ten years: taking inventory

A few years ago, I told the story of how Dan Savage ruined my life at an interfaith storytelling event connected to annual LGBTQ+ Pride festivities. It’s a story I’ve told colleagues and friends for years and even published as a reflection a couple of years ago about how Savage’s response to a question at an educators’ conference sparked in me a crisis of conscience, a thorough reassessment of my professional life, and, ultimately, a shift in my career and ambitions. So, yes, the title of my reflection, “Dan Savage Ruined My Life,” is intentionally provocative and slightly misleading because he ruined my life in all the best ways. 

This week marks the 10th anniversary of that moment. I won’t retell the story - I hope you’ll read it instead! But, since certain intervals, for example a span of 10 years, tend to inspire pause, reflection, and celebration of important moments, I want to take inventory of what’s changed because of Savage’s response.

I’m never one for an abrupt shift (I’m a process person to the extreme), but soon after the conference, I worked with my boss to move into a role in which I didn’t feel like the face of the Catholic Church for students. After a couple of years, I took a senior administrative position at a non-Catholic school, and for the first time I recognized how heavy the burden of being queer in a Catholic school had been. However, after 4 years of navigating the brutal world of middle school parents and three deaths in my family, I burned out. Again, I heard Savage’s voice in my head, but this time I felt like a hypocrite for telling colleagues and students to pursue their best, most authentic selves and care for themselves first so they could care for others while I was propping up a professional and personal mask of confidence over a morass of grief, loneliness, and dwindling health. That facade only made a difficult and taxing job more difficult, more taxing. 

Occasionally, my husband reminds me that I was always sick when we first met. I picked up every bug that came through school. I lost 20 pounds because anxiety strangled any desire to eat, and people went out of their ways to compliment me and ask how I’d done it. “It’s the anxiety diet,” I’d say, cheerfully, wondering if anyone would catch the subtle call for help embedded in my response, “I don’t recommend it.” 

Yeah, my husband. Or, as Dan Savage calls his spouse, my huuuuuuuuuuzband. It’s not a coincidence that marriage wasn’t on my “to do” list until I left working in Catholic schools. I’ll wait for a good psychologist to help me unpack it sometime, but I’ve got a few working theories about this. Perhaps my commitment to the professional life functioned as a primary vocation, not just a job, making it easier to deprioritize my personal growth and give my all to my students and colleagues. Perhaps I was commitment-averse or believed, deep in my heart, that I break people and the idea of inviting someone to commit to my emotional vandalism was more than I could bear. Perhaps, judging by my performance in my last big relationship, I lacked the skills required to make a life with someone. Perhaps these theories just reflect an inherited Irish Catholic instinct to blame myself for, well, everything. Or, perhaps I had internalized heterosexism and heteronormativity so deeply, so insidiously, that marriage, the pinnacle of civil rights, the right that demonstrates a citizen’s full humanity, participation in society, and welcome contribution to the social fabric (not to mention, the biggest fuck you a queer educator can give to the Catholic Church), prompted an existential choice: career or love. 

This time, I planned a different kind of transition. I wouldn’t search for a new role or a new school or another job at all - I plotted a path into a self-imposed, year-long time-out and committed myself to doing nothing for a year. Well, nothing except Kondo my possessions, stop smoking, move to Seattle, merge houses and lives with my then-fiancé-now-husband, find some friends, get married, and, importantly, sleep, get healthy, clear my mind, and start to heal. I started doing yoga. Too traumatized by childhood PE classes, my avoidance of public humiliation while exercising kept me from visiting a studio, but my husband pointed me to Yoga with Adriene. After about six months, I felt ridiculously flexible, I had discernable upper body strength for the first time in my life, and, based on the amount of time she spent on screen in our living room, my husband and I were basically in a throuple with Adriene. I started to apply her motto, “Find what feels good,” to the rest of my life. 

I started writing, too. Apparently, I had 40+ years of stories and insights and questions simmering inside me. Some of what I write includes stories I’ve told to various people in various ways over time or questions I’ve grappled with as an educator or as a ritualist, but most of it responds to questions that I got sick of waiting for someone - anyone - to ask. I wondered why I waited so long to tell these stories, to explore those questions, and came to recognize that, as an educator, I felt constrained, choked either by the structures I worked in or by my own fear of honesty. I’d avoided projecting my true voice lest it negatively impact my relationships with students and their families. 

All those stories and insights and questions emerged wrapped in all sorts of feelings and grudges I didn’t anticipate. Occasionally, I hear back from an old classmate or a good friend because something I wrote resonated with them, and once in a blue moon a total stranger will chime in on social media with kind words. Those responses are always comforting, reminding me that I’m not the only one obsessing over this or fixated on that, that actually telling the stories I tell helps me process the grief that still surrounds me and helps me lay a path toward…

Well, that’s where I am today, 10 years since Dan Savage so magnificently and generously ruined my life. A decade ago, I was committed to my professional path and personally untethered. Now…just switch the words. I’m professionally untethered and personally committed, or, more precisely, committed to myself as a person first. I have no idea how to build an audience or attract and retain participants, but I’m content, happy, and I don’t have to leave any part of myself at any door.