Notes From the Field 08 - What Is Erin?
Hippie. Grunge. Preppy. Druggie. Princess. Punk.
At 16, Mr. Eggers asked who I was. At 18, Ben and Grant told me how the world saw me. It took another 30 years to reconcile the two. To realize I was most of those things on any given day, and to forgive their youthful ignorance. To understand why I’ve had such a hard time defining myself, and to finally settle into acceptance. I am all of it and none of it. My life is a collage. A patchwork tapestry of every road I’ve ever gone down, every dead end, every misunderstanding of intention or identity.
Picture it. The year was 1992. It was the first day of junior year. I was sitting between Megan and Mandy (who we lovingly called Mrs. Roper, and who is reading this right now and laughing). Mr. Eggers: psychology teacher, tennis coach, man who hoped to crack us open before we even put our backpacks down, walked in, dropped the needle on The Who, and let Roger Daltrey ask the question none of us wanted to answer: Who are you? Who, who, who, who?
We rolled our eyes. Because of course we did. We were 16, which means we were performing with a confidence and certainty we hadn’t earned, and were protecting ourselves from exactly the kind of sincerity he was trying to hand us. He gave us a blank page. We filled it with whatever version of ourselves felt safest to commit to in ink at the time.
I don’t remember what I wrote. I remember thinking it was cheesy. I wish I’d had the emotional intelligence at the time to see the exercise with as much reverence as I do now.
Now 1994. Senior year. Biology. Someone passed me a folded piece of paper.
At the top it said: What is Erin?
What followed was a list. Exhaustive. Thoughtful even, in its cruelty. Hippy. Grunge. Druggie. Princess. Preppy. Punk. Because I moved between groups seamlessly and always had. I picked up the language and the style of whatever room I walked into without even trying. Code-switching before I knew the word for it. Masking before I knew I was doing it. Belonging everywhere, which apparently read as belonging nowhere.
At the bottom of the list, after the catalogue of everything I apparently was read “Feminazi Baby Killer”. It was the height of Rush Limbaugh’s reign of ugly. And clearly these boys decided those words, that they probably heard on their parent’s radios, would hurt the most.
I’ve thought about that note a lot over the years. Not with grief. The grief phase was quickly replaced with pity for those boys. Especially after they both got suspended. It was shocking, and hurtful, but said way more about THEM than it did about ME. But I continued to think about it with a kind of anthropological curiosity. Because the list wasn’t wrong in a lot of ways. That’s the thing. I was most of those things, at any given moment. The crime, apparently, was refusing to only be one of them. The verdict at the bottom wasn’t a description. It was a punishment for being uncategorizable.
Thirty-two years later, the algorithm is trying to do the same thing.
I’ve been building Perimeditate inside the wellness content ecosystem, which means my feed has closed around me like a fist. Somatic this. Nervous system that. Women healing in flowy linen pants. The language gets softer and more interchangeable by the day. The suggestions get more niche-specific. And suddenly I’m in a room full of people who already agree, speaking a language that only travels six inches. A somatic mindfulness echo chamber.
The algorithm, like Ben and Grant, wants to know what I am so it knows where to file me. And like Ben and Grant, it’s not entirely wrong about the parts it can see. It’s just missing the whole picture. Which is the part that matters.
Here’s what the algorithm doesn’t know about me.
I am a 1.0 Phish fan who has stood in enough lots over the last 30+ years to understand that presence, repetition, and surrendering to the flow are a practice in and of themselves. I am a hospitality industry lifer who got broken by the industry that built me and came out the other side with a strong meditation practice and a lot of opinions about mise en place. I am a reluctantly enthusiastic Bravo viewer who is deeply, fluently literate in the gap between what people perform and who they are. I am an alcohol-free woman in my (early) fifties who built and lost brands, buried a sister, and raised a kid who sees the world differently. And I learned, eventually, to stop apologizing for being hard to file.
The woman Perimeditate is for? She’s not necessarily stuck in the wellness algorithm. She’s in the Real Housewives group. She’s dancing in the lawn at a show. She’s in her kitchen at midnight, prepping for her clients, and wondering when she stopped being able to feel her own edges. She’s been handed a blank page before. And she rolled her eyes at it too.
Mr. Eggers wasn’t being cheesy. He was trying to get a room full of kids to stop performing and ask themselves something real before the world gave them the verdict. Most of us weren’t ready. I certainly wasn’t ready.
I might actually be ready now. Maybe. Thirty years late, which is right on time.
Who are you? Not the version that fits the algorithm. Not the one that answers the note. Not the one that’s easiest to file.
The collage. The patchwork tapestry. The fits and starts and reinventions and relapses and relaunches. Who are you?
-erin
p.s. Speaking of surrendering to the flow, Session 02 - Confluence posts on Sunday. I hope you’ll stick around!
Mandy here!! Loving every minute of this!!