this not knowing.”

I believe it is in the “not knowing” that our real work is done, both in the world and in us. I believe staying in that space will protect us from needing, wanting, or having a “personal brand.” I believe it will protect us from feigning belonging in places where no one belongs and it will keep us from finding identity in places that will fail us and hurt others along the way.

My favorite Madeleine L’Engle quote is about children’s literature and in it, she quotes Rilke (and so of course it’s my favorite), “I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.”

Disturbing the universe is our work as writers in the world. I would even say it’s our work as Christians in the world. If you want camaraderie and “fellowship,” go to the women’s conferences. If you want confirmation bias and views that keep you in your comfort zone, there are podcasts for that. If you want to be a part of some tidal wave of political or religious power, there are plenty of places for that. If you want to be influenced or be an influencer, get in line, it’s short.

I’m glad the Evangelical Women’s Blogosphere no longer exists, though, and I’m glad I got out. I don’t belong there. I never did.

Neither do you.

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1. This is why I want my life to be divested from billionaires, millionaires, and churches that operate like businesses.