morethanenoughtruth

One of the most terrifying features of any Zoom meeting is its facility for supporting instant elections.  Most recently, when I offered an easy fix for an electronic defugalty, our moderator directed the assembly to agree or disagree with my bright idea by raising hands.  Only two hands joined mine, and I mercifully can’t remember whose they were.  Of course my lizard brain regressed into a defensive crouch.  I had been there many times before.  Recently and probably most painfully, my dearly beloved bible study group could only accommodate one translation of the week’s scripture on our virtual link.  Pastor reasonably asked for a show of hands.  If the New Revised Standard Version won, he would read the text himself; if the Robert Alter Version were chosen, taking my turn as designated Alter reader, I would be the one to intone the poetic phraseology.  I voted for Alter; everybody else voted for the NRSV.  They didn’t want me to read.  It was clear.  It hurt too much to bear, and I faded out of biblical exegesis entirely.

Whether authentic or delusional, memories haunt and hurt.  Attending twenty-six schools over my twelve years of public and private education, zig-zagging back and forth across Mason-Dixon line, I was ever the new girl—always different—speaking Texas twang in Massachusetts—the next year irritating my Texas homeland with Yankee acquired r-dropping.  I was a stranger in whatever strange land, no matter where I made my bed.

In the fourth grade I learned how to give a name to this miserable syndrome.  The classroom teacher directed every person to write on a piece of paper the name of the classmate they liked best of all.  She collected the sheets and assembled a chart placing a name in every circle.  Vectors drawn from each person to the one they preferred depicted strands of affiliation as arrows.  Partnerships and mutual crushes chose each other.  Popularity kings and queens fairly jumped off the page, impaled by a crush of arrows.  Only one circle stood alone, having been chosen by no one.  That circle was me.  So proud was teacher of her achievement that she provided a copy of the chart for every person to take home.  “The one identified as not worthy of choice by any person is called a social isolate,” she explained as she smiled and distributed her artwork.  That’s when everybody turned around and looked at me.

Down through the years I lived in fear of group dynamics, circles of affiliation floating behind my eyes, and threatening to make of truth a bludgeon.  Never was I voted into any classroom office.  No matter how hard I worked to excel, it was only the teacher who valued my efforts.  In high school the boys called me the nose, a commentary on my pursuit of high marks, assuming it was an obsession to please the instructors.  It was a relief when my high school yearbook did not report that slur in its featured list of unofficial titles.  I did have a snip of revenge at the annual Staples High School awards ceremony.  Trying to ignore my spiteful classmates as they poked me and yanked my braids, I heard my name called and climbed onstage to accept the Bausch & Lomb Honorary Science Award and then the PTA science scholarship.  I didn’t return to my seat but found and claimed a more congenial one.  Of course they hated me.

It wasn’t until my late twenties in Dallas that I joined an Adult Singles Sunday School class at Highland Park Methodist Church.  This huge congregation supported equally sizeable “small” groups, our class alone numbering over 200.  Soon I was acting out my nascent leadership.  Elected as Social Chairman, I planned wildly creative monthly events that swelled our number to unwieldy proportions.  We soon were pulling in the unchurched with zeal and were accused of too much success, perhaps even fomenting a “meat-market.”  Soon we earned a new sponsor whose quiet agenda was to quell the spirit in the interest of propriety, but I have never forgotten those lovely Methodists who elected me to an office.  It’s too bad that senior church management, when confronted with Christian love, could attribute it only to body heat. 

Later when settling in as a West Virginia farm wife, I began attending Ritchie County Farm Women’s Club’s monthly meetings.  Elected to office, I served as president for three years.  It looked like a coup, so finally I stepped down to encourage somebody else to take a turn.  It felt good to be part of a group, and I continued to reach for affiliation, as down through the years the pain of rejection was always worth the possibility of belonging.

Too much truth can assault the soul.  In 2011 I made a blog and named it morethanenoughtruth.com.  My site and I set out to have the last word.  If I speak my truth first, perhaps it won’t hurt so much.  As I settle into my eighty-second year, it is distressing to report that even now those early memories rise up and state their bitter case.  Just the suggestion that a minor dispute might be settled by vote is enough to throw me back into that frightening time, and suddenly a too-emotional response appears inappropriate to all who experienced growing up as something pleasantly normal.