by Jamie Wright
One December night when I was in third grade, my dad came home from work dragging a big bushy pine tree behind him. He stood it upright in the middle of the living room with one hand, and made a grave declaration that his kids were not gonna grow up without “a goddamn Christmas tree.”
Lights and ornaments materialized out of nowhere, and my siblings and I were overjoyed by the shiny red and green balls with delicate hooks and the clean pine scent that quickly filled our home. In retrospect, it must have been a spiritually tumultuous time for my parents, but for the kids it was a nearly storybook evening. My dad was always a bit of an alarmist, so before we nodded off peacefully to visions of sugarplums, he sat us down for a stern warning about the implicit danger of putting lights on trees. And how it kills people. Especially kids. We kissed our parents good night and scampered off to bed with visions of burning houses, screaming children, and wailing mothers who forgot to unplug the goddamn Christmas tree dancing in our heads.
Our surprise first Christmas is a fond childhood memory, but with it came a sudden awareness of two things I found very unsettling. First, I realized faith isn’t fixed. It can move. It can morph. It can change. And second? I learned that my parents were…tinsel people.
That was that. We just sort of stopped being Jewish. No one ever said it out loud; it was never addressed or discussed or explained. The Jewish part of our lives simply ended.
Years later, while they were at work, I shamelessly helped myself to whatever private stashes and hidden caches I came across in my parents’ bedroom. If I wasn’t buried in books at the bottom of their closet while they were out, I was usually digging around in the rest of their bedroom. It was a tween dream come true, as a thorough tossing of drawers revealed a small handgun, a couple of dirty magazines, and a solid year’s supply of chewable antacids. But the bottom middle drawer of my parents’ dresser was my favorite place to snoop, for that drawer held the only remaining evidence of my Jewish childhood.
There was proof that it all happened. Dreidels my brother and I literally made out of clay at Beth Shalom elementary school, a collection of kids’ artwork, including my own sloppy preschool attempts to draw the Star of David, and a few pages of my brother’s practiced handwritten Hebrew. There were also a couple of carefully folded yarmulkes and a manila folder that held the signed documents that proclaimed us Jewish for real. And wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of it all was the acrylic tortoiseshell menorah we’d gazed upon for so many Hanukkahs, with a handful of bent and broken candles.
When my parents were at work, I would occasionally dig out the menorah and flatten one of the yarmulkes on my head, and then, pulling the little gun from its irresponsible hiding place, I’d run for the mirror in the master bathroom to do some modeling with these exotic props.
Sometimes I would point the gun across the room at an imaginary bad guy, squint my eyes, and launch into what little Hebrew I could remember. I waved the pistol, chanting, “Barukh ata Adonai,” like the deranged love child of Clint Eastwood and Yentl. But my very favorite thing to do was hold the gun in one hand, elbow bent at a ninety-degree angle so it was pointed at the ceiling, with the menorah held straight out like an exorcist’s crucifix in the other, pretending to be one of Charlie’s Angels but, like, super Jewish. I looked dangerous yet prayerful, so you couldn’t be sure whether I was about to shoot you in the face or bless your ass off.
So anyway. Basically, I lost my religion in the eighties, before R.E.M. even made it a thing. I was Jewish…and then I wasn’t.
My religious identity just kind of disappeared into thin air. You could say I continued to believed in God throughout my youth, but I also believed in ghosts and unicorns and in that urban legend about a couple making out in a steamy car when an urgent news report alerts them to a one-armed escaped convict in the area, so they buckle up and speed home, only to find a bloody hook dangling from the handle on the car door. I was far too busy crimping my hair, pegging my jeans, and screening my calls with an answering machine to have time to dig deeper for a better understanding of these timeless mysteries.
I never questioned the existence or the purpose of God, but that’s only because, as we got less and less Jewish, I never bothered to think about that kind of stuff at all. Just like I never bothered to ask myself why an experienced murderer would open an old-school car door with his clumsy prosthetic hook hand and not his perfectly fine other hand. I mean, it doesn’t even make sense. But the point is, I didn’t care enough to care.
* * *
I know what you’re thinking. You’re like, Why are you telling me this? I thought this book was about a shitty missionary, not some dorky Jewish kid who got a random surprise Christmas. What the hell am I reading?
Well, I’m telling you this stuff because long before I became the Very Worst Missionary, I was a mostly Jewish gun-waving treasure hunter who lost her religion and didn’t really care. I’m telling you all of this because where you come from matters.
Your ancestry, your childhood and adolescence, your awful, weird, or wonderful family; it all adds up to who you are today. You can accept or reject the lessons of your youth—your mother’s dogma, your father’s politics, your ninety-seven-year-old great-granny’s super awkward sex advice—but you can’t change where you came from, or who you came from, or what you came from.
The past lies beneath our beliefs like the soil of our soul. It’s the wet clay and dry bones and clumpy dirt, the grit and gravel, the small stones and loose sand, and the petrified turds that the adult formation of our faith must rest upon. Your history is like an inheritance, a patch of land that, though you may not have had much choice in its early cultivation, belongs solely to you.
Fair warning: While I believe it’s valuable and necessary, the excavation of your past is a very good way to disrupt your whole entire life as an adult. (I highly recommend the help of a licensed therapist. And possibly medication.) Carefully plucking your way through the landscape of your history can suck, but doing so can help you carry an unsettled faith to solid ground.
It would take a lot of work and a lot of sifting through my own story before I’d understand how my journey as a Christian began long before I actually chose to follow Jesus. I mean, as a little Jewish kid, if you told me I would grow up and someday move to a foreign country as a Christian missionary, I would have laughed in your stupid face. But my mostly Jewish childhood gave me a pretty solid introduction to God while keeping me blessedly far away from churches and churchy people. I was free to learn about Christianity as an adult, without bias or guilt or expectations and, most important, without affection for how things were or how they’d always been. I didn’t know it at the time, but making a late entrance to the Christian scene, which at first left me feeling awkward and unsure, would eventually turn out to be an unexpected treasure.
When I was fourteen, I slipped a black leather biker jacket and steel-toed boots over my youth.
I bought them myself with babysitting money, which is kind of a big deal, because in 1989 a reliable babysitter with a reputation for getting the kids to bed on time and doing the dishes could earn a whole two bucks an hour. With a price tag of ninety-nine dollars, it took months of hoarding fives and ones and stacks of quarters in my sock drawer until I finally had enough money for the jacket. It was a broiling 112-degree summer day when I asked my mom for a ride to the mall so I could buy a winter coat, but I was determined to have it. I walked into the leather emporium looking like the girl next door, and I strutted out looking like…well, the girl next door in a biker jacket.
As far as investments go, it was a good one. I wore that jacket every day for at least three years. Plus, it gave me superpowers. When I had it on, I felt invincible. I felt grown up and capable and tough. It allowed me to smoke cigarettes and sip light beer without feeling like a sneaky child. I could flirt, bait, tease, and lie about my age with the greatest of ease, and from the safety of
my black leather jacket, I talked to men as if I were a woman. I was only a kid, but when I walked out of my house in that jacket and those boots, with short shorts over black tights and lips the color of red wine, I felt like I could run the world. I could march right into any room, any group, any scenario, and front like a gangster.
Naturally, this got me into a lot of trouble.
I was born with a sharp tongue and the poor taste to say out loud what everyone else is only thinking. The dark-sided Supergirl vibe only gave me more confidence to be an even bigger asshole in public. I could be downright cruel, rude, dismissive, and aloof, the meanest of mean girls, frequently dropping one best friend for another, never getting too close to anyone.
I wanted to be tough, because I thought to be tough was to be unfeeling. I wanted to be made of steel, unbreakable, so I learned to master the swirling mess of fear and insecurity I carried inside. I got so good at hiding it all, so good at pretending nothing bothered me, that when I got drunk and lost my virginity to a complete stranger at a house party, I didn’t even bat an eyelash. That night was just confirmation that I possessed control over little in my life, even my own body. But if I could control my emotions, nothing else mattered, because if I didn’t let myself feel, then I couldn’t be hurt.
Never in the history of the universe has there been a more obvious or pathetic tough-girl facade.
Beyond the lipstick and leather, any reasonable adult could see that I was an incredibly soft, vulnerable child doing her damn best to navigate a chaotic home life and a handful of mental-health issues. The narrow feet stomping around in those big boots were attached to a pretty smart kid with an inexplicable history of academic struggle and a severely underdeveloped sense of self. I wasn’t actually a tough girl with a quick wit and a dirty mouth; I was a lost girl with no language for the depression, anxiety, and general disorder that ruled my life.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with teenagers who are off the rails, I suffered a glaring absence in my life of reasonable adults. My parents, bless their hearts, had too many kids, not enough money, and their own bubbling cauldron of undiagnosed mental illnesses between them. I believe they did their best with what they had, and I will always be grateful for their efforts, but my mom and dad were so busy fighting their own demons, I don’t really think they could even see mine.
And so I learned to avoid all of the adults who could really see me, instead surrounding myself with those who fed my ugly alter ego. Or rather, fed on it. I happily believed my grown-up friends when they told me I was “mature for my age.” I assumed they were wise enough to know, but then, my standards for the company I kept were not high. As a high school freshman, I thought hanging out with people who grew pot and made porn and kept a baby possum in a shoebox was cool. It didn’t seem at all weird to me that a thirty-five-year-old man was handing out ecstasy like candy and letting a bunch of blitzed teenagers crash at his house every weekend. And while I was quick to pick up on the power of my own sexuality, I remained naive to the fact that grown men who sleep with teenage girls are deviant predators, not “sophisticated older guys.” For the longest time I honestly thought I was the one manipulating them.
I’m grateful I never did anything really, really stupid in my black leather jacket and steel-toed boots, like rob a bank or hijack a plane or join a death cult. I’m certain I could have been talked into just about anything, and I’m lucky I didn’t end up, like, buried somewhere in the middle of a Mexican desert.
* * *
During the first semester of tenth grade, the vice principal called me into his office to let me know I’d missed so many classes there was no way I would be able to graduate on time. He said he wanted to understand how a kid who was clever enough to get into honors English could have a GPA that ranked 388 in a class of 390. All I could do was shrug. I really didn’t know the answer to that question; I only knew there was something seriously wrong with me. I was fundamentally different from everyone else, but not in a cute, quirky, Nutty Professor way, and not in that all-teenagers-think-they’re-weird kind of way. I was extraordinarily dysfunctional, though I didn’t know why, and I hated myself for it. (It would be another ten years before I’d learn about this thing called ADHD, and twenty before I would seek treatment.)
I didn’t tell my parents about my conversation with the vice principal, and to this day I don’t know if the school administration ever bothered to call them with news of their daughter’s catastrophic failure. Instead, I went home and told my parents that high school didn’t stimulate me, I was bored and unmotivated in my studies, and I couldn’t bear another day of it. I was ready for college material. It was time for me to move on. I was mature for my age—everyone said so! Then I sold them on the idea of taking the California High School Proficiency Examination so that I could “graduate early” and move forward with my life.
One Saturday that spring, I took a five-hour test, which I passed, and I never set foot in a high school classroom again.
I was fifteen.
And completely untethered.
There was nowhere I needed to be and no one I needed to be with. I had no real God; I observed no moral code; I knew no intrinsic worth. I lived the next few years of my life almost like a body without a spirit. I couldn’t be hurt or disappointed. I couldn’t be victimized or violated. I pretended to be emotionally bankrupt; that way the vault was empty—even if someone violently broke in, there was nothing for them to take. This lent a false sense of protection as I engaged in more and more risky behavior. I was extremely promiscuous. I dabbled in drugs. I jumped in cars with all the wrong people and took off my clothes for all the wrong reasons.
Still too young to get a driver’s license, I rolled up for my first day of community college in the passenger seat of my mom’s minivan. Initially, I enrolled in super easy classes like Psych 101, Bonehead Math, and Intro to Fencing. The next semester I tried to expand my horizons. I took a writing class (which I dropped immediately, because writing is so much work. No, thank you!), but I was surprised to fall in love with the nuances of anthropology and the broad impact of world history.
I’d like to tell you this was a major turning point for me, like I suddenly discovered the joy of learning and a hidden capacity for getting shit done, and then I kicked ass in college. But there was no reason the academic struggles I’d had since kindergarten wouldn’t follow me on this new journey. The truth is, nothing changed. The only difference was that now I could drop classes before my disastrous habits were immortalized on my transcripts. Also, college professors wouldn’t write concerned notes to my parents that said things like “Jamie is a bright girl with great potential, but she often arrives unprepared, spends class time daydreaming, and never turns in her work.”
Sadly, failing out of high school wasn’t the rock-bottom event it should have been. “Graduating early” and going to college only furthered the delusion that I was somehow taking charge of my life. I convinced myself I’d chosen that path on purpose, ignoring the part where I’d backed myself into a corner and run out of options. I never told anyone that I quit high school before high school quit me, and it was easy to let college classmates and professors believe I was there because I was extra smart, not because I was actually really dumb. Despite the fact that I’d literally failed my way there, when I walked around the American River Community College campus in my black leather jacket and chunky combat boots, I felt like a total badass.
But mostly I was just an ass.
* * *
I like to think I grew up to be the kind of reasonable adult I so badly needed entering my teen years. Personal experience has given me eyes for seeing beyond the icy exterior of the troubled kid who’s hiding a hurricane of pain. I cringe when I see girls who remind me of me, for I certainly have regrets from that period of my life, but I’m also filled with understanding and compassion for them. I would scoop them up and hug them and tell t
hem they’re enough, if I thought it would actually spare them a few years’ worth of embarrassing behavior.
But of all the stupid, dangerous, disgusting things I did in my youth, I carry a deep, abiding shame over only one thing—and it’s not that I was a gullible, drunk slut; it’s that I didn’t complete four years of high school. I mean, it’s one thing to be a dumb kid with poor judgment, but even the biggest burnout potheads I knew made it all the way through their senior year, walked the stage in a cap and gown, and went home with a diploma. I’ve known some people with college degrees, master’s degrees, even a couple of PhDs who function at, like, borderline chimpanzee-level intelligence, but I couldn’t even manage high school.
I’m still trying to make peace with that silly child who daydreamed her life away. I’m still kind of pissed at the girl who was always unprepared, still disappointed in the one who didn’t do her work and frustrated by her inability to get her shit together. I’m annoyed with the girl who made a mess of her life and then pretended the only way out of the mess she’d created was exactly the way she wanted to go, as if it had been her plan all along. That girl? The one with so much “potential”?…Ugh. I just want to kick her.
Probably because I still am her.
When you struggle in your forties with things that wrecked you at fifteen, I don’t think you’re supposed to say so out loud. It makes people uncomfortable.
Everyone loves an underdog, but we prefer our stories of wrestling and redemption to be told in the past tense: I was depressed. I had anxiety. I felt insecure. I slept around. Our favorite books, movies, and heroes offer us inspirational retrospectives of overcoming and winning—we’re all about killing the monster. We’d rather hear from our drunks when they’re sober, our depressed when they’re happy, our sick when they’re healed. We want to see wild horses broken and to believe in the hands that tamed them, because most of us hold our own dark places of wrestling with unbridled messes in our souls that sometimes spill over into life, and we desperately need to see that maybe we too can overcome the things that are ruining us.