Am I the Crazy One?
In a world in turmoil, how can we be sure that we aren't imagining what we're seeing?
In Embracing Curiosity, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life, exploring my faith and politics with curiosity and nuance.
I remember walking into the school building the day after the 2020 election, fully aware that I was one of the only ones in the building feeling tremendous relief at the results. I masked my emotions as I entered my classroom and moved on with the lessons for the day, all while feeling four years of tension slowly leave my body as news continued to confirm what I went into the day believing would be the final vote count.
I remember feeling so disoriented when I entered the school building on January 7, 2021, the loneliness of not knowing who I could trust with my fears and concerns. I once again attempted to mask my emotions as I entered my classroom, but that mask hid so many feelings, my body holding the tension of knowing that something in our country had changed and only time would tell just how, or even if, we would recover.
In the months that followed—job loss, career crisis, and the sudden decision to move across the country—I repeatedly felt like maybe I was crazy. Maybe I was imagining everything. For the first time in my life, I finally understood what people had been saying about “gaslighting,” but that didn’t change the constant uncertainty of my own experiences.
Had I been standing on the side of justice? Or had I been wrong to be critical of a presidential administration that appeared to oppose everything that I believed about my role as a Christian?
Were the many diverse voices I had taken to listening to right about the way things are? Or was I listening to the wrong voices?
Did I imagine my loneliness? Or was it self-imposed?
Did I imagine that I was walking on eggshells? Or were the planted landmines of my own making?
The more certain I become of myself, the more I read, and the more I listen, the more assured I become of the answers. While I believe certainty is never fully within our grasp, I am comfortably convinced of where I stand in my beliefs and convictions, with just enough humility to be willing to admit that I might be proven wrong even about those thoughts and beliefs.
But it only takes a single conversation or text thread to send me into a spiral, asking myself “Am I the crazy one?”
I want to trust what I see with my own eyes, what I hear with my own ears, and what I’ve experienced in my life, but everyone just seems so damned certain about everything they feel and believe and stand for. So certain that they refuse to listen to the stories of others that might challenge those very convictions.
I can see the many sides to debates on abortion, solutions to the climate crisis, criminal justice reform, and even religion, and while I may not agree with the many sides and while I may take a definitive position, I respect that the different views come from personal experience, knowledge, and deeply held personal beliefs.
But I don’t understand denying truths that are staring us right in the face.
The climate is changing and the human, ecological, and financial cost can no longer be denied.
The middle class is shrinking and giving more money to the people on top isn’t helping anyone but the excessively wealthy.
Systems of service, such as medicine and education, are understaffed, overworked, underappreciated, and over-vilified.
Guns are not making us safer; they are putting all of us at higher risk of losing a loved one or our own lives to gun violence.
Mental health needs to be prioritized but our current system cannot help the vast majority of Americans.
And the list goes on and on.
We’re not on different pages, we’re in different books. We’re not seeing the same facts through a different lens; we’re seeing different facts. We’re all afraid of something, but our fears directly conflict with each other. We’re all hurting, but we can’t agree on what caused that hurting and on how to heal.
This really came home to me last fall when I listened to the first episode of the 2022 season of The Wilderness. The point of interviewing the various focus groups around the country was to show just how disconnected many of us are from what is actually happening around the country, and how little we know about each other.
I’m a confessed politics junkie who listens to a variety of political news sources for fun. While I wish things would shock me, nothing much does anymore, such as the news from this last week about Dominion Voting in their case against FOX News.
Or in an issue that is even closer to home, I was not at all surprised by the revelations of the growing influence of alt-right personalities in my own church body. It is something that a small number of us have been talking about since 2015, as we watched many of our friends, family members, and colleagues choose political power over loving their neighbor. While everyone around us kept telling us that we were crazy, we knew what we were watching with our own eyes.
In the end, I’m sure that I’m not the crazy one. How can I be sure? Because the cost has been too great. It hasn’t meant the loss of power, prestige, or influence. Instead, it’s meant the loss of friends, career path, community, and a complete transformation of the way I see my world.
And it’s not just my experiences, but the experiences of others, as highlighted in this interview with Beth Moore from the Holy Post Podcast.
The most heartbreaking part of all of this is the realization that I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know how to stop feeling like the odd woman out, the voice in the wilderness, the canary in the coal mine. But I’m also comforted by the knowledge that I’m not the only one. That longtime friends are at different points on the same journey. That I’ve found online friends who have both encouraged and challenged me. And that my faith in a God that is bigger than all of this continues to grow and evolve.
Knowing that I’m not the only one asking “am I the crazy one” has brought me at least a little bit of comfort over the last several years, and I hope that my experiences have done the same for others, as well.
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It grieves me to watch the body of Christ divide itself over issues that, while important, are not ultimate. I've also seen how politics has increasingly infiltrated and divided the Church and how the enemy uses opposing views to keep many Christians distracted and focused on the wrong issues. We need more people with the ability to have level-headed conversations regardless of their positions so that we can come to intelligent conclusions about how to navigate a world that, from every side, opposes the will of God. We indeed need to love our neighbors as an outworking of our love for God.
I applaud your conviction to remain true to your core values. We are the sane ones who can see through the big lies. The power mongers try to deflect and spin issues with the sole purpose of remaining in power. It is all about power and money to those that lie to the public. There are many politicians who are honest and true to their oath of office, it is up to us to vote them into office, it is not hard for me to figure out who they are. They have the same core values as you and I.