JE # 3A

What does “cultural schizophrenia” mean to me? I have been putting off this post for a week now, this question hovering over my head. I think I’ve been nervous about getting personal here, because as a white woman from an Anglo, middle class family, I often find myself feeling like an imposter in our Border Consciousness class.

Writing out the different spokes of my identity wheel today helped me get started. I’ll share it here.

Name: Rosanna, but I always hated my name growing up and went by Rose, Rosie, or Rosa. I remember dreading the inevitable roll call on the first day of a new school year.

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Bisexual

Race: White

Place: Born in Louisiana, raised in Miami suburb

Religion: Raised Presbyterian, now atheist

Class: Middle class parents, their parents were working class

Language: English, became fluent in Spanish between ages 18-20 when I lived in San Pedro Sula, Honduras y Jocotenango, Guatemala

Occupation: Recently translator, currently doctoral student

I want write about religion, because I think it has been the primary factory in my cultural schizophrenia (and for me, it encompassed sexuality for a long time). A lot of what I’ll write here I haven’t shared with people in my life that I’m close to. In many of ways, I still try to hide who I am from my family, and I have recently come to admit to myself that I even try to hide who I used to be from my partner of over two years. Essentially, I am simultaneously ashamed of what I used to believe and who I used to be, and afraid that revealing to my family who I am today will hurt them, or worse, make them love me less. Okay, here it goes.

I tried, as a young child, to raise what were of course very basic questions about the teachings of the Presbyterian Church; but I learned in Sunday school that questioning was wrong, and that questions often caused people to become flustered and offended: “Some things we just won’t understand until we get to heaven.” I buried my questions somewhere deep.

During my high school years, as I became more politically conscious, I began again to internally question the “Ultimate Truth” of “God’s Word.” Terrified of disappointing my parents, and surrounded by a community of other “believers,” I began to live somewhat of a double life. For my family, I was a good Christian girl. A pure, pious, “Proverbs 31 woman.” I was “saving myself for marriage.” Alone, I wondered why a loving god would relish sending his helplessly sinful human creatures to hell, among other things. At this point, though I sometimes caught myself thinking about women I was attracted to, I refused to admit this to myself. I can distinctly remember quickly reassuring myself of what I read in some stupid women’s magazine: that women like look at or “check out” other women because they feel competition with them for the attention of men. Anything but heterosexual attraction to a person I could “see myself marrying” -- a young man with good Christian qualities like leadership in the church -- was out of the question, sinful and punishable. Rather than explore these feelings and attractions, I entered into a series of three sexually and emotionally unhealthy relationships with men, two of them with partners who were significantly older than I was, one of them abusive. I hid most of this from my family, my parents especially.

One of these men I met in San Pedro Sula, where I moved when I was 18, to work for an ONG. This is also when I became fluent in Spanish, (no one I knew when I first moved there spoke much English), a language that I feel a very strong connection to. I don’t fully understand this connection. I won’t continue in such detail on the blog, but basically my “double-life” continued en Honduras, even from so far away. In many ways it was easier to continue from a distance.

Fast forward. It wasn’t until I moved to Brooklyn, New York, at age 22, that I really began to come to terms with what I actually believed and felt. I think a big part of why I was able to do this was because in New York I knew no one, and it wasn’t expected by anyone I met that I would be a Christian. For the first time in my life, it was even assumed that I would not believe in god. Within the very diverse community to which I eventually belonged in New York, the thought of spending a Sunday morning at a “worship service” was almost laughable. This was EXHILARATING. I think of the two years I lived in New York as a sort of reverse spiritual journey, or just a different kind of spiritual journey. By the time I moved to Los Angeles, I had come to accept that I do not believe in god. This was a very long and painful process, but ultimately a liberating one.

It took me a little longer than those two years to work up the courage to “come out” to my parents and one of my sisters as atheist. They still don’t want to accept this. While I think I am currently the healthiest I have been in my adult life, (intellectually, physically, emotionally), my parents and sister think of me as a “lost sheep” or as just going through a phase, a period of “doubt”. The last time I spoke with my mom about this -- about who I am -- was in March; she was driving me to the Miami International Airport, where I would catch a flight back to California. She said something like, “I just worry because I know that something is going to have to happen for you to realize that you need God. Sometimes you have to get to your lowest low, and then you reach out to God.” I told her, lovingly, that I wish she wouldn’t worry, and that I sincerely hope that she one day realizes that she doesn’t need religion. As you can imagine, she did not like hearing this. I wonder if like Pilar, my mom sees my rejection of what she taught me to believe as a reflection of some kind of failure on her part.

Thus, as I said, I feel that I am in a healthy place in my life; but in some important ways I am still pulled in multiple directions. Except for my youngest sister (who has also rejected religion, something my mom, in anger, has blamed me for), my family still does not know that I am bisexual. I don’t know if they ever will. In New York, I met and fell in love with a man. We moved to LA together, and are in a committed relationship. I think that most people generally perceive me as a hetero, monolingual, Anglo woman, and yes, there’s a disconnect there -- they don’t know that I love in two languages.