The Awakening: A Coming Out Story in Pictures

Last night at our homeschool group's curriculum sharing night/7-hour chatfest, a friend I hadn't seen in awhile said, "Su, you look fabulous!"

And I thought, "Yes, I do."

This morning I had the idea of doing a blog post about how sometimes I look at old pictures of myself, and I am lovely, but when I think about what I thought about myself at the time, it breaks my heart. I was going to put up a picture like this one of me at 22:

And I was going to say: Look at this attractive young woman. She is packing up to leave the land after her first Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and this unposed shot was taken by a friend. She is smiling out of the frame at her lover at the time (whom you may know as my friend Farina Endfen from some recent blog posts). She looks happy, relaxed, fit, and lovely. She has a charming, easy smile and, apparently, dimples, although this photo is too low-quality for you to be able to see them.

However, this is what she thinks of herself: she thinks that she is grossly fat. She thinks that certain unfortunate features of her physical appearance--her eyebrows, her nose, her high forehead, and her facial hair, to name only a few--mean that she is not, and never will be, pretty. Although she has never had any trouble finding either romantic or sexual partners, she is convinced that each person who expresses an interest in her in this way has been so charmed by her intelligence, her wit, and her bubbly personality that it has overcome their, what? Revulsion is too strong a word...so is distaste. Ah, let us say, their indifference to her physical appearance. It has never occurred to her that someone might be attracted to her because of her physical appearance, or that those who enjoy her bubbliness and wit and intelligence might also sometimes just enjoy looking at her.

I was going to go on to say that one of the many reasons that this, right now, is the best time of my life is that I feel very good in my body, and I look good in my body, and I know it. (Do I have any pictures? No. The only person who takes pictures of me is the Tiny Tornado, and they are usually pictures of my butt. But maybe I can get David to take some this weekend.)

I was thinking of doing a series of these: here I am at 16. Adorable! Yet self-hating. Again at 23. Again at 30. And so on. Until the thrilling conclusion: Here I am at 46, happier in my body than I have ever been before. Even though I am also, without a doubt, actually fat and not just imagining that I am. Who'd have predicted that?

The first box of photos I found covered only the years from my high school graduation at age 17 through my First Grad School Foray, which ended 6 years later. And as I flipped through these albums, I saw a different story being told: "My Gay Boyfriends: Seriously, How Could We Not Have Known, Just Look at These Photos."

But that's not the only story, and it's not the one I'm telling today. This is the one I'm telling today:

Until I was 20, in almost every picture taken of me, I am crossing my arms. Whether I am on a sailboat in San Diego Harbor with my dad's cousin Barbara or coming down the dunes with my cousins or getting my picture taken with Grandma Irene before we leave for the airport, my arms are crossed over my stomach:

If I can't cross my arms, I fold up on myself and look away from the camera:

In those last two shots, I am 17 and on a bike trip with my cousin Marion, who is 57. She's on the glider there with me, in the red tank top, looking completely at ease and gazing cheerfully and directly into the camera. The young woman on the glider drinking a Dr. Pepper is an amazing physical specimen. She can ride her bike 60 miles in a day, set up camp, and then hop back on to go exploring, riding another 10 or 20 miles before bed. Her bulging thighs and calves are like granite. But she believes herself to be basically an unfit and sedentary person, because she is so often harassed for the time she spends sitting around reading, and because she does not play any sports or do anything "athletic." She does her best to hide when the camera comes out, because even though she is in the middle of pedaling her bike over 700 miles across the state of Michigan and then up the western shore to the UP, she is ashamed of her body.

This is only a sampling of the pictures like this I could show you. But then, one day, something changes:

[Side note: In this picture, you can see my son the Lego Savant, who won't be born for another 16 years, squinting into the camera with me.]

Let me tell you the story of this picture:

I am 19. I am transferring to the University of Michigan, and they have assigned me a roommate. I get a letter that tells me that my roommate's name is, well, let's call her Muffy Lou. At this time in my life, I am hanging out with punk rockers a lot, though you can tell from this picture that I am not, myself, actually a punk rocker. I am not happy at the thought of rooming with a preppy. And Muffy Lou sounds like the ultimate preppy name.

A couple of days later, I get a phone call from someone who identifies herself as Louie and says she is my roommate for the fall. I say, "I'm confused, my letter said Muffy Lou." "Oh, yeah," she says, "that's my name but nobody actually calls me that. I think we should meet."

So we do. That picture is of us meeting. She's not home when I arrive at her house, and her mom shows me to the rec room in the basement. After a couple of minutes, I hear the door open and that woman in the picture comes down the stairs. Blonde hair, plaid skirt, oxford shirt, sweater on a chain: Muffy Lou. The preppy personified.

Then she whips off the wig.

In this picture, I think that I am not just squinting into the sun but perhaps also not as OK with this practical joke as I am pretending to be. You can see that Louie does not have my problem with body image--Look at how she stands, hands on hips! Look at that smile! Look at that direct gaze! She is tough, good-humored, smart, playful, self-confident, outgoing. She has a little bow-legged swagger and boundless physical energy. After this picture is taken, she will change into regular clothes and then barbecue seafood for me on the beach.

It is August. By the time I turn 20, on October 13, we will be lovers.

This is the last picture of me with my arms crossed over my stomach. After I come out, my pictures start looking like this:

And this:

And this:

And, for heaven's sake, this:

[My cat Susie Sienkiewicz, may she rest in peace, chewed a bite out of that one.]

It's not that all my body image issues are magically resolved. I doubt they ever will be, not completely. I would be a much better person than I actually am to live as a fat woman in our culture and have no issues at all with how I look and how much I weigh. But you can see that something happens. And it's not just sex--I'd had sex before, with men. Some of whom turned out to not actually be gay, even. It's something else. Something complicated about finally understanding why, for all those years growing up, I felt I didn't fit in but didn't know why; and about Lou liking to look at me and me figuring that out after awhile (why else do I have all these pictures of myself?); and about love; and about it just being very exciting to be a young lesbian in the late 80s.

p.s. In case you are wondering what Lou looks like under that wig, here we are a couple of years later:

We're Facebook friends now. She looks exactly like that but 100 times better--one of those women who starts out cute and just gets better with age. I am happy about every good thing in her life, because she was one of the good things in mine.

(Also, these pictures look crappy because I don't own a scanner, so I just took pictures of them with my camera. I hope they're good enough to make my point.)

What We Look For, and What We Get

Kirk Cowell over at A Soul in Training is looking for a new church to attend, and while he is explicitly Christian in a way I'm not, and most Quakers I know aren't (even the Christocentric ones, I think), his thinking about what he and his family need from a church resonates with me. I've been musing off and on in recent months about how people come to Quakerism, and what they look for once they're there.

I know some people in my meeting come and stay because they find support and recognition for their political activism, a community that sees that work as important and spirit-led. Some come, I think, because we're a group of nice, welcoming people. Although some people in our meeting have known each other for twenty years or more, we're not insular. I think we do a pretty good job of making newcomers feel welcome but not overwhelmed. We can be accepting in good ways--one single mom who started attending a few years ago told me she appreciated the lack of judgment about her status as a single mom and about the way she dressed, after spending some time at a church where she felt scrutinized.

Some of us come to Quakerism because we're not comfortable with liturgical worship, or because we've been hurt by the Christian churches of our upbringing. This was my path; I wasn't raised in a church, but as a young radical lesbian feminist with vague spiritual yearnings, I couldn't see myself listening to a sermon about God the Father or singing hymns about Jesus. I tried joining some of the local lesbians in their pagan celebrations, but it didn't seem to me that anybody there really believed in what they were doing (I could have been wrong about this). And I wasn't comfortable with the Native American Lite spirituality of many white lesbians. So I tried the local Quaker meeting, and liked it well enough to stay.

The thing is, we come there for all kinds of different reasons. This can create tensions--as at a recent Meeting for Business I've talked about before, in which I had been seriously thinking, "If we approve this wording about what it means to be a Quaker, I'm going home and writing my letter withdrawing my membership," only a few minutes before a very beloved Friend said something like, "When we do this kind of word-smithing, I think we're getting awfully close to defining a creed, and I have to tell you if we start spending very much time on this kind of thing, I'm out of here." Despite the distress I was feeling, I couldn't help grinning inwardly and thinking of Mr. Bennett telling Elizabeth, "An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do." I think people in the meeting that day would be aghast to think they'd come to the brink of losing one or the other of us.

But I think overall we--my meeting, at least--do a pretty good job of being together in all our unlikely unity. I have a mystical relationship with a personal God I know experimentally, and Paul is an avowed atheist, but not only does the meeting want (and need?) both of us there, but Paul and I really care for and about each other. It seems to me that we bump up against our differences as we go about our Quakering--half the meeting loves so-and-so's vocal ministry, and the other half wishes he'd shut up already; one person needs to name God and another is pained to hear the word--but when we take time, in retreats or in business meeting, to listen to each other, we do it well, and it unites us.

What was my point?

Oh, I was going to say that we come to Quakerism for a reason. We're looking for a place where we will be comfortable and accepted, or where some of our questions can be answered. Does anybody walk through the door hoping to have all her most treasured beliefs challenged, to be transformed by faith, to be converted? Somehow I doubt it. And yet, to me, that's the best part of being a person of faith (also the scariest): the completely unexpected things that can happen to you when you let yourself be open. I joke that I am a person of faith today because when people told me that Quaker worship was a bunch of people sitting around waiting on God, I naively believed them, and after I waited long enough, God started showing up. And the thing is, once God shows up, crazy unexpected things start happening. Your whole like can change.

The balance seems tricky to me: we don't want to frighten people off, but if we think our purpose is to make them comfortable, we're never going to do God's work or help them find their piece of it. And yet, if we're honest with people, we would have to tell them that they're taking big risks by trying to listen to God, even if they don't call what they're listening for by that name. Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club and Lit, converted to Catholicism right in the middle of the pedophile priest scandal. She totally gets why people think she's a complete moron, and yet her conversion felt inevitable to her, and it was central to helping her become sober--conversion saved her life. But it also wrecked her life. Does anybody come to meeting for worship hoping to have their life wrecked? Should we warn them?

I went looking for a Flannery O'Connor quote I remember from 20 years ago, something about most people coming to church by means the church does not allow, and I couldn't find it. I found this one, though: "All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful."

I preached in worship on Sunday (I just can't say "offered vocal ministry" right now, sorry) on the subject of conversion. At least, I think that's what I was trying to talk about, with God's help. I was hoping, I think, to encourage people to be open to the way their faith and their practice can change them, though I also ended up talking about why people resist that. Why I do, even after having been through it before. It's because your faith and your practice can change you in ways that seem intolerable from where you're sitting now.

When I first came to Quaker meeting, I came to "Quaker meeting." It was years before I could say "worship," or anything else that sounded religious. Now I have an affinity for the religious aspect of our society (I am the one who, if I didn't rein myself in, would be prissily correcting people who talk about "The Society of Friends" instead of The Religious Society of Friends) and even for religious language from outside our tradition: convicted, preach, grace, mitzvah. And yet, having gotten comfortable here, I don't really want to be changed any more. It's not that I have thrown down all the walls and am ready to follow God wherever God leads; it's more like I moved the walls. This far, and no farther.

I talk about me here, and I talked about me some in worship on Sunday, not only because I like to talk about me but because I want people to know that when I invite them to be open not only to the comfort that Spirit and spiritual community provide but also to the ways that Spirit and their spiritual community can change them, push them in uncomfortable ways, I am not speaking as someone who has solved this problem for herself. It's more like I'm looking for company in a prickly and frightening place.

I am woefully ignorant about the Bible (I recently asked my friend Julie, a Lutheran pastor, to clarify for me: Peter and Simon Peter: one person, or two? Julie is very patient). But in the few bits I do know, it seems like Jesus is always asking people to give up all they have to follow him. And nobody can blame the ones who answer, "You have got to be kidding me," and go back to their vineyards and mansions and piles of gold coins. And even the ones who say yes sometimes get what seem like paltry returns. There are a couple of people in my meeting who can speak eloquently on the subject of following a leading right into a brick wall at 60 miles an hour.

Hmm, I don't think Ministry & Outreach is going to be asking me to write the new outreach pamphlet anytime soon. All this talk about life-wrecking. But there you have it. You come into a silent room for a little peace and quiet, with maybe some coffee after with nice people who seem to like you. And then a bomb goes off.

They say I should write a book

I understand that when people say, "You should write a book," they mean, "I enjoy your writing. I enjoy it enough that I would read an entire book full of it. I think other people would enjoy a book full of your writing as well, and perhaps even pay money for it." But what I hear is: "Why the hell aren't you writing a book, you big loser? You are squandering your God-given talent!"

For much of my life, I expected to write a book. When I was about 12, and changed my name to Su Penn, a librarian who was very important to me said, "Wow, that is going to look really good on the cover of a book someday," and I thought that she had somehow miraculously divined this secret ambition I'd had for as long as I could remember. I also thought she was making a prediction that could not fail to come true.

In my 20s, I got an MFA in writing and literature, I published a few things here and there, I performed my work a lot, and I really thought all that was going to lead to a book. I was disappointed that it didn't. And then, at some point, I stopped being a public writer of that kind, for various reasons. And some time after that, I got very peaceful about it, and busy with other things, and didn't really think about it much. I don't usually think about it; writing a book is no longer one of my ambitions.

Until somebody says, "You should write a book." And I have a flare-up.

The thing that's new about this latest flare-up--brought on by several recent "you should write a book" incidents--is that I find that I am not only OK with not writing a book just now, but I am glad not to have succeeded at it ten or fifteen years ago when I was really trying. Some of the writing I did back then was pretty good, and I do not squirm when I happen to re-read it. I spent some time last week re-reading a few things, and mostly liked them.

But a lot of what I wrote back then would have been hurtful to, well, my mother. And right now, I would not hurt my mother for the world. So I find myself feeling glad that the ambition of my twenties never bore fruit, because I am more comfortable now living in a world that doesn't have The Book of My Twenties in it. Maybe this just means I'm a coward; do not all writers, after all, move on from their early work? Well, so be it.

I may yet have a book in me; life is long, I always say, and the road takes many a turning. But I am glad for the book I didn't write, and I am enjoying the book I'm not writing just now, and every now and then I spend some time not planning to write a book any time soon. It keeps me busy.