Pendulum

I want to talk about the "horseshoe effect". This is something I've touched on before, but I feel like it warrants an entire post. In brief, the "horseshoe effect" is when an individual swings from one extreme ideology to an opposite but equally extreme one. And this my experience with it:

My parents grew up in fairly typical homes, i.e., homes with a decent amount of dysfunction. Their families had a history of alcoholism and abuse (or at least on my mom's side; I'm not sure about my dad's, although he definitely had a father with anger issues). My mom found religion (Christianity) and then made my dad accept the faith before she would agree to marry him (he grew up a mild Catholic, which has its differences from Protestantism). It's funny, because I actually feel like my dad's faith is more genuine - I may not believe what he believes anymore, but I really respect him for his faith. Anyhow, my parents briefly considered becoming missionaries, but settled for having a lot of kids instead. And then they decided to home school all of us as well. Basically they went pretty extreme as far as current social norms appear. 

While my religious up-bringing could have been really traumatic (not necessarily because of the religion itself, but because of what people way too often use it for), it wasn't actually too bad for me. I was very serious about my faith throughout my childhood and even into young adulthood. However, through a series of circumstances that warrant an entirely separate post, I eventually moved away from Protestantism (dabbling briefly in Catholicism), then from organized religion, and then from faith itself (I just no longer believed it all to be true). 

Around this time I also ended a pretty serious relationship with an addict (again, another post warranted for this story). I had some friends (one I'd met through church many years prior, the other was her girlfriend) who really became a strong source of encouragement and support after my break-up. I started renting a room from them, and a pretty close bond formed. I had so much fun with them - we discussed ideas and laughed a LOT. There was so much that was good about it, including the fact that they got me thinking about ideas I'd held for a long time and started challenging that thinking. I needed that, and it broke me out of some unhealthy thought patterns. 

About a year in, I'd definitely hit my strongest feminist phase. I was trying to make sense of the ideological rules I'd been fed as a child, and the very negative things I'd experienced with my now ex-boyfriend. There was a lot of truth to what we discussed, and some very positive growth occurred. However, instead of understanding my experiences as they pertained to me, I was learning how to attach broad rules to a larger social picture - which can be a very slippery slope. My social media posts became more and more polarized, focusing on how the church IS bad, how men ARE dangerous; as opposed to how the church CAN be bad and men CAN be dangerous. It might seem like a tiny distinction, but I find it to be an important one. 

Thankfully, I somehow managed to find a better balance to my thinking. Through discussions with other people, and through observing my roommates and where their thinking was leading them, I realized that I was swinging far. And I discovered that my pendulum swing was bringing me away from the religious ideology I'd grown up in, to a totally opposite set of views - but with an equally militant set of rules and ideology attached to it. 

Let me see if I can describe it to you: a big thing that started my journey away from Christianity was the issue of homosexuality. I was raised to believe it is a sin. But as I grew older, that made less and less sense to me, and eventually I realized that it was just not something I felt was wrong. Anyhow, my roommates were in a homosexual relationship, and they definitely believed it was something that should be accepted. And while I absolutely agree with them, they always took it a step further, attaching big rules to society and making sweeping judgments about the people who maybe didn't agree with them 100%. 

I started to notice this swing, and I started to work to balance out my thinking. I realized that life is not so black and white, and that ideas can always grow and change. I understood more clearly how every idea and situation is very nuanced, and that trying to attach a rule only creates inflexibility of thinking and shuts people out. 

Unfortunately, my roommates shut people out. They were fighting for acceptance, but there were so many people they thought they couldn't accept. Eventually, for a variety of reasons, it became pretty difficult for me to live with them. I tried to talk to them about some of my concerns, and I don't really know if they understood. They were really focused on how the world needed to be fixed, and not enough on how they needed to be taking care of themselves. There were serious issues with their relationship, and none of their rules applied to them or helped them out in the slightest. I moved out, hoping that would allow us to retain the friendship, but things didn't seem to improve. Eventually I had to talk to my friend some more about it. I felt bad, but I never felt like I could really be myself around her and I knew I owed it to her to be honest with her about it. Naturally (because no one wants to be on the receiving end of this type of conversation) she didn't take it well and our relationship literally dissolved overnight. 

It still makes me sad. Really, really sad. I recently tried to reach back out and connect, but they are in the same place as they were before. I miss them, but honestly, just as I can't stomach extreme ideology on one side, it's also equally intolerable on the other. Even though the rules are completely opposed, they are still rules that apply snap judgments to anyone who can't in good conscience follow them. There is no allowance for humans to be humans and to be different. And in an age that screams about tolerance and inclusion, I see a whole lot of intolerance and exclusion going on.