you do not have to be beautiful
on the real problems, including the ones we can fix
I gave up Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for Lent, which I have so far kept to, even on Sundays– except of course that I have removed only the incentive, not the desire. So I have redirected a good deal of my previous Twitter time to things like trolling Pinterest for new haircut ideas and Zillowing homes in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and major coastal cities (yikes yikes yikes). Correspondingly, I have noticed new and undesirable instincts in myself.
I’m using the internet for something different, now. I am less compelled to identify the Right Take about every news event, but I do find myself compelled to seek out a sort of aesthetic improvement. I fire up a new tab and hover my cursor over the search bar, wondering: How could I fix my life?
Pinterest is great for this. In fact, like most women’s media, Pinterest is very, very good at convincing you to redirect from the real problems of your life– things like, I don’t know, rising income inequality, biodiversity loss, this horrifying article about women denied medically necessary reproductive care in Texas, the scary stuff Ron DeSantis is doing to higher education, the price of all those homes on Zillow that are also located in flood plains– and, of course, the intimate problems of our lives: illness, strained relationships, the slow leak in your right front tire.
Pinterest will convince that instead your problem is that you are the only woman on earth who doesn’t have curtain bangs, or doesn’t know how to style them.
Curtain bangs are fine. I might get them! I might also buy a new lipstick and organize my closet and employ some of the cleaning “hacks” served up to me on the websites I am trolling instead of Twitter. It reminds me, though, of my favorite line from (forgive me) The Hunger Games: remember who the real enemy is. The real enemy is not my inability to embrace a new style of denim or my poor table-scaping. The real enemy is actually not me at all, despite the many businesses who profit from keeping me at war with myself and/or my un-curl-able hair.
It is often much more difficult in real life than even The Hunger Games to identify the enemy. But I have found three questions very useful as tools in that general direction:
1. who benefits?
Who benefits from the way things are? (An example, from one of my favorite sociologists, in the New York Times). Who benefits from the problem being posed in this way? (An example, from Pinterest: “you do not have a thorough chart to manage your cleaning” is a much easier problem to solve than “your husband does not participate in household work.”)
2. what agency do I have?
I read a book about design thinking a few years ago that argued “if it can’t be solved, it’s not a problem.” Gravity is not a problem, because there’s nothing you can do about it. This framework is subjective, of course, and can’t exempt us from tackling big or intractable problems– our laws, for example, change because a critical mass of people decide that they must; climate change is both a juggernaut and a problem, and we better do everything we can and make way to do what we can’t yet do. But, in general, it seems like a valuable spiritual discipline to focus my energies on problems I can do something about. One so often discovers, at that scale, that the enemy is not some mysterious and unnatural force but something more like a lack of trust or poor budgeting or an unwillingness to have a hard talk.
3. what coalitions could I build?
This has been a long, slow change for me, a paradigm shift from the gospel of self-improvement and personal righteousness–spanning every sector of one’s life from curtain bang styling to carbon footprint and interpersonal dramas–to the gospel of collective action. (I tend to think that white Christians in America are especially ill-equipped, so well-trained have we been in personal pieties and so poorly-trained in things like solidarity, compromise, and healthy conflict.) Before my lenten practice, I bemoaned on Facebook the difficulties of getting solar panels on the roof of my condo building, an as-yet-unrealized effort that has involved learning about financing and budget projections and my own anxiety. But it has also been a profound encouragement to learn about Ann Arbor’s Solarize program, in which homeowners can partner with a contractor and invite their friends to join them in learning about solar and getting (discounted) quotes for panels. What a fabulous model! To not only pursue one’s personal carbon footprint reduction and energy savings and independence from the tyrannies of DTE, but to spread that good news and make it easier for others to join you.
All that said, I am trying to forgive myself my hair-related vanities and also to embrace asking for help and inviting partnership in this unwieldy solar panel project. I am trying to identify the problems that I can solve and cultivate serenity in all other areas. I am trying very hard to remember that “I do not have to be beautiful,” and in fact I do not have to fix my un-fixable life or improve it through table-scaping or the perfect capsule wardrobe. I am leaning hard into the phrase: “that is not what the Lord requires of me.”
Instead–say it with me now: act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.
(The understood subject of that imperative sentence is a plural “you.”)
Relevant and not-so-relevant things I am reading and thinking about:
Cleanliness is a scam designed to keep women down– or at least our ideas about mess and hygiene “are stuck in the mid-20th century, when most women didn’t work outside the home.” Relevant because: I suspect that, unlike me, my husband does not get ads telling him he must create elaborate chore charts to optimize our domestic bliss. See above example problem. (My husband happens to be great, but that seems to be a real statistical anomaly.)
Ever impressed by Phil Christman’s capacity to cut through the bullshit of academe, in this case by introducing the term “vulgar Bourdieu-ism”: “the idea that there is nothing to study about philosophers or philosophies, art works or artists, except the way that they get used between people in status games.” And the excellent point that if we (academics) actually believed that to be true, our own jobs make no sense at all. (Who benefits?!)
Kristin Kobes DuMez points out that we mean very different things when we say “religion,” beating the same drum as every religious studies professor I have ever met. It’s almost the Bernie meme: I am once again asking you to recognize that “Religious identity … cannot be reduced to a 100% match of every stated doctrine and belief.” It’s just “not how people live.”
Those three questions! Yes, yes, yes.