I *think* I am finally clean
Taylor Swift is somehow always writing about my deconstruction journey.
When Taylor Swift’s album 1989 came out in 2014, I was 23 years old and one month away from moving to Eastern Europe as a full time missionary. I was living with my parents at the time and my little sister and I drove to our local Target and purchased the CD. We took pictures of us holding the album in the parking lot and then listened to it on the way home with our windows rolled down and the volume turned all the way up.
2014 was a wrought year for me. I had graduated college at the end of 2013 and moved to Beirut, Lebanon on a whim in January. I was deeply committed to my faith and to the belief that God had called me to be a missionary. I was also incredibly depressed and suffering with undiagnosed anxiety that manifested in rash decision making, oversharing, a lot of crying, and dozens and dozens of poems written to boys who preferred blondes.
I arrived in Beirut convinced that it would fix my life. That I would finally be in the center of “God’s will” and that I would finally feel at home within myself. I was searching for peace and thought I’d find it in the Middle East of all places— instead what I found was a crash course in geopolitics and practicing what you preach.
I spent 6 months there, studying and volunteering and trying to decipher what exactly I was doing there. On my very last day, a Palestinian friend took me on the back of his motor bike to Sabra and Shatila— Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut. I had first heard of these camps in a college class when we watched the animated film Waltz with Bashir, which documents the massacre that took place there in 1982 when Israeli soldiers murdered upwards of 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
It was a quiet afternoon when we rode in. We pulled up to a cement building, and I thought how odd it was that these were called refugee camps. They were slums, really, but I was told that it was important to call them refugee camps because Palestinians in Lebanon were refugees, even if it had been generations since they had last set foot in Palestine. We sat down to have tea with some friends, and they told me stories of the neighborhood. They recounted that the previous week several children had died when, during a rainstorm, the streets had flooded, and because the telephone wires hung so low and exposed, when the floodwaters rose up to meet them, everyone in the street was electrocuted. They told me happy stories too, but all these years later, that is the story that sticks with me.
The next day, I boarded a plane and as I looked out the window over the city, I felt, for maybe the first time in my life, that my faith and calling that I had centered my whole existence on might be a little bit of bullshit.
I would not return to Beirut, though I hope one day I will. It is a beautiful place— loud and chaotic and full of joy and pain that is visceral on every street.
I loved it, but I was struggling. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing, and I was achingly lonely and desperate to be part of something bigger than myself. I wasn’t ready yet to let go of my ‘calling’. I was still searching for someone to tell me I was important and that I had something that the world needed.
There’s a phenomenon in the evangelical church of single, young women going into the “mission field” at a disproportionate rate to that of single men. In fact you’d be hard pressed to find any single men who are missionaries, and if you do, they don’t remain single for very long. My theory about this, and certainly this was my own experience, is that global missions is one of the few places within the evangelical world where women can be in positions of leadership, where they are encouraged to express themselves and be independent, where they can even be respected and taken seriously in ways that they otherwise would not. Truly, it wasn’t until I began my foray into the mission field that I felt any sort of inclusion within my evangelical church.
And I was desperate to feel included. I existed on the fringes of the cool kids club— a club that was made up of 20-something year old men and, if they were married, their wives. I went to all their parties, bible studies, community events, worship nights— whatever I could get an invite to. I tried my hardest to seem cool and easygoing, like all I cared about was my faith and ‘oh, you’re single? I didn’t even realize!’. But I was dripping with my desperation to belong, and not just belong, but to be taken seriously, to be lauded as a leader, as someone deserving of respect. I wanted it so badly. I reeked of it. So I did my best to latch myself onto one of those boys who would get me in the room. I tried my hand at various times to various degrees with each one of them. But I wasn’t a mastermind or some pretty young thing. I was a tryhard and my heart wasn’t in it. Not truly. I thought myself in love a half a dozen times. I have the poems to prove it. But in the end I couldn’t get any of them to love me back, thank god. And so I stepped onto an airplane bound first for Beirut and then, after that didn’t work out, to Eastern Europe hoping that this would finally get me the love and validation that I wanted.
Of course it didn’t, but in October 2014, in a Target parking lot in the suburbs of Atlanta, I didn’t know that yet. I didn’t know that I was at the very beginning of a journey towards leaving behind my faith once and for all. A journey that would lead me to the peace that I so desperately craved.
Today, October 27, 2023, Taylor Swift released 1989 (Taylor’s Version). I listened to the album in my kitchen while my 6 month old baby smiled and squealed at my dance moves. I hadn’t listened to the album in a while, and when I heard it now through Taylor’s more polished, older voice, I teared up. I was reminded of how much pain I was in 9 years ago. How empty everything felt, how futile. In the final song of the album, is the song Clean. In the beginning of it Taylor sings,
The drought was the very worst
When the flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst
It was months and months of back and forth
You're still all over me
Like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore
As I listened to it today, I didn’t think about whatever boy I would have inserted into the song when it first came out. I thought about religion, my old faith. Because it is just like that, isn’t it? So incredibly hard to shake free of. It clings to you even as you think you’re evolved, think you’ve moved on.
I sometimes worry that it took me too long to deconstruct my religion. That I participated in this violent system for years longer than I should have. The fact that I was able to walk in and out of a refugee camp where untold horrors took place every single day and still think ‘if only they knew Jesus’ — it shames me. And even now, to reflect on it and think about what it meant for me and my life… I’m thankful for the cracks it made, and yet here I am sitting in my quiet kitchen, my child safe, no bombs or bullets threatening to shake my windows, simply benefiting from the lessons I learned from someone else’s pain.
The chorus of Clean says,
Rain came pouring down
When I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe
And by morning
Gone was any trace of you, I think I am finally clean
The truth is, I don’t know if I will ever feel totally clean from the faith and ‘calling’ I clung to for so long, but I don’t know if I should. I believe I have a responsibility to confront who I was all those years ago, to hold her close, to embrace her and also to scrutinize, to judge, to hold to account. And even Taylor Swift knows this. She thinks she’s finally clean, but she’s not sure.
And so I will end with that doubt. 9 years ago that would have frightened me and kept me up at night. But now I have that long sought after peace— peace that found me in spite of myself, peace I only achieved when I stopped caring so damn much about all the wrong things. Peace and doubt coexist so beautifully when you let them. I won’t risk losing the doubt. It’s too important. It keeps me honest.
There is not a button on this story, so I’ll just end with gratitude, and I’ll skip to the next and to get to those Taylor Swift bonus tracks that are just so so good.
BRB MAKING THIS SONG MY ENTIRE PERSONALITY
What I’ve been reading lately
My Delirious Trip to the Heart of Swiftiedom by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
“But listen more carefully. Read the liner notes. Decipher the codes. Know your Taylor Swift history. Her songbook is really only minimally about romantic love, and the best part of romantic love, which is its moment of revelation. It’s maximally about the other things that happen to a person in life: about the sometimes-questionable, sometimes-great, sometimes-tragic aftermath of that revelation, but it’s also about loss and betrayal and friendship and revenge.”
A Simple Way to Reduce Sexism in Kids by Melinda Wenner Moyer.
“When adults draw verbal attention to gender, it incites kids to develop prejudices against, and stereotypes about, people of other genders.”
One Month Left: Some last words on pregnancy by Haley Nahman.
“Every day that we wake up, hearts still beating, is both a miracle and the most basic fact about any of us. Here I will add a sentence that seems to suggest I am self-aware, but I am actually not: Pregnancy has happened before, but not to me.”
What is Mom Rage Actually? by By Merve Emre
“Your child is and is not an extension of yourself. He is both an intimate and a stranger. He imitates you and he rejects you, and it is not always possible to anticipate which gesture is more startling. You can attempt to control what he does, to a point, but you cannot control what the world does to him, or how he responds to it. What we learn from our children is nothing less than our own limitations—our passivity and our susceptibility when faced with what was once a part of us, but is, ultimately, other to us.”
