The Hope of Identity
Once you label me you negate me.
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Throughout my life, the voices came for me, and they carried in their whispers the ancient shame, their tongues curled into my ears, trailing me through my day. They hissed that God couldn’t have said I was good. They implied that maybe, like so many things, I had gotten this wrong too. And they were always there with reminders of the ways I was damaged goods.
As a child, I swallow the lies politely, like a good girl, instead of spewing them out.
Instead, I succumb to the burden of brutal words. Sometimes it’s easier to be what they expect.
As a teen, I morph into the girl stomping onto the front of the stage, black Doc Martens thudding with a heaviness I’ve learned to conceal.
I’m tired of being good. I’m tired of asking God into my heart and rules I can’t keep because despite it all, I know my heart’s beat is wicked. I’m tired of the hypocrites trading faces. I am tired of a God who refuses to show his.
Instead, I write poetry in the dark under the blunt-edged light of my Marlboro red. My cigarette butts stack themselves like crooked bones, a graveyard of the hours spent curled around my journal scribbling furiously, carving out my confessions. Every word hurts.
My pages are smoke and cinder, fire and dust. Other people’s words scald my tongue and I exhale mouthfuls of ashen syllables.
The voices promise me I’ll always be hollow and empty and wretched.
And ever since the day I was called girl, they have understood my tender spots. The day the voices first come for me I am five years old and I keep secrets in the dark. I learn unspeakable things happen to little girls. I am groomed by the lethal burden of silence. I walk bruised in tender parts. I learn this identity and wear it with pigtails over ears scalded with shame.
Ghost Girl
I am ribs and skin and sunken eyes for much of my girlhood, a haunted child. I am long, braided hair so thin and wispy, the plastic daisy barrettes slip down no sooner than my mother places them, and I hope to grow ghostlike, an apparition no one can grasp hold of. If I am bodiless, I can escape capture. But I learn a girl’s body will betray me all over with the legs of a woman and breasts that draw catcalls and lusty eyes, and I am to blame. I learn I can be violated again and again with unholy tongues.
“She’s exotic,” they say. “Once you go Asian, you never go Caucasian.” They laugh and never see past the slant of my eyes to the vacancy their words leave. “I’ve got Yellow Fever,” they joke, palpating their hands over their hearts as I walk by. Their labels slither serpentine down my hips, all venom and fangs and poison so strong it takes me years to believe myself anything but nasty. I learn I am nothing more than fantasy, than fodder for locker-room talk, than rumors and wagging tongues. Boys will be boys after all.
Exotic. Slut. “We’re just joking, you should be flattered. It’s a compliment.”
Goldilocks and Being Just Right
I contort into a thousand roles depending on who I am around. I try them all out like Goldilocks, co-opting identities trying to find the “just right” fit. And when I fail, I pull on labels others dress me in. I grasp at the threads trying to weave an identity thick enough to cover my nakedness.
He slings his arm lazily around my shoulders and drips his fingers down my collarbone like he’s strumming chords on the neck of his guitar. I am hollowed out, percussive and echoing whatever beat they play. I am a girl used to greedy hands, and when I grow from childhood, I am once again prey for hungry eyes, a girl who’s been plucked down to bone for the curve of my breasts and the bow of my lips. The kind of girl who always feels hunted. I walk around in borrowed skins.
I was the girl so uncomfortable in her own, she grew more and more until they swallowed her whole.
The Lies Full Grown
And the years pass. I believe the skins will shelter me from carnivorous eyes. My breasts balloon, my belly shakes full of lies, and I’m magic. Maybe now I have achieved invisibility?
I am a new stereotype, a new label. My fat body dictates my identity for me. Society demands I apologize for being a fat woman, for the space I take up, for the choices I make, but it needs no explanation. It knows everything there is to know about me with one look.
I’m a fat woman. I’m not seen as a whole person, because I am a full person and a full person is automatically lazy, slow, undesirable, gross, slobby, out of control, and asexual.
When slim girls eat pizza and joke about pigging out or eating fast food, they’re charming and down to earth. They’re celebrated for being real and not obsessing over their bodies. But if a fat girl did the same, she’d be criticized for not obsessing more, for not making healthier choices. If a slim girl loves wine and chocolate and carbonara pasta served with crusty artisan bread drizzled in olive oil, she’s a foodie. If a fat girl does, she’s self-indulgent and lacking willpower.
The church fancies up the language with biblical terms, but they amount to a lot of the same stigma surrounding fat bodies. In church, my fat often determines my gluttony in others’ minds with nothing more than a casual glance. Sluggard, slothful, slowly destroying my temple, and lacking self-control to properly discipline my flesh—so much flesh. No one accepts that my fat isn’t my greatest sin because it is offensive to take up so much room without repenting of the calories I’ve claimed and carried on my body. My body is seen as a confession of the ways I’ve sinned against God. It keeps the equation simple, but it masks what truly grows in me. The shame of an unknown girl.
The same shame that halts another girl’s fork before it reaches her lips again and again as the number on the scale plummets, that keeps her cutting the tender flesh of her forearm or her thighs where no prying eyes can judge, the same shame that keeps a girl’s body on display like an accessory or in the bed of anyone who says, “I care.” The same shame that keeps the credit card sliding and the shopping bags attempting to fill the void. The same shame that keeps the good girl’s hands lifted in church for everyone to see and the complicated prayers tumbling from her lips as she tries harder and harder to be loved.
My shadow voices followed me from girlhood and swell like a prophecy, the lies have come full-grown inside me. I have conceived sorrow, reaping my curse.
I stuff myself into bodiless sweatshirts and go barefaced against the world. I drain the color from my eyes and make jokes about myself before anyone else can. I carefully turn off every single light and let the darkness cover me when my husband reaches for me at night. My hair is unwashed, scraped hastily into a ponytail. I can’t meet my own eyes, I avoid my reflection because I do not know who that woman is. I’ve never known. I don’t want to be seen. I hate having my picture taken and all the memories I have are blurry photographs, my hand blocking my face like I’m ashamed of being remembered at all.
Sadness becomes my natural habitat. I surrender to the ache of being unknown. And the voices come for me as I grow into motherhood.
When the child crumples in the shopping cart and his face turns mottled and red as his wailing rises from his sobbing little chest, and the shoppers raise their eyebrows and cluck their tongues because I am not doing this right, the voices rush back.
I can hear the faintest hum of “Hmmph, she really ought to discipline that child . . . brat . . . my child would never . . .” and it gets louder until I’m frantically removing Goldfish crackers, and milk, and ground beef, and toilet paper onto the conveyor belt and rifling through my purse for coupons and my debit card while shushing Judah with a mix of embarrassment and frustration. I drop the frozen orange juice and the container splits like it’s gutted and the pulpy mess oozes onto the supermarket floor. They call for cleanup on checkout three and the voice on the loudspeaker thunders in my bones. And I stand there in checkout lane three and I feel myself spilling out too. Making a mess everywhere I go. And everyone looks on and they can all see I’m not cut out for this.
The voices come when I gather with other women. These women smile with mouths full of words people want to hear. They toss their heads back when they laugh, deep and throaty—their hands don’t fly up instinctively to cover their mouths when they do. They say the right things and people lean in closer. They don’t mumble and trail off when people turn their heads mid-sentence, and I drop my eyes to the floor as the voices come for me. You could just go, no one even wants you here. You are invisible or worse, an annoyance, a burden. They only invited you because they feel sorry for you. You are drama and chaos and they all pity you, if they notice you at all.
Who Am I?
In the desert, we are introduced to a terrible and mighty doubt. Weaving our fig leaves, we become the great pretenders or we become who we were always meant to be. Unashamed. No one remains unchanged in the wilderness.
I forget Jesus knew the landscape of the desert too. The Spirit led him into the wilderness and directly into contact with his hunger. Creaturely appetites fixate our gnawing dependence on the tangible goods this world has to offer, the things offering sustenance. The void swells in our bodies, reminding us how much we need, how much we lack. But Scripture says that after he had fasted forty days and forty nights, Jesus then became hungry (see Matt. 4:2).
What nourishes us when confronted with doubt in the desert? Jesus knew the voices would come for him just as they do for us. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God . . .” The first attack was on Jesus’s identity and relationship with the Father, not on his hunger. “Tell these stones to become bread,” followed (Matt. 4:3 NIV). But the great temptation of Jesus started from another front: Are you who you say you are? Is God? Can you trust your Father? Can you meet your own hunger? Can you save yourself? Can you name yourself?
Jesus is tested again on the cross, a posture of complete surrender and weakness. The soldiers mock him: Aren’t you the King of the Jews? Aren’t you the Christ? Save yourself! Only a fool or an imposter would die instead of ransoming themselves with a thousand angels. It is an assault on the relationship and identity of Jesus.
Can you trust God at your absolute lowest, at your absolute end? Will you take this cup? Will you drink from suffering? Jesus modeled full identity, strength, and power by surrendering to unfathomable weakness, even unto death. But the Son knew his Father and when Satan whispered in his ear, Jesus didn’t fall or fly into the heavens, bypassing the cross. Jesus fought back, offering us a ransom of words, the nourishment of “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4 NIV). The original language of hope stayed fluent on his tongue.
Jesus knows the voices we face, and his promise to send a Comforter to be with us forever anticipates that our lives will be filled with grief and sorrow, with desert wanderings and our consuming and ever-present weakness. Why would we need a Comforter unless he knew we would be uncomfortable? Unless he knew we would need comforting? Jesus says, “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26 NIV).
Jesus knows we face an accuser; he knows the voice that comes for us. The Holy Spirit is prepared for the grief, sorrow, trials, and accusations common to us all, and we are ministered to by the Spirit of Truth even in the wild—especially in the wild. Jesus knows we will be ravaged by our hunger, by our doubt, by the tendency to want to sustain ourselves, protect ourselves, rescue ourselves, nourish ourselves, name ourselves. He also knows we are utterly incapable of remaining sober minded on our own, not when we face such terrible lies, such loud voices of accusation. Jesus promises we will not go into the wilderness alone. We will not be left hungry. We have a Counselor to defend us. A Comforter to tend to us. We have a language of hope that speaks truth to us and calls us out of the desert, changed forever. “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever. He is the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16–17 HCSB).
We Are at War
Sun Tzu said in The Art of War that “all warfare is based on deception.”1 The battle for our true selves, the imago Dei in us, is assaulted at every turn. Sin has sown discord in our hearts and reaped a bounty of pride, fear, lust, racism, white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, ableism, ageism, classism, and so many more spores now flourishing full grown like toxic mold within our atrium and ventricles, pumping deception into our souls. Its nucleus is invisible to our clogged eyes but it is everywhere choking out life, filling our bodies with disease. We don’t realize we’re colonized, but the symptoms are everywhere. We separate ourselves, we tell ourselves we don’t belong or declare that others don’t. We become divided instead of diverse. There are countless ways we declare the image of God as not fully present in other people. And when we don’t see the image of God in others, we’ll fail to see God. The image of God has nothing to do with merit, nothing to do with status, or character, nothing to do with our body’s ability or lack thereof. It has everything to do with God’s imprint on his most intimate creation. We don’t earn it, it is bestowed, incarnate, essential to who we are. Beloved.
We are hardwired for self-deception and self-preservation though. Sometimes we know we’re doing it, sometimes we choose it out of habit or comfort, but often we don’t. Our subconscious is a mighty adversary, and if you’ve survived childhood you have learned to self-preserve in one way or another.
I have stared into the solemn brown eyes of my baby still clad in diapers and covered in chocolate from chin to cheek while he’s sworn up and down that he did not in fact find Grandma’s hidden stash of candy and eat it all. There could be wrappers trailing Hansel and Gretel–like behind him and still he denies truth. I wonder if sometimes God shakes his head at us, with the kind of gentle knowing only a parent could have, and sighs, because don’t we know he gets it? Don’t we know he would’ve offered us a treat himself? Don’t we know he loves us?
We tell such eloquent lies about who we are, who others are. We masquerade as orphans instead of as the beloved children of God. Deception surely plays a role.
What is the point when these lies began to germinate? What feeds the disease? What nourishes and hides our sin? What perpetuates the grand cover-up? What intoxicates and numbs us? What keeps us from truth?
The lie might be so big the world came undone in a moment. You might have soaked your pillow every night believing you were dirty and could never be made clean. You might have told yourself it was your fault. You might have believed God turns his head the other way, or looks on and simply doesn’t give a crap, determined to get you good for the wrong you’ve done. You might have learned to weaponize your body, your soul, to keep yourself from ever being hurt again. You might have learned to despise your body, wishing away every synapse, every cell, every joint, and decided that punishing yourself by making it disappear, by making it bleed, or by starving it completely was the only way you could deal.
The lie might have been that your life doesn’t matter to God, because it surely doesn’t matter in the world. You might have watched your skin color be assigned value in the classroom, on the television, in the store every time you feel watchful eyes on your back. You might feel the burden and oppression of your ancestor’s market price. You might have been stopped and frisked so many times because others see nothing but a threat, a commodity, a problem. And you always drive with your hands at ten and two but know deep down that keeping them up won’t help, you’ll never be innocent in your skin.
The lie might be that you have to defend God. That you have to stand up for the truth, and it looks a lot like keeping the riffraff out. You are a card-carrying member of the people of God, the fixers, the get ’er dones, clambering for their place in the hierarchy, in the empire that was never of God. You might believe you can become tainted by the evil in the world if you get too close, without realizing what festers in the fleshiness of your own wicked and desperate heart. You might believe the image of God departed from those sinful ones, with their wayward desires, with their addictions and their perversions, their foul language and their folly. You might believe a prodigal can never come home, still reeking of feces and puke from gutter sleep and orgies and poverty. You might cross your righteous arms in refusal to join the celebration and look on with disdain as God makes a fool of himself running toward his beloved child, with arms outstretched and limbs flailing in pure joy and anticipation—not waiting to first weigh and discern with a calculated coldness what explanation and apology his disgraceful kid has to offer. Is he penitent enough for the wrong he is?
The lies start somewhere. Maybe we have no origin story other than we saw a way to know ourselves apart from God, to make sense of everything, to become our own nourishment, and only after we tasted the seeds of sin, felt the nectar of our choices flowing down our chins sticky and sweet, did we see it was rotten. We invited death and deception into our beautiful world.
That warfare leaves its scars on us, marks us with lies. Lies we tell, lies we are told. Lies we become. Are we arrogant or are we afflicted?
We are not good enough or we are too good. We have no place at the table, no banquet for us, no safe haven—or we are invite-only, RSVP and black tie required. We don’t take truthful stock of both the wickedness of our afflicted hearts and also the belovedness of our everlasting souls.
If all warfare is based on deception, truth is the weapon to fight against the lies. The balm for our scars. To flourish in relationship we need a bridge of truth to connect us. The cross is the greatest truth we have. The X on the map, the way home, the treasure unearthed.
The antidote for the voices that come for us is our true identity as beloved. The cross tells us the truth. I don’t know of a fiercer love than this: while we were sinners, Christ died for us. We are not shamed or self-satisfied, we are saved. We return to the slippery-tongued serpent and hear the hissing in the whole world, and even though lies come easier, we tell ourselves a new story. We hear the good news.
The Power of True Words
We are hardwired for self-deception and self-preservation, but the Word of God is intrusive. Disruptive. Subversive. It tears at the skins we’ve hidden ourselves in, and that’s agonizing.
The power of true words comes to fruition in repentance. Weakness is seminal to grace. Nothing can be birthed that has not first stretched and ripped you open. Truth is the midwife that helps us labor long and hard during the process.
What I had gotten wrong about my salvation attempts all those times I timidly raised my hand for altar calls was that deep down I only saw my sin and scars. I only saw that I was dirty and separated from God. I only tasted bitter fruit and heard the voices accusing me. I only saw where I didn’t belong. I saw my lack, but I didn’t see God’s abundance. I needed the truth of the gospel. It is the goodness of God that brings us to repentance.
For those who put their trust in God’s love, the cross neither condemns nor condones, it only ever covers us with Jesus. This kind of truth is intrusive but it is also redemptive. It both unmasks and covers.
It’s the most beautiful truth I know. We are claimed by the devastating love of God’s grace. I am claimed by a greater love.
The nature of gospel truth is to confront, but its purpose is to set us free. I didn’t know when I was filling those journals in my teens that I was crying out to God, because all storytelling is a confession of sorts. I was thrashing about in the dark, reaching for a lifeline.
But Jesus gathers the weary ones, the ones who can no longer hear anything but accusation and despair, the ones whose ears ache in agony and ring with the need for good news. We count ourselves among the poor, the oppressed, the weak, the meek, the wandering, the poor in spirit, the hemorrhaging, the unclean, the broken, the thirsty, the outcast, and the other because we know Jesus came for just such ones. We know we are more than the labels the world places on us.
And the voice that cancels out all the whispers and the hiss of unholy tongues says, “I have made you good.”
Maybe all of life is just a journey back to the heart of God, back to the garden where we saw his face and he called us good. Back to the place where we remember who we are by knowing who he is.
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.”
I am not dirty. I am not what they say. I am not what was done to me. I am what Jesus did for me. Redeemed.
“When you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.”
I can spit out mouthfuls of ash and scalded tongues are quenched with a language of hope. These lies have no claim on me.
“For I am the LORD your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.”
No longer a lost girl, no longer a label or a stereotype. Named. Beloved. Ransomed.2
My shadow still spreads across the light, but these days it dances to new songs. These days I stand on tippy-toes to kiss my husband as his arm circles around me, pulling me closer. I’m at peace with my body, with my soul, with my identity as beloved.
I pull my swimsuit cover-up over my head and drop it on my beach chair before joining my kids in the water. They swim toward me. My arms, fleshy at the tops like a pair of ’80s shoulder pads that have slipped down too far, are the only ones they know. I am familiar. I am known. I tuck my arms around their bodies, pulling them through the water while they squeal with joy. We stay in long enough for our fingertips to wrinkle as we dunk each other or race across the top—the first one to the floaty wins. My body isn’t consumed by shame. When the voices come for me, I remember whose I am.
God provides the reminders when I need them. Jesus sees us despite our three-way mirrors and bad lighting, despite the labels we wore or the sizes we fit in or don’t. My hands stretch into the summer sun to lift children on those hips and my family calls my body home; I drop my hands and let my picture be taken. I will be remembered.
I am Alia Joy, which means ascending to God’s joy. My name, which I long hated as a girl, which I thought made me different when all I wanted to do was fit in, was, in fact, a promise that in the midst of my weakness, the joy of the Lord would be my strength.
These days I’m not hiding. I’m shedding skins and writing my way back to the truth. To the identity I had long forgotten and the place where I remember I am not labeled, I am named.