So Long Insecurity Page 8
You may not be nearly as sensitive as I am, but perhaps you’ve suffered losses or struggled through limitations that help explain where on earth your insecurity originated. Remember, you’re not looking for all of the above to qualify. Then again, if every single root we’ve discussed so far is under your family tree, girlfriend, you are already a living, breathing miracle.
I’ve saved two roots of insecurity for the next chapter because, as you’ll see, they come from a different part of the soil than those we’ve discussed here. With the exception of personal disposition, those in this chapter—instability in the home, significant loss, rejection, dramatic change, and personal limitations—are, in many ways, scars on the soul left by hardship. Insecurity that results from the way we’ve coped rather than healed.
Life really is hard. No one can escape it. No one is unscathed by it. But we are not just flailing aimlessly in a universal black hole. There is purpose. There is order—because there is God. Several months ago my younger daughter, Melissa, insisted upon going with me to a follow-up appointment for a suspicious mammogram. No, I’ve never been diagnosed with breast cancer, but because my mother died with it, I have to be more cautious. We were sitting in the waiting room, each of us crossing one leg then the other, sipping our Starbucks and making an attempt at small talk. We’re both big readers, but instead of a People magazine to pass the time, the only reading material the office offered was a rack of brochures about every imaginable cancer.
Melissa took one after another and glanced over them, shaking her head. She looked up at me with that classic expression of hers and said, “Life is brutal, man.” I nodded. We both sat silently for just a moment. Then she said one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard.
“He knows it’s scary to be us.”
Yes, beloved, He does. He does not take lightly that some of us were raised in a veritable madhouse. He does not take lightly that some of us have been mentally berated or physically beaten or sexually abused or simply abandoned. He does not take lightly that some of us are still trying to recover from that midnight phone call. He does not take lightly that some of us were born with legs that don’t work. Or eyes that can’t see. Or ears that can’t hear. He does not take lightly that some of us have endured the cancer treatment of our very own children. He does not take lightly that some of us, Lord help us, have buried our own children.
He knows it’s scary to be us.
Son of David, have mercy on us! It’s almost too much to bear here at times, Lord. No wonder we’re insecure!
The thunder crashes in the heavens, and the earth grows dark in the middle of the afternoon, and a man, beaten to a bloody pulp, cries from a cross between two thieves, “It is finished!” Because He did, one day God will wipe away every tear from the eyes of those who trusted Him, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will pass away and all our hardship will be finished.
Chapter 6
A Cocktail of Ego and Culture
Let’s dig in a couple of other places for roots of chronic insecurity before we move on. The roots we talked about in the previous chapter—instability in the home, significant loss, rejection, dramatic change, personal limitations, and personal dispositions—are timeless. Any one of those factors could have challenged the inhabitants of planet Earth five thousand years ago just as readily as they challenge us today. They are part of life in any era, at any time, but in this chapter we are about to draw a deep line in the sand. After all the talk from our grandparents about how much worse life was for them and what lightweights we are in comparison, we’ve finally found a genuine area in which we trump them.
Our Culture
As God would have it, I’m writing this chapter from a tiny, century-old German farmhouse that sits on some acreage Keith and I own out in the middle of nowhere. Keith had talked incessantly about owning some ranch land ever since we were married three decades ago. In fact, he insisted that it was the dream of almost every little boy reared in the Lone Star State and that the dream unrealized would put a Texan in the grave dissatisfied even if they buried him with his boots on. We didn’t have two dimes to rub together when we were first married, and practically before I learned to sign my new name, our first child was on her way.
Keith’s dream was a long while coming, but two years ago, after a few good fights and a few bent knees, we signed the papers on some desperately neglected land begging for love. A friend of ours had snatched it up in foreclosure so he could flip it. Trust me when I tell you the land wasn’t the only thing that flipped. Learning to love this rough country was no small education. For a woman raised amid the hills, lakes, and piney woods of Arkansas, it was a reach. Very little about our land of mesquite, cactus, rocks, and rattlers is beautiful to the untrained eye, but it is ours, and we honestly adore it. What it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in sunrises and sunsets so beautiful they could make you bawl. That’s what I’ve come to love about the flatlands.
While we were on our first drive through the acreage, our friend said, “There’s an old dilapidated farmhouse there that you could tear down and then build something in its place. It’s in a good location for a view of the old red barn and the western horizon.” A few minutes later, Keith and I walked gingerly on creaky wooden floors that contained holes so big you could crawl through them and under the house if you had a mind to meet a rattler. The house was so far past condemned that you couldn’t have found a place to nail a warning sign that wouldn’t collapse. And Keith and I loved it. Everybody thought we had lost our minds, but to two history buffs, there was something so charming about the house that we couldn’t bear to tear it down. Real, live people with real, live stories had lived within those walls one hundred solid years ago. They deserved respect.
Keith began a mammoth six-month project with one goal: to restore that tiny German farmhouse as close to original as he could—without bankrupting us. Today, almost everything in this house is one hundred years old: every door inside and out, every single window, as much of the floor as we could salvage, many of the pictures, and much of the furniture, which belonged to somebody a century ago. Only the heavy white and black Magic Chef stove is new by the house’s standards. We had to settle for a 1924 model, and yes, every burner still works. It’s true. They just don’t make them like they used to.
Every time I’m here, I wonder what life was like for the family who most certainly bulged from these tight walls years ago when another man fulfilled his dream. His body has long since turned to ashes, yet we walk through the very same doorposts he did. What was his wife like? What kinds of things occupied her thoughts? How alike are we, if at all? When did she flip through her first Sears and Roebuck catalog? If they went to church on Sundays, what did she and her friends chat about? What were her insecurities? Or did she even have enough time on her hands to give insecurities a second thought? I can hardly imagine her world, but in her wildest dreams, could she have ever pictured mine?
Life has changed dramatically for American women since the first nails were hammered into the wood of this old house. So dramatically, in fact, that we were told the property foreclosed on people who lost their priorities—and maybe even their minds—to cocaine. Ironic, isn’t it? I thought that was an urban addiction. No century on record has ever clocked the dramatic changes of the twentieth. We wheeled into it on a horse and buggy and out of it on a rocket. We split the century wide open with our feet on the moon. Years into the twenty-first century, I peer through these wavy windows at a postmodern world and bear its growing pains as much as anyone in it.
Life has changed—and in countless ways, it has changed for the better. But here’s that line in the sand I promised you: our foremothers did not have to put up with the media madness that we women do today. They did not check out their groceries next to a magazine rack of gorgeous, half-dressed, airbrushed women. They did not rinse the leftover Hamburger Helper off the supper dishes while their husbands watched Victo
ria’s Secret models traipsing around in high definition. They did not stumble on pornography or chat rooms tucked in the closets of their computers—nor did they seek it out for themselves. They did not get explicit mail from complete strangers in their in-boxes. They could never have imagined the quick trip a woman could take from double-X chromosomes to triple-X movies. They were not immersed in a society where a woman is only as valuable as she is sensual. Simply put, they were not surrounded by our harrowing culture.
I’m not foolish enough to suggest a list of ways we have it harder than the women who graced this earth before us. We have rights, conveniences, occupations, and health care they never dreamed of having. My goal is to pinpoint one way their lives were dramatically easier than ours. But it’s a whopper: media exploitation. We’re so accustomed to it now that we’re growing oblivious to the toll it’s taking on us. It’s our new normal. Let’s wake up from our shell shock long enough to reflect on the image onslaught that has overtaken us like a tidal wave in the last seventy-five years.
Consider this for a moment: though television only became commercially available in the 1930s, even well into the next decade, very few American households could boast of having one. It was not until the mid-1950s that the phenomenon exploded and spawned into every imaginable offshoot. Anything with a screen can call television “Daddy.”
My generation is the first in all of history to grow up in a media-driven society. What we’re dealing with is unprecedented; we cannot look to the generations before us to see how to handle it. We are drowning in uncharted waters, and it’s time we learned to swim. Most of our great-great-grandmothers had access to compare themselves to a few hundred women in a lifetime. We can now throw ourselves up against tens of thousands if we’re willing—and apparently most of us are. We’ve got travel, television, the Internet, magazines, books, billboards, movies, storefronts, advertisements (even on the back of the cab in front of us and the bus beside us), camera and video phones, texting, sexting, and Twittering to remind us what’s out there. We’d better step it up if we want to compete, and if we don’t, we might as well have the word loser inked on our foreheads.
In a telling article in Psychology Today, studies show that “women who are surrounded by other attractive women, whether in the flesh, in films, or in photographs, rate themselves as less satisfied with their attractiveness—and less desirable as a marriage partner.”6 Since the mark of real security is the ability to be around anyone, regardless of how attractive or intelligent, and still maintain personal confidence and contentment, that study says a lot about our need for a change. The primary point for now, however, is that we no longer feel inferior to ten other women the way our great-grandmothers might have. We feel inferior to thousands, and as a result, we become less and less satisfied with ourselves until much of our lives are lived on the slippery slope of self-loathing. We honestly talk ourselves into believing that media princesses, whether on the page or the stage, are the norm and that we are the pathetic few in the entire universe who can’t keep up. We hang these near-perfect images like an enormous collage on the walls of our brains, making common experiences like acne, extra pounds, a flat chest, or a large nose twice the benefactor of insecurity that they once were.
That’s not all. The high premium on youthfulness has skyrocketed to the point that a woman in her midtwenties now fears she’s getting old. (If you’re young, I don’t want you to dread what you’re about to hear and put the book down. Answers and new attitudes are on their way, and you’ll be far more equipped to handle aging than my generation is.) Let me be loud and clear: our culture is just as merciless on men. Those men who have done their best to handle themselves with integrity in a society where sex sells and age smells are true warriors and worthy of a medal. None of us girls can imagine what it’s like to have the genetics of a guy and deal with such a wholesale assault on the senses. The same trap that demoralizes women as bait discounts men as animals. No one walks away from the snare without a limp.
There are places in which our challenges take different turns, however. As we address some of those ways, I’ll need a little elbow room to speak in gender generalities. Keep in mind as I proceed that not all men or women lean with the cultural sway; some are remarkably unaffected by it. That said, generally speaking, our culture does not hold men to the same standard of youthfulness as women. I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. I’m just trying to show you how the double standard intensifies our gender’s insecurities. Case in point: a few days ago I was watching one of those murder-mystery documentaries on television. A woman was dead, and her husband was the primary suspect. The couple in question had been married for thirty years and had raised several great kids. From all outward appearances, they seemed happy. The husband was first suspected of murder after authorities discovered his long affair with a younger woman. The evidence mounted from there, and he was eventually convicted of murder.
Here’s the part that caught my attention: the dead woman’s own sister, believing her brother-in-law was innocent, explained away the affair by saying something like, “Well, his wife had gotten older. . . .” A woman said that! She had bought the double standard hook, line, and sinker until it made perfect sense to her. My thought? If she’s right and that was his rationale, somebody wheel that dude in front of the mirror and show him somebody else who has gotten older! Why, I ask you, had she gotten older but not he? His hair was mostly gray (come to think of it, his wife colored hers), and his face was appropriately lined by time. Oh, I know. Men are supposed to be more visual, and women are more relational and emotional. Is it really that simple? For the life of me, I don’t know a single woman with decent vision who has been married awhile who can’t see that her man is aging too. Or gaining weight. Or dressing differently. Women are not blind. As a gender—and I’m speaking in blatant generalities here—we may be a tad gentler. But that’s probably because we’re emotional.
It’s maddening sometimes—and not just for women who have kissed their twenties good-bye. I well remember being a very young woman cognizant of my culture and wondering how quickly I would be dismissed and outdated. I don’t think there are many women—of any age—in Western culture who are oblivious to how quickly the clock ticks. We don’t get that luxury. The dot on the cultural time line that separates the young from the old is inching closer and closer to the left-hand margin. If we women are to believe our culture’s press, our window of relevance is so small we have to squint to see it. Furthermore, by the time we develop some semblance of vision and wholeness, our time has come and gone, culturally speaking. We need to start looking out a new window.
Our culture offers us five minutes—okay, maybe five years—to feel fairly good about ourselves. The least we can do is refuse the offer and instead look for a reasonable ethic to live by. The One who created us in His own image and then bragged about His own handiwork extends such an ethic to us, but we have to be willing to redirect our preoccupations.
This youth-obsessed movement would lose half its steam if we quit puffing our breath into it. Listen, men didn’t shape this culture by themselves. Women did just as much to contour the mind-set. We’ve even shot our own wounded so we could minimize the competition. God has entrusted each of us—male and female—with a brief measure of time on this planet, and each season is meant to be lived abundantly, effectively, powerfully, and pricelessly. It’s our right as His prized creation, and we’re living like people scratching to reach our five-minute peak and then sliding downhill from there, all the while wondering if we felt anything.
When I was in my forties, I was hit with my first memorable wave of jealousy toward younger women. Though I have lost battles with numerous other insecurity struggles, God and I won a fast victory on this one, and for some reason it stuck. When that jealousy first reared its unwelcome head in me (I hate that feeling), it occurred to me that not one woman out there would be young a second longer than I was. Generally speaking, we all get the same amoun
t of time. I’d had my turn. They would have their turn. And all of us, God willing, will get the chance to age. I’ve not experienced many immediate cures, but in that very moment, I felt God shove aside my jealousy, flood me with empathy, and impress upon my heart the need to do my part in making it easier on those coming behind me. I want to be part of a coalition of women who feel the same way. Not bitter women. Not angry women. Not women with an ax to grind. Gracious, loving women who have found some relief and release. I don’t doubt that it was the beginning of this book.
Oh, that one generation could teach the next how to survive this culture with security intact! We’d better come up with some chutzpah, though, because this I promise you: media exploitation is not going to let up on us. We can scream about the double standards and injustices all day long, but it probably won’t make one bit of measurable difference. It must happen in our thinking, in our processing, in our feeling, in our relating.
It’s up to us to change the way we react to media influence and to quit emotionally buying into everything we see. Dr. Rick Rigsby says, “Truth is the first casualty in a media-crazed society.”7 How right he is. Absorb this thought for a moment: a medium (the singular form of media) is “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.”8 It is a go-between. An intermediary. You can see the obvious connection when you set the words media and mediate side by side. Everything that qualifies as media stands between “us” and some form of “them,” whether they’re politicians, nations, entertainers, teams, or some similar entity. Anything that’s not the general “us” qualifies as a “them.” While mediators like newspapers and newscasts were originally meant to be unbiased, mediators of entertainment and advertisement are now blatantly selling agendas and subsequent emotions. If we do not have a measurable reaction, they have failed.