For those who have asked, yes, I do plan to finish the "Finding Each Other" series. I hope it will be soon, but the words have stalled. Part Two is traumatic; any time I spend in that space has to be counterbalanced with happy living in the present.
Also, our small experience working at IBLP Headquarters suddenly became part of a much bigger narrative this year. Current events do not change the past, but they do affect my emotions as I revisit my own history. I thought I could write it and stay grounded, but some days that is simply not the case.
Thank you, kind readers, for sharing my journey--both the pretty parts and the prickly ones.
dumpy white guy will wait. thanks for telling us.
ReplyDeleteDoug
Okay--let's see how hungry the Internet is today. :)
ReplyDeleteI can only imagine how difficult it must be to write about these experiences--I've been out of fundamentalism for about 13 years now, and I'm still avoiding writing about it--much less for a public audience.
At risk of sounding creepy, I'd so much love to chat with you over a cup of coffee sometime. I wasn't raised in ATI, but my parents were very influenced by IBLP which led us to homeschool in the 1980s and 90s (this on top of being Amish Mennonite). I'd leave the seminars salivating over the videos of the young people in navy and white, envying their perfect, well-ordered lives while I felt bound to the chaos in our home. (Somehow IBLP's teaching on orderliness never caught on with my Dad like the teaching on authority did.) But it took a stint in a second form of fundamentalism to realize that the issue was not being legalistic about the right things, but it was legalism itself that was the problem.
But, here's the thing--and I may have mentioned this in another comment some time ago--I was raised in PA and then my family moved to western Oklahoma in the mid-1990s. I lived in OKC from 1997-2001 and worked at Mardel. So there are elements of your story that parallel my own. I'm still in the Midwest, but now I'm a feminist academic, still trying to process fundamentalism, but now as an academic project.
Sorry about the epistle, but it felt even more creepy to be so engrossed in your writing here and not do a little self-revelation of my own.
Thank you for posting! I would so enjoy a chat over coffee, too. But connecting by reading each other's words is second-best!
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