I have been inspired by my uncle Kit’s recent posts on his personal encounters with racism in America (“White Flight,” “Stupid Smart Person,” and “Window Tint“) to do some reflecting of my own.

In 7th and 8th grade, I had a teacher named (for purposes of this essay) Mrs. G.

Mrs. G taught social studies, reading, and grammar to all of the 7th and 8th grade students at my small Catholic school in Boise. In some respects, she was one of my favorite teachers of all time. She was deeply engaged with my classmates and me. She challenged us, treated us like adults, and gave us more ownership over our own learning process than any teacher we’d had before. We had heated discussions about anything and everything. She made space for it. She gave us hard, work-intensive research and writing projects, and said “I know you guys can do it.” So we did.

At the end of high school, I honored Mrs. G as one of the three most impactful teachers of my K-12 education. I brought her to the Boise Century Rotary Scholars dinner and we both got medals. I still have the event photographer’s photo of us standing together right as we exited the stage, flashing startled smiles.

* * *

Years later, I started working as a part-time assistant to Mr. G’s husband, I “friended” Mrs. G on Facebook. I was shocked to see that basically all she posted was asshole-ish political content. I started to feel kind of icky about having honored her as an influential teacher. I learned that she was pro-Trump long before he became the Republican nominee. I watched her amplify Fox News’ calls for Hillary to be arrested and jailed during the 2016 election on my Facebook timeline. Day after day, she reposted memes that called Bernie Sanders supporters “ignorant freeloaders” and “young people who don’t know history.”

After that Facebook awakening, I began reflecting more critically on my junior high experiences in Mrs. G’s class. I started remembering the Mrs. G of social studies, who was very different from the Mrs. G of writing, reading, and grammar (or so I thought).

During a unit on the Civil War (a unit that we had in both 7th and 8th grade social studies), Mrs. G repeated to us the following line, again and again: “Remember, the Civil War was not about slavery. It was about _______” she’d look at us, hand up to her ear, and wait for us to answer in unison: “States’ rights!” She told us that the idea that the Civil War was fought over slavery was nothing more than a “common misconception.” My perception of this lesson at the time was that it was more correct and academic to look for causes and ideals that were more central than slavery. Slavery was not a founding principle of the United States, just something that happened on the side for a while.

(On that note, as part of my great unlearning, a phrase that comes from Rachel Cargle, I am deeply grateful for Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “The 1619 Project.”)

Mrs. G also told us while teaching Civil War history, “If I were teaching this in Georgia right now, we’d be calling it the ‘War of Northern Aggression.'” (She had been a teacher in Georgia before she came to Idaho.) Given that juxtaposition, Mrs. G’s categorizing the Civil War an idealogical divide over “states’ rights” seemed like a fair middle ground. On a social studies test in Mrs. G’s class, if the question was “What issue was at the heart of the Civil War?” it was not open-ended. It was multiple choice, and you would be wrong to fall for “slavery” if it were listed as an option.

A quick Google search reveals that my class was not alone in learning this version of Civil War history. According to a Quartz article by reporter Jake Flanigan, “An informal survey conducted in 2011 by James W. Loewen, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, found that 55% to 75% of American teachers—’regardless of region or race’—cite states’ rights as the chief reason for Southern secession.”

A Washington Post article corrects this narrative in article titled “Five Myths about Why the South Seceded:”

“Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

Thinking back to middle school social studies, over a decade ago, I now recognize things Mrs. G said in history class as direct quotes from conservative pundits. E.g. “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” I marvel at how much power she had to shape my classmates’ understanding of the world back when we were young and had two main sources of information: our homes and our school.

Mrs. G taught me history in 2007 and 2008, not long before Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States. During the primary elections, I remember kids in my class saying they were “moving to Canada” if Hillary Clinton were to be nominated and elected. In a red state like Idaho, I was one of only two kids in my class of 30 who was vocally in favor of Obama. But this was not to my credit. Like the rest of my classmates, I was parroting the beliefs of the only other adult with whom I regularly talked about politics, whom I loved and respected more than Mrs. G: my dad.

* * *

Mrs. G was a California native, Spanish speaker, and Latina woman. She was not the person whom one might expect an impassioned “state’s rights” defense from. After I started working for her husband years later, I realized she was probably the less extreme defender of the Confederacy within her house. Mr. G once said to me (after I told him I voted for Obama in 2012, my first vote as a newly enfranchised 18-year-old), “One thing I always like to ask Democrats is this: ‘How much money do you want?'” His intonation was, “Where does it end?” To Mr. G, the government was a system that was there to take from him without end, and he didn’t owe anyone anything.

I did not have a good answer to the “How much?” question. For me, politics has never been about money, it has been about justice. We should do right by people. People are more important than things. This is a lesson I have been re-learning after the killings of more innocent black citizens in recent weeks, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, among others. If we seek to do the right thing, the details will work themselves out. I see now that I should have responded to Mr. G not with an answer (“How about $5 more an hour, to start?”) — but with more questions. Why did he associate “Democrat” with “wants my money?” Why is keeping and maintaining control of “his” money the number one political consideration in his life?

This question followed from one of my only attempted confrontations with my coworkers about politics that summer. I spent many days listening to Mr. G and the other nurses talk about needing to get AR-15’s before it was too late, and saying things like ‘you don’t negotiate with terrorists,’ (criticizing President Obama’s rescue of Bo Berghdal, an Idahoan). I never knew how to engage them. I assumed it was a lost cause. I also interpreted these kinds of comments as mean and angry and I did not want that energy redirected at me.

I used to sit there, restocking medical supplies, thinking “damn, this is hard to listen to.” I’d tell my dad later. He’d refute them and that would make me feel better.

But now, following the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement (that I am rejoicing to see spring up more unified and powerful than ever), I am realizing that there is a hierarchy of discomfort. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to listen to people be rude and selfish and quick to anger and violence. It’s counterintuitive to put oneself in the line of fire. But it is a privilege not to automatically be in the line of fire by virtue of a thing as unearned and random as being born white in America. It’s a hell of a lot more uncomfortable to walk around in the world as a black or brown person at whom this kind of vitriol is automatically directed (in our office, the Medicaid patients); to be a person who lives in the line of fire, everyday, year after year, generation after generation.

One of these former coworkers posted on Facebook last week “Here we go again with black lives matter. . . ” several people liked it and someone commented “Haha I love you.” I read this, got super mad about it, thought about messaging her, and then did not do it. Still thinking about it a few days later, I went back to her timeline and found that she had since deleted the post. I had missed my opportunity to speak up. The silver lining was realizing that somebody else probably did.

The resources I’ve been reading and listening to this week are helping me to realize that I do have privilege any time I’m in a white-only space (e.g. the entire state of Idaho), and that I have an obligation to use it. After squeaking out to my boss “I voted for Obama,” the next step should have been to research how to have difficult conversations and come up with an intelligent answer to the “How much money do you want?” question.

My husband, Thom, is practiced and strategic about mixing it up with people he disagrees with. In the past, he has approached AR-15 toting guns-rights marchers and given them hugs as a nonviolent form of protest. He once got in the middle of a fight on the street he lived on in Chicago and started hugging people amidst the flying limbs (he was then hit by a car). Thom credits his strategies to the tradition of nonviolence and social justice Christianity – a tradition that relies on people becoming free from the fear of pain and death. Thom finds this freedom in the example of Jesus, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Christian scholars such as Thomas Merton. I am not on his level yet (he says it’s the white guys’ job to become nonviolent first, anyway, not the women and people of color’s), but he inspires me to recognize the power I do have and to give it freely.

* * *

Middle school teachers have a tremendous impact on how we go on to understand the world. At least, they certainly did for me. If not for my dad who immediately told me when I brought home Mrs. G’s “states’ rights” idea, “No, the Civil War was absolutely, one-hundred-percent about slavery; your teacher is wrong,” I might have believed it. (Shoutout to all the amateur Civil War historian dads out there.) I might have taken Mrs. G’s version of history with me into high school, college, and beyond. I wonder what other perceptions of history she taught me that I don’t consciously remember, that have gone uncorrected.

I am waking up to all that I need to learn, and perhaps more importantly, unlearn.

I gave myself a bye on blogging last week.

I needed a rest. I was also uninspired by the book I was reading.

After hearing her interviewed on Cheryl Strayed’s new podcast, Sugar Calling, I decided to check out Amy Tan’s recent memoir Where the Past Begins (2017). I’d never particularly enjoyed Tan’s short stories, which I’d read for creative writing classes in college, but I was struck by this quote of hers, pulled out as the podcast title: “You don’t take dictation [as a writer], you find the truth.” (Listen here.)

Even though Tan’s book contains everything I should love (refer to my previous post) — I just could not get into it. Every time I tried to read a few pages, I would soon find myself scrolling through texts or Instagram, with no memory of putting the book down.

I’m not sure it’s entirely the book’s fault. I enjoyed parts of it. Tan’s life story is compelling, and she is deeply insightful. Hers is a vignette-style memoir that was apparently crafted by sending random 20-25 page personal essays to her editor every week for a year. It’s less a narrative of a life than a collection loosely related essays on her past.

She is full of interesting ideas. She writes of herself:

“I am a writer compelled by a subconscious neediness to know, which is different from a need to know. The latter can be satisfied with information. The former is a perpetual state of uncertainty and a tether to the past.”

Brilliant. Super-insightful.

And yet, perhaps because we’re in our the eighth week of quarantine here at Casa Troyer Behrens and I’ve had enough self-examination, or perhaps because I’m all-memoired-out for the moment, this neediness to know in Tan quickly started to drive me crazy.

After a week of snail-paced reading (during which I made it halfway-through the book) I decided to let it ascend back to its home in the Indianapolis Public Library cloud.

It might be that Tan’s mind is too similar to my own for me to enjoy visiting there. What annoys you in others is what you don’t like about yourself, as the saying goes. Where the Past Begins opens with Tan sitting at a desk in her office, sorting through every paper artifact from her life, her parents’ lives, and their parents’ lives. She reigns over a pile of old wedding announcements, ancestors’ applications for citizenship, old Christmas letters, and schoolwork.

At the time of writing, Tan is in her mid-60s. She has preserved her long-dead father’s master’s thesis and old sermons. She has kept her brothers’ elementary school report cards. To write this book, she relies on these piles old paper to conjure up people and memories from them. She admits to being a packrat, saying, “Even the molecules of dust in the boxes are part and parcel of who I am.”

I found this object-based relationship to self off-putting. My first thought was defensive: So I have to keep every last piece of paper to write a memoir someday? Transport them from house to house forever? Cherish the dust itself?

I understand Tan’s impulse to keep things. I experience that same neediness to know the past — especially the histories of the people I love. It can make me a good detective when called for, but it’s not a productive impulse to let run wild (particularly in the age of social media, when I can get trapped looking at increasingly far-removed people’s profiles into oblivion). So indeed, what I found triggering about Tan’s approach has more to do with me than her.

Shortly before getting married this winter, I confronted a box of old journals my closet. It was heavy, packed with 10 or more filled notebooks from the last 15 years of my life. Those journals held entries from middle school about my crushes, entries from college about my crushes (this is a strong theme, unfortunately), collages from studying abroad – ticket stubs, letters from boys, friends, family members… copies of poems, artistically-drawn song lyrics, and all kinds of ruminating. I used journals to process my feelings when they got too big, needed an outlet, and my friends were burnt out on hearing me rehash whatever I was stuck on at the moment.

Shortly after I started dating Thom, I observed that my journaling habit started to dwindle. In retrospect, I was starting to figure out how to process emotions in real time. Journaling used to be my space for that, but I was learning to do it out loud, with Thom as my witness.

Over the last few years, whenever I opened the old journal box and started reading, I soon felt bogged down by old feelings. Why did X person do Y? goes most of my entries. Many describe in great detail super awkward interactions. I was stubbornly dedicated to writing the truth of my experiences and not romanticizing anything. I wrote minute-by-minute records of middle school dances. Who asked me to dance the slow songs, how sweaty they were, how self-conscious I was about being taller than them. My first makeout in high school, in the Haunted World cornfields, where I laughed because it was so bad, and then quickly had to recant that reaction to fix the stab to the boy’s ego. In college, shattering a wine glass in a boy’s room and him accidentally stabbing himself on the broken glass and needing to run for help. A guy at a summer internship telling me, entirely serious, that his birthmark meant that he’d had a had a former life (and my lack of one meant I was a “new soul”). I was way into boys, and every boy-related novel and movie, but I made a habit of writing the awkward truth of my own experiences. Eventually, I could usually find it funny.

Undoubtedly it was useful to write all of that stuff down, if only to preserve the memories. But to keep all of those pages around forever started to feel like a burden, especially after I met Thom and observed the very different way he moved through the world.

Thom has thrown away all of his old letters (except the ones from me… I think.) He’s never been able to keep a journal, either. And I mean keep in his possession. Even when he decides to start journaling, the journal will escape. The first summer I knew him, he left a filled-out journal from his summer of hitchhiking on the top of his car right after he returned home. He never found it. This fall, after briefly keeping a digital journal on his tablet, he lost the tablet in a cab in New York City (and his writing app was not backed up to the cloud). “God doesn’t want me to keep a journal,” he has concluded — and I concur. Thom is not a natural holder-onto-the-past. He’s not a grudge holder, or a ruminator. If he’s going to ruminate about anything, it’s the future (whether his plans and habits are a match for his goals and ideals). He writes things down, then the universe whisks them away.

I kept my box of journals at first, after we moved in together, thinking it was an important part of my history as a writer. I had never considered that it was anything other than essential to carry these papers around from house to house, along with my book collection, for the rest of my life. But watching Thom toss all of his old letters, lose his journals, and generally exist so freely (also without shoes, or very many clothes) — I started to feel envious. How did he get to be so free?

At some point, I realized there was nothing stopping me from joining him there. I just had to rethink my idea of what a reader is, and what a writer is. For as long as I can remember, I have kept piles of books and journals with me, because that’s how I know who I am. It’s tangible evidence, a grounding device, a reminder. I’ve been told I even did this as a toddler. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? Could I still write a memoir someday without a written record of all of my grade school crushes? Could I trust my memory of the past without checking my contemporaneous accounts?

I decided to give it a go. I threw away almost everything in the box. The journals from grade school, high school, college, studying abroad, my early years in Chicago. I emptied everything into the trash except my letters from Thom, my great-grandfather’s scholarly articles from his time as an English professor at Bucknell, and the “Princess Books” that my Uncle Kit had made for me on a few early birthdays. In other words, I kept things that made me happy, which turned out to be things created by other people.

I used to rely on my box of journals to prove to myself that I was a writer, and that my memories were real. But living without them, I’ve begun to realize that my passion for writing is not something that can be lost, or taken from me. Nor can my memories (at least, not yet). The writing impulse can be either used and enjoyed or left to collect dust. But the mere fact of the journal box can’t help me remember who I am as a reader and writer. Only the act of writing can. I have to keep practicing it, but I don’t have to keep the evidence.

I’m still working on paring down my book collection. I recently got a new Kindle, determined to commit this time around.

(This is my fourth Kindle. I sent back the first three, but now I am finally open to e-reading in a real way. It took a global pandemic.)

Easy for me to say, perhaps, as I type a blog that will be stored in the cloud. I can find information and photos as needed online without taking responsibility for the storage space it requires. But in any case, I’ve never felt more free.