Finding Your Identity When the World Threatens to Steal It

[Trigger warning: suicidal ideation]

What do you know about yourself?

I'll bet most of you can tell me a few positive things that you are, things that you like about yourself. You're a hard worker, you're pretty, you're loyal or passionate or funny or you can really cut a rug. When you're having a rough day or starting to lose sight of some of the nuances of who you are, you can count on these details to be true and good.

I'm smart.

This is the one good thing I've known about myself since I was very young.  Even when I also believed I was bad, lazy, messy, ugly, boring, nerdy, overly-emotional, not worth being friends with or dating... I knew I was smart. It was a good quality of mine I could cling to, and I built the bulk of my identity around that.

But what do you do when that identity is called into question?

I was 20 years old, a junior in college, taking a class I loved called “Sociology of Families.”  The professor was young and fun, with a wry sense of humor and a penchant for actually writing class notes off the cuff on the chalkboard.

Sociology was my major, and I was drawn to it because I enjoyed the lively yet respectful and open discussion it encouraged.  I loved that I could float ideas that I was still developing and have them explored and expounded upon by my peers and profs.  I loved that my major was based on critical thinking and questioning everything we were told. I loved that if I could at least begin to support my thoughts with sociological theory or ideas, I was welcome and urged to do so.

One day in class, we were talking about religion and its impact on the family, and our professor stated definitively that Christianity was an institutional support for domestic violence. Simply-put (and without getting into a sociology primer, haha), this means that Christianity – by its very nature – needs and feeds domestic violence. I took issue with this and raised my hand to argue that the more likely causal relationships were with traditional gender ideologies, etc, which were features of the radical branches of any number of religions, rather than with one whole, specific religion.

My professor flew off the handle and told me that he had more experience and knowledge than I did, and he shamed me for questioning him.  He told me that he didn't know how I had made it to a 300-level class without learning the importance of generalization, and he said that I didn't belong in his class.  I kept my eyes down for his tirade... it was the first time a professor had ever spoken to me that way and I didn't know how to process it other than to take it in silence.

I had to turn in a brief paragraph proposing the topic for my final paper at the end of class, so at the bottom, I jotted a note.  I apologized for disrupting class and upsetting him, and I told him that the point I was trying to make was that Christians generally abhor domestic violence.  He had pointed out the "wives submit to your husbands" verse in Ephesians during his attack on me, so in my note, I pointed out that that verse is sandwiched between verses admonishing husbands to love their wives like Christ loved the Church, and to love her as he loves himself.

The professor came to our next class session with at least a ream's worth of printed articles, slammed them down on his desk, and said, "This is all research that backs ME up."  He dared anyone else to challenge him and then lit into me for another ten minutes before moving on with his lecture.  As we were leaving, he pulled me aside and told me how inappropriate my note was and how he just couldn't believe that I could be so dense.  He again told me that I didn't have the critical thinking or generalization tools necessary to succeed in the upper-level courses at a rigorous university.

It was terrible.  But the worst part of it was...

I believed him.

This post originally appeared at Always, Katie - to finish reading the full text, please click here.