My Back Story
(I'm mentioning dates from memory; when I get around to checking they might change just a bit.)
My father is from eastern Kentucky, the son of a coal-mining father and whip-smart mother who had him at 17. My mother is from east Tennessee; her father was a Baptist preacher and her mother the church pianist; they both also taught high school and farmed. My parents were the generation who left the mountains, moving us every three years further north and west until I got too cold and flat land weary and headed back south! My father is also a Baptist preacher (although he's had many other careers) and my mother an English teacher; they became American Baptists when fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s. I was raised in a very progressive household with thousands of books -- I learned to read at 3 1/2, and as my father vehemently opposed censorship, I pored through an astonishing assortment of books throughout my childhood.
One of my daddy's favorite sermon refrains is, "People become the stories they tell about themselves." That has always stuck with me. From an early age, I understood the intense power of stories, for good or for ill. This is how emotional abuse works, after all -- if you repeat to someone often enough that they are stupid, they will begin to tell that story to themselves, to internalize it. Stories form a powerful branch of any oppression strategy, and resistance to oppression has often shown itself in the persistent diseminiation of alternate stories to one of "less than" (sometimes whispered when they aren't safe to say out loud, or encoded in songs or objects). On the other hand, long before I heard of visioning, or the power of affirmations, I understood that we don't "earn" the right to tell a new story of ourselves because we have changed, but that instead, daring to tell a new story about ourselves almost always comes first, laying the groundwork for new possibilities of becoming.
One reason I read so early was my intense desire to be listened to and taken seriously. My sisters were 7 and almost 9 1/2 years older than me, a tween and teen by the time I started school. I remember once when I was about five, announcing angrily at dinner that if the family didn't include me in the conversation I was leaving the room. It didn't work--they all burst out laughing. I learned that if I wanted to converse, I had better grow up fast and learn the family language. Fortunately, words and language, culture and politics, theology and literature were all delightful languages for me to learn! Harder was being the only emotional intuitive in a family of logical rationalists. I think despite my intense efforts to assimilate, my parents and sisters spent a lot of my childhood wondering, "Why is she upset now?" or "What the hell did she do that for?"
I graduated with two bachelor's degrees from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (go Salukis!) -- one in English, and one in French (with a minor in Japanese). Those years were some of the best of my life. Most people don't realize that the state of Illinois comes down to a point at the bottom; Carbondale is south of both St. Louis and Lexington. It's also adjacent to the Shawnee National Forest, and I spent many hours rock climbing, camping, and star gazing in some of the most beautiful country I've seen. I also had my first mystical experience in college. Walking back from a class to my dorm, it was suddenly as though I had been seeing the world through a veil my whole life -- a veil that suddenly and unexpectedly fell away. All at once, the sky was so blue, it made my teeth ache. The grass was so green that I wept. I wondered for a second or two if I should sit down underneath the tree I was passing and just observe . . . but I had been raised on logic and rationality. I had no means of understanding what was happening, and I ran -- both figuratively and literally - from the experience, heading back to my dorm room on the double. I didn't mention it to anyone for years.
(Here is progressive theologian Marcus Borg describing his interpretation of his own mystical experiences.)
After graduation, I worked at an innovative chemical pump manufacturer to save money for graduate school (moving from glorified receptionist to head of inside sales and customer service in two years) -- I assumed I would get a PhD in English and become a professor, but was disappointed by the turn the English academy took in the 90s. One day I flipped through the Peterson guide to graduate schools, wondering what on earth I was going to do, and discovered that the next entry after English was Folklore. Pretty quickly, I realized I had always been a folklorist; I just didn't know it had a name. My undergraduate work in both English and French had centered on cultural issues and understanding . . . and stories, always stories.
I came to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997. My first day on campus I met a classmate who would change my life. We were about as opposite as could be in some ways, but we clicked immediately and ended up being housemates for a bit. She is the person who first got me to consider that perhaps intuition is real, and something that can be cultivated.
In 1999 or 2000 I took a life-changing course in Cross-Cultural Counseling with Dr. Linda Brooks in UNC's Counseling Education program. I'd always been interested in social justice in a general way, but I had not developed a deep analysis of power and privilege around race, class, and other differences. From that point on, racial justice became a major life focus for me. I have helped start two caucusing groups for other white people committed to racial equity, pursued training, developed curriculum, attended conferences, led discussion groups, and more for the last 15 years. I particularly love working with progressive white organizations who are motivated to know what they don't know and to align their actions with their values. I also love helping groups and organizations of color strategize for success by understanding systemic factors in health, fundraising, and other endeavors.
In 2002, while I was still working on my master's thesis, I was wooed to the Community Psychology doctoral program at NC State by a professor who admired the community programming I had designed. I decided its focus on research wasn't the best fit for me as I enjoyed working directly with people, but while there I took a course that applied systems theory to psychology. I had been interested in complex systems theory and quantum mechanics for a long time but hadn't had the opportunity to study either formally. I ended up incorporating systems theory into my thesis, and became increasingly interested in the value of dealing with complex realities, even when it's easier to compress them into either/or categories. I also loved quantum mechanics' insistence on dealing with "nature as She is – absurd," to quote physicist Richard Feynman.
I was a little slow to catch up with dealing with nature as She is in my own life, however . . . not only had I pushed away my first taste at mysticism, but also the reality that I was queer. I had never heard the term bisexual, and living in an unusually progressive household ironically highlighted a binary sense of the world, because so many people I admired were fighting against a dominant paradigm for their own realities. I read feminist memoirs as an early teen about women leaving their churches. I was adopted as a little sister by my older sister's gay and lesbian college friends. In my experience of the 80s, there was a strong sense of "you're with us or against us," and I very much wanted to be on the side of WITH progressive causes. As a result, in the midst of an astonishing gift of open-mindedness I also unconsciously adopted a worldview of either/or choice. I remember asking someone when I was about 14 if they thought it was possible I might be gay (the only word I knew), and they said, "You like boys too much, Joy!" So despite the fact that I had a girlfriend in high school and sexual relationships with women in college, I accepted that liking men meant I "wasn't gay," and suppressed that side of myself.
I married a man in 2004, and we had two children. When I was pregnant with our oldest, I became both fascinated and troubled by the obsession of our culture on childhood gender. We had decided not to reveal the sex of our baby, and that bothered more people than I thought it would. We also discovered that it was difficult to buy what one might consider "gender neutral" clothing for babies; from birth, society seemed intent on coding them via clothing for aggressive competition (male) or beautiful whimsy (female). This plunged me into a deep noticing of U.S. culture's attitudes about and enforcement of gender. At that time, I was interested as the researcher I've always been -- isn't this interesting/what's going on here? But we got to explore these concepts in a much more personal way when our son turned 2 or 2 1/2, and told us that he "needed to have been born a girl." Working to support his gender fluidity over the next few years led me to start a blog that ended up being quoted in the New York Times Magazine and featured in a French newspaper.
Around this time I first tried going out on my own as a full-time consultant. While we'd always worked other jobs, my life-changing housemate and I did projects together for several years. She had convinced me in 2000 that we were being called to create a program for young people that combined oral history, racial reconciliation, deep listening, and art. Somehow (and this seems slightly impossible to me even now), we created curriculum, recruited and trained volunteers, solicited food donations and financial support, and put on a two week summer camp called Creating Connections for two years. This got us involved in other oral history and documentary endeavors, and led to us taking over the Introduction to Documentary Studies course in the certificate program at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). I taught that class for almost twenty years, and it has been a great joy in my life. The opportunity to help beginning documentarians attend to their own inner journey and recognize that it impacts their work, to help them consider ethics from many angles, including power and privilege, and to help them move concretely forward in their goals was a gift and a delight. I had felt similar fulfillment when we had helped companies design more meaningful "diversity" programs or worked with progressive white-led churches to align their walks with their talks and values. It definitely seemed that helping people and organizations who were aware enough to know what they needed but not sure how to get there was a gift of mine. As I added gender identity to my deep conversation topics with others, I thought maybe this was my calling (another deep longing!), but I could never quite seem to get a consulting business off the ground.
In 2011, I took the position of executive director for the North Carolina Folklife Institute, an almost 40 year-old nonprofit that preserved and promoted traditional arts and cultures in the state. The five years I led NC Folk gave me many gifts, chief among them the change to work alongside, be mentored by, and become friends with grassroots activists across the state. A lesson I hadn't anticipated was the growing sense that the whole nonprofit sector was being played -- that burning out working long hours for low pay, spending so much time seeking and reporting on grant funds that we didn't have time to do the work we were trying to fund, all served to keep the system in place, not correct it.
When I finally acknowledged in 2013 that my marriage was critically troubled, I reached out for every kind of support I could. I got more involved in my church. I re-immersed myself in the Enneagram, which I had trained in previously. I went back to therapy. And on a whim, I asked a friend of mine to "do my chart." My friend and former coworker, Jennifer Shelton, was herself an unlikely mystic. After a master's degree in Slavic languages and years working in the education field, she discovered that she had a natural intuitive gift for astrology. I don't know if I would have managed to open myself, even in the "what the hell" way that I did, to the input of astrology had I not already known Jennifer, and known that she wasn't "a flake." Of everything she included in her report to me, what stood out was North Nodes. This was an aspect of astrology I hadn't heard of before, and I spent the next year diving into it. It has been the single most helpful aspect of astrology to me, although I have since added (like ripples in a pond) additional aspects, especially Houses, Rulers, and Sabian Symbols. Everything in my rationalistic upbringing said that North Nodes "should not" make any sense, but there was NO denying that the pitfalls, gifts, struggles, and journeys they outlined could have been taken from my own diary. In this they fit well wth the Enneagram, which I had begun studying years earlier. Unlike some other personality models like Meyers Briggs, that can give the feeling of putting you in a box ("Now I've got your number!" . . . or letters, as the case may be), both the North Nodes and the Enneagram allow both for the ways in which we are all unique and on our own journeys, and also for varying levels of health or dis-ease, and a path of growth.
(This is a work in progress; stay tuned for more "chapters" in my back story to see how my many interests ended up coming together.)
My father is from eastern Kentucky, the son of a coal-mining father and whip-smart mother who had him at 17. My mother is from east Tennessee; her father was a Baptist preacher and her mother the church pianist; they both also taught high school and farmed. My parents were the generation who left the mountains, moving us every three years further north and west until I got too cold and flat land weary and headed back south! My father is also a Baptist preacher (although he's had many other careers) and my mother an English teacher; they became American Baptists when fundamentalists took over the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1960s. I was raised in a very progressive household with thousands of books -- I learned to read at 3 1/2, and as my father vehemently opposed censorship, I pored through an astonishing assortment of books throughout my childhood.
One of my daddy's favorite sermon refrains is, "People become the stories they tell about themselves." That has always stuck with me. From an early age, I understood the intense power of stories, for good or for ill. This is how emotional abuse works, after all -- if you repeat to someone often enough that they are stupid, they will begin to tell that story to themselves, to internalize it. Stories form a powerful branch of any oppression strategy, and resistance to oppression has often shown itself in the persistent diseminiation of alternate stories to one of "less than" (sometimes whispered when they aren't safe to say out loud, or encoded in songs or objects). On the other hand, long before I heard of visioning, or the power of affirmations, I understood that we don't "earn" the right to tell a new story of ourselves because we have changed, but that instead, daring to tell a new story about ourselves almost always comes first, laying the groundwork for new possibilities of becoming.
One reason I read so early was my intense desire to be listened to and taken seriously. My sisters were 7 and almost 9 1/2 years older than me, a tween and teen by the time I started school. I remember once when I was about five, announcing angrily at dinner that if the family didn't include me in the conversation I was leaving the room. It didn't work--they all burst out laughing. I learned that if I wanted to converse, I had better grow up fast and learn the family language. Fortunately, words and language, culture and politics, theology and literature were all delightful languages for me to learn! Harder was being the only emotional intuitive in a family of logical rationalists. I think despite my intense efforts to assimilate, my parents and sisters spent a lot of my childhood wondering, "Why is she upset now?" or "What the hell did she do that for?"
I graduated with two bachelor's degrees from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (go Salukis!) -- one in English, and one in French (with a minor in Japanese). Those years were some of the best of my life. Most people don't realize that the state of Illinois comes down to a point at the bottom; Carbondale is south of both St. Louis and Lexington. It's also adjacent to the Shawnee National Forest, and I spent many hours rock climbing, camping, and star gazing in some of the most beautiful country I've seen. I also had my first mystical experience in college. Walking back from a class to my dorm, it was suddenly as though I had been seeing the world through a veil my whole life -- a veil that suddenly and unexpectedly fell away. All at once, the sky was so blue, it made my teeth ache. The grass was so green that I wept. I wondered for a second or two if I should sit down underneath the tree I was passing and just observe . . . but I had been raised on logic and rationality. I had no means of understanding what was happening, and I ran -- both figuratively and literally - from the experience, heading back to my dorm room on the double. I didn't mention it to anyone for years.
(Here is progressive theologian Marcus Borg describing his interpretation of his own mystical experiences.)
After graduation, I worked at an innovative chemical pump manufacturer to save money for graduate school (moving from glorified receptionist to head of inside sales and customer service in two years) -- I assumed I would get a PhD in English and become a professor, but was disappointed by the turn the English academy took in the 90s. One day I flipped through the Peterson guide to graduate schools, wondering what on earth I was going to do, and discovered that the next entry after English was Folklore. Pretty quickly, I realized I had always been a folklorist; I just didn't know it had a name. My undergraduate work in both English and French had centered on cultural issues and understanding . . . and stories, always stories.
I came to graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997. My first day on campus I met a classmate who would change my life. We were about as opposite as could be in some ways, but we clicked immediately and ended up being housemates for a bit. She is the person who first got me to consider that perhaps intuition is real, and something that can be cultivated.
In 1999 or 2000 I took a life-changing course in Cross-Cultural Counseling with Dr. Linda Brooks in UNC's Counseling Education program. I'd always been interested in social justice in a general way, but I had not developed a deep analysis of power and privilege around race, class, and other differences. From that point on, racial justice became a major life focus for me. I have helped start two caucusing groups for other white people committed to racial equity, pursued training, developed curriculum, attended conferences, led discussion groups, and more for the last 15 years. I particularly love working with progressive white organizations who are motivated to know what they don't know and to align their actions with their values. I also love helping groups and organizations of color strategize for success by understanding systemic factors in health, fundraising, and other endeavors.
In 2002, while I was still working on my master's thesis, I was wooed to the Community Psychology doctoral program at NC State by a professor who admired the community programming I had designed. I decided its focus on research wasn't the best fit for me as I enjoyed working directly with people, but while there I took a course that applied systems theory to psychology. I had been interested in complex systems theory and quantum mechanics for a long time but hadn't had the opportunity to study either formally. I ended up incorporating systems theory into my thesis, and became increasingly interested in the value of dealing with complex realities, even when it's easier to compress them into either/or categories. I also loved quantum mechanics' insistence on dealing with "nature as She is – absurd," to quote physicist Richard Feynman.
I was a little slow to catch up with dealing with nature as She is in my own life, however . . . not only had I pushed away my first taste at mysticism, but also the reality that I was queer. I had never heard the term bisexual, and living in an unusually progressive household ironically highlighted a binary sense of the world, because so many people I admired were fighting against a dominant paradigm for their own realities. I read feminist memoirs as an early teen about women leaving their churches. I was adopted as a little sister by my older sister's gay and lesbian college friends. In my experience of the 80s, there was a strong sense of "you're with us or against us," and I very much wanted to be on the side of WITH progressive causes. As a result, in the midst of an astonishing gift of open-mindedness I also unconsciously adopted a worldview of either/or choice. I remember asking someone when I was about 14 if they thought it was possible I might be gay (the only word I knew), and they said, "You like boys too much, Joy!" So despite the fact that I had a girlfriend in high school and sexual relationships with women in college, I accepted that liking men meant I "wasn't gay," and suppressed that side of myself.
I married a man in 2004, and we had two children. When I was pregnant with our oldest, I became both fascinated and troubled by the obsession of our culture on childhood gender. We had decided not to reveal the sex of our baby, and that bothered more people than I thought it would. We also discovered that it was difficult to buy what one might consider "gender neutral" clothing for babies; from birth, society seemed intent on coding them via clothing for aggressive competition (male) or beautiful whimsy (female). This plunged me into a deep noticing of U.S. culture's attitudes about and enforcement of gender. At that time, I was interested as the researcher I've always been -- isn't this interesting/what's going on here? But we got to explore these concepts in a much more personal way when our son turned 2 or 2 1/2, and told us that he "needed to have been born a girl." Working to support his gender fluidity over the next few years led me to start a blog that ended up being quoted in the New York Times Magazine and featured in a French newspaper.
Around this time I first tried going out on my own as a full-time consultant. While we'd always worked other jobs, my life-changing housemate and I did projects together for several years. She had convinced me in 2000 that we were being called to create a program for young people that combined oral history, racial reconciliation, deep listening, and art. Somehow (and this seems slightly impossible to me even now), we created curriculum, recruited and trained volunteers, solicited food donations and financial support, and put on a two week summer camp called Creating Connections for two years. This got us involved in other oral history and documentary endeavors, and led to us taking over the Introduction to Documentary Studies course in the certificate program at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). I taught that class for almost twenty years, and it has been a great joy in my life. The opportunity to help beginning documentarians attend to their own inner journey and recognize that it impacts their work, to help them consider ethics from many angles, including power and privilege, and to help them move concretely forward in their goals was a gift and a delight. I had felt similar fulfillment when we had helped companies design more meaningful "diversity" programs or worked with progressive white-led churches to align their walks with their talks and values. It definitely seemed that helping people and organizations who were aware enough to know what they needed but not sure how to get there was a gift of mine. As I added gender identity to my deep conversation topics with others, I thought maybe this was my calling (another deep longing!), but I could never quite seem to get a consulting business off the ground.
In 2011, I took the position of executive director for the North Carolina Folklife Institute, an almost 40 year-old nonprofit that preserved and promoted traditional arts and cultures in the state. The five years I led NC Folk gave me many gifts, chief among them the change to work alongside, be mentored by, and become friends with grassroots activists across the state. A lesson I hadn't anticipated was the growing sense that the whole nonprofit sector was being played -- that burning out working long hours for low pay, spending so much time seeking and reporting on grant funds that we didn't have time to do the work we were trying to fund, all served to keep the system in place, not correct it.
When I finally acknowledged in 2013 that my marriage was critically troubled, I reached out for every kind of support I could. I got more involved in my church. I re-immersed myself in the Enneagram, which I had trained in previously. I went back to therapy. And on a whim, I asked a friend of mine to "do my chart." My friend and former coworker, Jennifer Shelton, was herself an unlikely mystic. After a master's degree in Slavic languages and years working in the education field, she discovered that she had a natural intuitive gift for astrology. I don't know if I would have managed to open myself, even in the "what the hell" way that I did, to the input of astrology had I not already known Jennifer, and known that she wasn't "a flake." Of everything she included in her report to me, what stood out was North Nodes. This was an aspect of astrology I hadn't heard of before, and I spent the next year diving into it. It has been the single most helpful aspect of astrology to me, although I have since added (like ripples in a pond) additional aspects, especially Houses, Rulers, and Sabian Symbols. Everything in my rationalistic upbringing said that North Nodes "should not" make any sense, but there was NO denying that the pitfalls, gifts, struggles, and journeys they outlined could have been taken from my own diary. In this they fit well wth the Enneagram, which I had begun studying years earlier. Unlike some other personality models like Meyers Briggs, that can give the feeling of putting you in a box ("Now I've got your number!" . . . or letters, as the case may be), both the North Nodes and the Enneagram allow both for the ways in which we are all unique and on our own journeys, and also for varying levels of health or dis-ease, and a path of growth.
(This is a work in progress; stay tuned for more "chapters" in my back story to see how my many interests ended up coming together.)