The Seed

In my previous life, I was the embodiment of the people-pleasing, overachieving, good girl. I obeyed, I conformed, and I sacrificed any needs and desires so that others might benefit. Today I feel inordinately lucky to have been born with a tiny seed of rebellion. A seed that would have made Burpee proud, as it thrived despite exceedingly harsh conditions and rare watering or exposure to sunlight. One that ultimately took root and grew into a complex, beautiful seedling responsible for saving and then transforming my life.

 My first memory of conscious disobedience was my wholesale rejection, at seven years old, of a homework assignment for my Religion class. It was my third and final year at the Catholic school that I now realize augmented my childhood trauma: there were the daily minor traumas we were collectively subjected to, and a handful of major individual traumas, a few of which I was unable to even verbalize until I was in my thirties. When we were given an assignment to fill out a monthly calendar by writing either “I was good today” or “I was bad today” in each square, I uncharacteristically balked. I didn’t say a word; I just didn’t do it. Repeatedly.

More mysterious than my sudden noncompliance was that no one said a word to me about it. Not the nun who gave me an F in Religion each quarter. Not my parents who surely saw the Fs on my report card of otherwise straight As. Would the seed have perished if I’d been punished? Or would the fleeting high of standing up for myself—of not submitting, if only temporarily, to the notion that I was only good when I did what other people, who were often demonstrably not good, wanted—have nurtured the seed enough to guarantee its survival?

A few years later, after confessing my imagined “sins” to a man in a dark booth, I once again, quietly, put my foot down. If God was omniscient, why did we need this creepy dude on the other side of a screen? And why would I ruin a perfectly good Saturday afternoon waiting to hear his take on my mostly made-up offenses? And really? No matter what you told the guy, your penance of a few prayers made it all good? So that you could come back and repeat the whole thing in a couple of weeks? (Don’t even get me started on how for several years of my young life I spent more than a little time terrified of how much the flames of purgatory would hurt before I’d paid for my imperfections.)

My early rejection of Catholicism and all organized religion notwithstanding, I remained a highly submissive and accommodating child. As I entered my teens, awash in hormones and anger and starting to realize that adults were not infallible (and that many that I knew were, in fact, full of shit), the seed underwent explosive growth. Because open disobedience would have had swift and brutal repercussions, I became a master at presenting a façade that masked my true thoughts and feelings, a skill that I perfected over the next several decades.

So, as a teen I got good grades and worked in the family business while secretly ingesting boatloads of mind-altering substances and planning my permanent escape. As a naval officer, I toed the line while in uniform and reveled in my decidedly non-conservative, nonconformist life in my off hours. As a new mother, I fit perfectly into my Stepford-like community while secretly railing against the shallowness and claustrophobia of it all. As a wife, I accepted what I now know was neglect and abuse while stockpiling resentments and dreaming of a better life.

And then I hit my fifties. Maybe it was the cumulative weight of all I’d been sublimating for so long. Maybe it was hormonal. Maybe I was just too tired to put the mask on every day. It was likely a combination of all of these things that acted like Miracle-Gro on that tenacious seed.

At times my anger felt restless and volcanic. Expressing it, or any of my thoughts and feelings, almost always had negative consequences at home. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to shut down who I really was. I was devastated to realize I’d all but disappeared. Until finally I had to admit that I’d been living a lie and I needed to start over.

In the years following that discovery, my rebellious, stubborn streak helped me withstand punishing divorce litigation, family estrangement, and various and sundry other forms of adversity and heartbreak. I was grateful and proud that I was finally brave enough to try to live my life for myself. And, as those of us who are black-or-white thinkers tend to do, I overcorrected a bit. For a while I enjoyed a do-over adolescence in which I delighted in showing my middle finger to the world early and often.

More recently, I’ve calmed down and mostly ditched my reflexive urge to rebel. This has a lot to do with growing self-awareness, setting boundaries, and trying to be fearlessly truthful with myself and others. In examining this change, I realized that, somewhere along the way, that seed from long ago had now become a bloom of self-love. Self-love is what has given me the confidence to be exactly who I am without justification or apology and to absent myself from spaces in which I need to rebel.

Like its predecessor, this seedling is fragile and prone to setbacks. There are times I temporarily neglect to adequately water it or expose it to sunlight. But now that I’ve seen its potential for beauty, I’m committed to doing everything in my power to ensure that it flourishes.

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