opinions

In a conversation with a friend yesterday I was forced to reveal the deep dark secret of my childhood. And here it is: I was a good kid. That's it. I was often the new kid, often the youngest in the class, usually also the smallest, and very shy, and my strategy for dealing with this was: just stay under the radar. Get good grades, find a friend or two, follow the rules, be you but only to the extent that no one else notices that you're actually kinda strange. (Note: I think they may have noticed.)

My big rebellious phase as a teenager consisted of that one time when I wanted to go on retreat with the Presbyterian youth group and my dad wouldn't let me because we were Catholic. I pitched a fit. He eventually relented, then cunningly undermined the whole thing by volunteering to go along as a chaperone the next year. Suddenly it didn't seem nearly as edgy. The End.

The trouble is that the older I get, the less well the flying-under-the-radar thing works. As an adult you are supposed to have...leadership skills. social skills. opinions about things. And this is all very hard for me. The past few years have been about trying to figure out whether somewhere, deep in hiding, a solid core of "me" exists. Who should I say that I am? And what do I believe?

On Saturday I was with my GCL group, and the host-of-the-day was leading us in a relaxing meditation. So there I was, lying on the on the floor, trying very hard to follow the directions in German without opening my eyes to cheat and see what everyone else was doing, breathing deeply, tensing and releasing each muscle group... And suddenly this intense feeling of resentment came over me. All I wanted to do was leave. I did NOT want to keep my eyes closed, I did NOT want to clench and relax my fists. I wanted to take up my mat and walk straight out the door, perhaps with a sneer and my best withering retort on the way out, "stop telling me what to do, B*TCH!"

I didn't, of course. I played along and did all the supposedly-relaxing things and we finished and when I finally got out the door I bolted up the hill and stood in the sun took a lot of deep breaths. What was that all about?

My first feeling was that it has something to do with my rather ambivalent relationship with authority. I'm desperate for direction aaaaand at the same time I bristle at following other people's rules. But it could be that the little temper tantrum is a sign that I'm ready now, finally, to stop following all the rules and make some of my own. Is this what it feels like to have an opinion?

Of course it might also be be my body's way of telling me that it's had enough with the dieting, already, and please go back to leaving us alone now.

As my favorite U.S. government agency likes to say: progress has been made, but more remains to be done.