I Don’t Want to Stand Out
On Defying Familiar Fears
I was devastated when the tip of my Schultuete, a cone shaped cornucopia filled with sweets, broke, and the candies started spilling out. I clutched it across my body, my left hand covering the tear in my pink and gray plaid skirt and white blouse with a new leather rucksack on back. It was the first day of school in Germany. Made of bright metallic cardboard embellished with glitter and shiny objects, the glory of the Schultuete exceeds any bag of Halloween candy. Kids carry it proudly to proclaim the end of early childhood; it’s a sort of rite of passage, but my rite was seriously derailed. As pictures were taken, I made sure no one saw my flawed cone. That was the first of many experiences of not wanting to stand out in my newly adopted German culture.
Germany’s homogeneous culture required a prodigious effort to fit in. While I mostly passed as a German girl, there were lapses and people who didn’t want me to fit in, like the boys on my street who yelled, “Ami [American] go home!” in German accents. It was funny, but I didn’t see the humor at the time. Determined to belong, I doubled down on blending in. Years later after an abrupt move back to the US in middle school, I stood out as a German kid and applied the same effort to fit in, which didn’t always end well. Being different was my biggest fear.
Last week, I opened an email that triggered this familiar fear from the past. Stress shot through my body as soon as I read it, and I wondered why. The email was from my publisher who sent me a PDF of a memoir I worked on for the last year and a half to proofread. My book was obviously already accepted, and I had prepared it for the typesetter, but suddenly I was very nervous. A sleepless night revealed my problem: a reluctance to expose myself publicly. Memoirs are a popular genre, especially in the time of COVID as record numbers of people wrote them recently. I was thrilled to get a publisher in this competitive market, but it wasn’t until I opened the email that I realized how uncomfortable this was for me. Why?
There are two reasons it’s hard for me to go outside my comfort zone. One is my innate reticence and desire to be accepted. I don’t like standing out. The other is a feeling of guilt or wrongness. An accusing voice in my head says, “You shouldn’t divulge personal struggles or failures.” This is the voice of shame that instructs me to gloss over the unvarnished parts of my life. The voice says, “You’re opening yourself to criticism. What if you offend someone? Just keep the status quo.” Going against this voice feels wrong, like airing dirty laundry or dredging up the past. These dictates are hard to defy.
But this pedantic voice is the voice of false guilt. What’s the line between genuine and false guilt? It’s unclear, and the lack of clarity makes the accusing voice more urgent. Perhaps the line is that true guilt is a signal of something that needs attention. It calls me to admit my mistakes, ask for forgiveness, and find a way to move forward. True guilt “produces repentance without regret” (2 Cor 7:10) that leads to positive change which removes the guilt. False guilt is persistent and impervious to change. It is critical and officious, like a German train conductor with a harsh whistle. It produces a feeling of being wrong.
Distinguishing between true and false guilt is not simple. Some people want to make it simple by arguing that self-expression is always a good thing, no matter the fallout. They live by the maxim, “Live your truth. Be true to yourself” often without serious reflection and questions like “Can I tell my story or forge my own way with integrity, humility, truth, and kindness?” It’s important to understand our motives and the reasons for leaving our comfort zones.
Cancer taught me to defy comfort zones and to speak my voice. It’s not something I’m accustomed to. I always marvel at my students who are so good at expressing their views. I was not raised in the kind of environment that encouraged kids to speak their minds, and it’s hard to change that. But I am deciding to make a change and to follow a dream of writing a book. So here I am, and I’m not turning back.
I first started writing during my cancer recurrence as a way to process the struggle. Overcoming obstacles became the focus of my blog posts. Then, as I was moving past the treatment stage, I thought about compiling my posts into a book. As creative projects often go, my project grew into something bigger. I discovered connections between my current experiences and my childhood. A year later, I completed a memoir on overcoming life disrupters that follows an acceptance scale to navigate the treacherous waters of life. I’m hoping that my story will provide handholds for others scaling steep walls and obstacles.
In his excellent book The Wounded Healer, Henri Nouwen reminds us that “[n]o one escapes being wounded . . . The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.
Wounded healers heal wounds.