ren·e·gade n.
1. One who rejects a religion, cause, allegiance, or group for another; a deserter.
2. An outlaw; a rebel.
Sometimes I feel like a renegade in my own life. I can clearly see who I was supposed to be, based on who I was growing up, who I was encouraged to become, and who I was punished for not continuing to become for many years. There has always been a strong part of me that will say “no” to things at what seems to be the most inopportune times. I’m not talking about little rebellions, though I’ve had a lot of those too. I mean saying no to the big things in life.
I was so stubborn about it when I decided this path wasn’t working that I gained some of the freedom I needed to figure out what map I wanted. I didn’t realize it for most of my life, but I have quite a few choices when it comes to who I want to be and how I want to live my life. Figuring out which of these choices work for me has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and will continue to be a lifelong process. I’m getting closer to figuring out some of my map though, the map I like for my life, the map that makes sense to me.
Looking at my life as a map, I realized that my family, through their examples, threats, rewards, encouragements, financial support or denial, and advice had laid out a clear outline for my entire life. I had struggled to stay on that path since middle school, trying to balance my growing despair over being in a public school environment in a non-supportive society with trying to please my parents and generally not fuck up my chances at succeeding in this world. In certain ways things were very simple. My Dad’s Dad was a doctor, so maybe I should become one too.
For my sixth grade science project, I researched what causes wrinkles. At the time I thought, well, maybe I can become a dermatologist, good money and it’s interesting enough. Even though I let go of that idea a few years later, it crept back in when I was in college trying to figure out my major. I thought, well, I like to talk to people and help them if I can, maybe I should become a psychologist. After researching the psychiatric field for a few months and at the same time working as the receptionist for a psychiatrist’s office, I let that go too. Ran screaming from the idea of working for the medical establishment is more accurate.
When I was fourteen, I was going to confirmation class to be confirmed in the Catholic Church. The problem was that I was so miserable with my life at the time, and had so many questions I felt the church wasn’t answering for me about why it sucked so much, that I began to wonder if it was the right thing for me to do, to pledge my soul to the Catholic God. Growing up with a religion focused so much on guilt and repentance, confession and sin, I first thought it must be God’s doing somehow that I was stuck in some hellhole of a middle school, had very few friends, and was still pre-adolescent when most of my friends were already looking more like adults. I was miserable and wondered why God was punishing me like this.
I felt (and still do) that there is something else besides the physical world I experience, a more eternal part of myself, connected to the life force of all that exists in the universe. I don’t know exactly what to call it; it’s more of a feeling of biggerness then anything else, of vibrancy, of life. I remember explaining to my Aunt why I didn’t want to get confirmed, saying that I believed in something larger in the universe that I was connected to, but I didn’t feel like for me it was the Christian God and it felt morally wrong to go in front of all those people, and that larger universal force and pledge my soul to something I felt wasn’t true. In short, I couldn’t lie on that big of a scale. A part of me stepped forward, dug its feet in, and refused to let me go through with it.
When you are raised Catholic, you are given a Godmother and a Godfather when you are baptized to vouch for you that you believe in God and will follow all the rules. Then, when you come of age, the church asks that you come forward as an adult and now vouch for your own soul that you believe in what the church stands for. I told my family I couldn’t in good conscience go through with the confirmation because I didn’t think what I’d be saying was true and wanted to explore another path, although I didn’t know what that was. Of course I dealt with a lot of pressure, anger, confusion, etc because of this but I still feel like I would have been lying and that I did the right thing. I did stick to my word about exploring what else is out there and am thankful for that part of me that had enough faith in me to make the right call.
The reason why this has been such a complication in my life, this rebellious voice, this sense of when not to take a certain path, is that I’m also a compulsive people pleaser. I usually can’t stand to have people not like me or think something is wrong with me. I realize now this is unrealistic because I can’t control how other people feel, but feeling like a disappointment makes me feel horrible.
I was the obnoxious good kid in school who for the most part got straight As, the teachers loved, didn’t cause trouble and strove to succeed in the eyes of the adults around me. This of course didn’t make me very popular with the other kids, who were a lot quicker to figure out that school was a sham meant to break childrens’ spirits. The fact that I was playing along so ingenuously marked me as a traitor to my peers. It’s hard to know what the right thing is to do when you’re growing up and getting so many strong mixed messages. That’s why it still surprises me that I listened so seriously to the part of me that didn’t want to go through with a major rite of passage in my family. Then I remember how miserable I was at the time.
There is a part of me that faithfully insists on always following the rules of society, the rules of my family, and the rules of how things are supposed to be. It wants to graduate from college with the highest degree of honor, have a high paying career with lots of recognition, be the envy and admiration of friends, family, and colleagues, etc. The interesting thing to me is that this part of me is not the part that wants me to be happy. It just wants me to look good. That’s it. And man does it throw a fit when I don’t do what I’m told.
I never graduated from college. I went straight to college after graduating high school, burning with an ambition that was unstoppable at the time. Over the next three years I went to three different schools, none of which truly worked for me or made me happy. I didn’t get very far into my first semester of school when I started seeing things through the lines of what was presented to me about what college was all about. I had a feeling public school was bullshit but I thought surely college was a safe haven of supportive stimulating experiences. That’s not how my experience worked out though. It began to bother me big time that I was being so strongly directed about HOW to think along with what to think about.
I’ve always been very curious about the world and it was frustrating to me that I didn’t feel the substance I had longed to sink my intellectual teeth into in school. It’s still hard for me to explain at times. It’s more a feeling then anything else. Like a creampuff or something. When I bit into the material of my classes, for the most part they came up empty. My suspicion was that what I was learning was more about Looking Smart. I realize now that what I was looking for was material more relevant to real life. The craving to acquire real skills such as how to grow food or build a sustainable house such as straw bale. The only classes I felt I got anything of real substance from where related to art and expression. Classes in acting, ceramics, even public speaking. I loved them and don’t regret taking them but had to also deal with a lot of pressure to be more practical about what I was focusing on at school. It didn’t take too long for that part of me to surface again to say “no, this isn’t for me”, progressively louder, over the next three years.
It was about nine months before I left school that things began to break apart in a big way for me. It had been a dream of mine since I was seventeen to live in California. I was absolutely nuts about the idea and from the time I spent a month at Cal Arts doing a summer art program, it felt like home. I was frustrated when it came time to pick out a college for me to go to that my Dad would not support me going to school, as he put it, west of the Mississippi. So I compromised with going to a small liberal arts school in upstate New York. When that wasn’t a good fit, I spent a year and a half at the local community college back in home. Then the time felt right to apply for a school in Cali.
I was accepted to UC Santa Cruz and was beside myself with excitement. Three weeks before I was scheduled to get on a plane and enter my new life, I was contacted by the school to let me know there had been a mix-up with my math credit. It turned out the math class I had taken at the community college was only a prerequisite and that they needed the next class up in order for me to meet admission requirements. I was shocked, heart broken, I felt like my world was falling apart. I felt like I was ready to walk through the gates of heaven only to have then slammed firmly in my face. I appealed to have the decision reconsidered and it was denied. The only thing I could do was suck it up, stay where I was another few months, get the math credit and reapply. I went into a whirlwind trying to reorganize my life. Within a couple of days I was enrolled in fall classes at the community college, determined to push through.
Then other things in my life began to show up. I got back together with the wonderful guy I’m still with now. Since so many crazy things happened to me all at once, I was left questioning a lot of things about my basic life and reality, which opened the door to a lot of ideas that are important to me today. A couple of months after refusing me admission, UC Santa Cruz sent me a bill for the semester I never spent there. I tore up the letter and decided I wasn’t going there at all. It took about six months from that point for my drive to finish college to completely dissolve.
I spent the last semester at a new school, hoping this one would work out. It turned out to be the most frustrating one of all for me. After the first month or so, I began to get horrible stomach aches every day when I would get home from classes. At first I wasn’t sure what was wrong but then I began to see a pattern. I was miserable there, couldn’t stand the hostility I felt, from the students sometimes more then the teachers, about considering different ideas. Yes, they were challenging ideas, but I was starting a time in my life when everything had felt like it had fallen apart a few months earlier and I was open to questioning a huge part of what I thought was true about everything. It turned out this didn’t work well with me trying to make it through classes. I was frustrated because I didn’t have the time to read about what I truly wanted to explore and the school didn’t offer classes in what I was looking for. The compromise didn’t work for me at all. I promised myself that if I left school I would dedicate as much time as I could to researching what I felt so drawn to learning about, and I have held true to this promise ever since.
Even in the face of obvious disappointment and even fear from my parents that things would go horribly wrong for my life if I didn’t finish college, at the end of that semester, I quit. My stomach literally couldn’t take it anymore. This is a decision I still wonder about, usually when I’m having a bad day at work and think maybe finishing school would have gotten me a job I would be happier at, but I realize there is no guarantee for that. Jobs don’t guarantee happiness; having some kind of degree doesn’t either.
I love to learn, am an avid reader, and researching what I’m interested in has become a driving passion in my life. What I had to accept was that modern institutional schooling doesn’t work for me. It might work for other people; it might have gotten me a very high paying job had I stuck with it. It also would have made me hate myself.
For me, the Tower card in the Tarot has come to represent a major force in my life, one I can’t seem to escape no matter how much I try to hide behind doing what I’m told I should do, listening to everyone else but myself about who I am, and just generally laying low. Or maybe that’s what creates the tower in the first place, the illusion of safety, conformity. The interesting thing to me about how the Tarot works, especially the Major Arcana, is that it’s a story, and I LOVE stories.
In the story of the Tarot, when the Fool gets to the Tower part of his experience, he is feeling safe and snug in his tower he has built around himself so no one can get in and he can safely look down on everything he has built without being touched by it. It’s a beautiful tower too, white, sparkling, tall and impressive. The problem is that out of nowhere comes a huge storm and with big bolts of lightning it all comes crashing down and he’s thrown out the window to what he assumes is certain doom. Except it’s not. The doom part is just an illusion. But when he reaches the bottom, with the crumbled remains of his tower all around him he so carefully constructed, he feels he has lost everything he has worked for. In his despair, if he takes a moment to look up, for the first time in a long time, he can see the stars. It turns out the tower was blocking the view of the sky, of the natural world, and he was disconnected from it without even realizing it.
So the story moves on to the next card, The Star, which is to me one of the most beautiful cards in the deck. It stands for hope, for being connected to the natural and unnatural world, a beautiful woman dipping a jar into the waters of the unconscious to water the soil she stands on in the physical world so that both may prosper. It is funny to me now that when I was 14 I chose the pseudonym Starla, maybe my unconscious waters speaking to me of hope and a desire for a true sense of balance in this world. The Star is not the end of the story, but it is the guiding image that leads the Fool out of the mess he created for himself into an experience that is more true to his genuine identity.
