Becoming Real

The thought of freedom continually rings in my mind. Not an eagle-chirping, American-flag-waving “freedom”, but psychological freedom. Freedom from the socialization that begins with our first breath. Socialization, defined as “the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society”, is enacted through family, culture, society, community, peers, religion, country, media, schools, etc. By its definition, socialization is informed by the systems of power in a given society. In America, those systems are patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, heteronormativity, American nationalism, and Christianity amongst others. Systematic conditioning is pervasive, persistent, and insistent on our assimilation. True psychological freedom and liberation requires the laborious work of unraveling what you actually believe from what you were told to believe in order to act with clarity of intention.

Many people act from values they adopted passively through socialization. They do things in a certain manner because “That’s just the way things are done”. One blatant display of passive value acceptance is gender. Men and women often partake in distinctive rituals assigned to them based upon their body parts. Grooming is one such ritual. Women may feel pressured into time consuming and financially draining grooming practices to adhere to patriarchal beauty standards including: make-up, skincare, hair styling, cosmetic surgery and procedures, dieting, and fashion trends. Alternatively, men may limit their individuality or self-expression through grooming to send messages about their patriarchal masculinity. These decisions are often made compulsively en masse. Many men and women do not think through why they partake in these rituals or what systems they uphold through them. They do not consider how their personal values do or do not align with passively accepted values. They view this often subconscious adherence to patriarchy as innate and natural. Freedom is obtained through thoughtful consideration of values by which we live. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Nathaniel Branden is quoted as follows:

I am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live. If I live by values I have accepted or adopted passively and unthinkingly, it is easy to imagine that they are just “my nature,” just “who I am,” and to avoid recognizing that choice is involved. If I am willing to recognize that choices and decisions are crucial when values are adopted, then I can take a fresh look at my values, question them, and if necessary revise them. Again, it is taking responsibility that sets me free.

It is often difficult to distinguish one's’ innate desires from the psychological relief of conformity. It may feel better to adhere to patriarchal beauty standards as a woman because patriarchy rewards this behavior through easier access to “power”. I use quotations here because we remain disempowered in systems which ask for self-abandonment to attain power. Such a system will never allow true empowerment. Conversely, nonconformity to the socialized norm may feel uncomfortable, in part due to the very real threat of violence and rejection. Heterosexual men may refrain from painting their nails or wearing make-up due to the fear they will be labeled gay. Underlying the aversion to being viewed as gay by heterosexual men is the fear of violence. Queerness and nonconformity upend systems of power and hierarchy, thus those who buy into these systems utilize violence and rejection to maintain the status quo. The threat of violence and rejection are the primary tools of control for hierarchical systems of power and oppression. They are powerful enforcers of conformity as they play on our most innate biological instincts. We do not want to be kicked out of the tribe and we do not want to die.

It is important to note how all of these systems of oppression interweave with one another. Scholar and civil rights activist, Kimberlé Crenshaw, coined the term intersectionality to highlight the “interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage”. The experience of masculinity for a black man will likely be different than that of a white man, just as the experience of racism will differ with class. All of these intersecting systems of discrimination work to uphold the powers that be. To enact conformity through force, policy, oppression, violence, and complicity. True resistance to one will lead to resistance of all. Thich Nhat Hanh speaking on resistance stated:

Resistance, at root, I think must mean more than resistance against war. It is a resistance against all kinds of things that are like war. Because living in modern society, one feels he cannot easily retain integrity, wholeness. One is robbed permanently of humaneness, the capacity of being oneself… So perhaps, first of all, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted, and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly.

Thich Nhat Hanh illustrates how true resistance begins in the mind and soul. True resistance requires us to become psychologically free. To notice values we passively accept from systems of power and oppression, question them, and revise them. True resistance requires returning to oneself. My personal resistance is chaotic. My brain is like the basement of a hoarder, filled to the brim with boxes. I’m sitting on the floor surrounded by all this ~stuff~ I inherited, overwhelmed by what to do with it. I am afraid that to completely be myself will result in loss. It will. I am anxious about all the unknowns that come with stepping out of the prescriptive. There are many. Discomfort is the nature of growth bell hooks reminds us, “(A)nytime any of us takes significant steps to grow, we go through a process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (the same stages Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified as those we go through when we confront dying).” Growth is in some ways a death of the old self. Psychological resistance necessitates the death of values out of alignment with growth. To fully “be oneself” as Thich Nhat Hanh beautifully puts it requires a willingness to embrace the unmooring nature of change. 

In the children’s novel The Velveteen Rabbit, a toy rabbit asks “What is REAL?” to a wise old toy horse. The horse replies, “Real isn’t how you are made… It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real”. The rabbit asks, “Does it hurt?” and the truthful horse answers, “Sometimes… When you are real you don’t mind being hurt”. Then the rabbit asked, “Does it happen all at once… or bit by bit?” And the horse said, 

It doesn’t happen all at once… You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But those things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand. 

Becoming real hurts. People won’t understand, they’ll judge, they’ll disapprove, but you won’t mind because you’ll know what it is to really, really be loved. To be loved as you are for who you are unconditionally. The child that really, really loved me, ultimately was me. That’s why psychological freedom and choosing my values and being oneself and resistance and becoming real matters to me. I can no longer abandon that child within. I can no longer abandon myself.