How conformity cultures are seeking safety in the face of overwhelm
Why rubber stamps taught me Roe v Wade isn’t about what it seems
Friends, lots of ink has already been spilled about the future of Roe v Wade, so this essay reflects on the toxic nature of conformity cultures (e.g., patriarchy, rigidly hierarchical organizations, white supremacy). Driven by fear and scarcity, leaders try to mandate “order” through rules. But through the lens of my own family history, I’ve seen first hand how conformist leadership backfires. As always, I love hearing your reactions — email me here or drop a comment below. Warmly, M.
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Echoes reverberate not just through space, but time. Reverberations are a result of multiple reflections. And the reverberant quality of a space and time determine how it’s received and perceived.
I’ve been on a quest now for several years to develop my voice, so in addition to writing to you, I’ve been taking voice lessons. What’s been most revelatory about singing is that, unlike other forms of music, I am my own instrument. The shape and tone of my body directly influences what sounds I can create.
When I’m stressed and in my head, my sound lands flat. But, when I’m relaxed and in my body, my sound is sonorous.
There’s no hiding. My body and my expression are inextricably intertwined.
And so it’s ironic that as a child growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was told: “You can become anything you want. Girls can do anything boys can.” Just as the discourse on race at the time encouraged color-blindness, I was reassured that gender was a non-issue. My generation was forward-looking; the past was behind us.
But I now see the reverberations of this well-intentioned, but flawed messaging decades later. Rather than fully claiming my embodiment as a woman, I renounced it.
The challenge with being told I was a blank slate with infinite possibilities was that it ignored the ways I’d been shaped and the shape of the world I stepped into — even before I was born.
My paternal grandfather, born in 1920s China, was the self-declared patriarch of our family. In the society he came from, men held power, and women were echoes. Roles were clear and decisive, reinforced through millennia of tradition and law.
But when my grandfather fled the civil wars of his homeland and emigrated to the US, the modicum of power and place he felt evaporated (which I’ve written about here). Being short, yellow, and ineloquent in English, he was far outside the ideal of the big, white, charismatic American man.
With no recognized space to occupy in the external world, home, he thought, was the one domain he had the right to dominion – the one place he had a right to fill.
So, when my mom — a product of post-war America — married my dad, my grandfather was rudely surprised. With a graduate degree and her own career, she refused to be the dutiful (read: servile) Chinese daughter-in-law that he believed she should be.
“Oh shit,” I imagine my grandfather said to himself in Cantonese.
My mom occupied her own space, and introduced complexity into his life that he simply didn’t know how to digest. She didn’t fit into his worldview that once helped him make sense of the world. In the face of overwhelming change and powerlessness, the more complicated his life got, the more rigid he became.
In one salvo of their decades-long cold war, my grandfather signed a family card on my mother’s behalf with the Chinese words for “Rubber Stamp” instead of her real Chinese name. If he wasn’t going to be able to get my mom to comply directly, he was going to turn her into an echo by fiat.
My mother understandably boiled with anger.
But for the sake of family peace, she bit her tongue (perhaps staying true to her Chinese name: May-Len, translated: “Charming Beauty”). She implicitly knew beliefs aren’t rational; there’s no reasoning or screaming someone out of a belief that wasn’t formed consciously.
Besides, she feared his future wrath; or more accurately, she feared being ostracized again as a scapegoat. So she walked a fine line of trying to hold her identity without letting him ruffle her further.
The desire to belong and stay safe was like an unconscious see-saw that my mom and grandfather were unconsciously riding.
And when I came along, my grandfather put me on that see-saw too.
In utero, my grandfather was 100% convinced I was going to be a boy — a proper heir to carry on the family line! And in his great excitement, he spent hours pouring over names to find ones fitting for his first grandson — Harrison, Wilson, Jackson, Grant. … Dead ex-President names.
It was as if the more commanding the name, the more he could will me into existence as the ideal grandson.
But when ultrasound revealed I was a girl, my grandfather fell silent. Girls in his Confucian worldview ultimately belong to the family of their future husbands. There was no future in me meaningful to him.
So even before I had a chance to unleash my first cry in the world, I got the message I too was meant to be an echo.
My boomer parents did their best to try to shield me from my grandfather’s seemingly anachronistic ways. “You can be anything you want,” they reassured me.
But words have a way of falling flat when they’re not reinforced with embodied truth. And children feel far more than we usually give them credit for. Our superpower as little humans is to sponge up the information being non-verbally communicated through other peoples’ nervous systems. We’re constantly sensing for cues of safety and threat.
And my younger self felt the unconscious constriction in my parents’ bodies as they repeated to me: “You can be anything you want.”
Despite their words, my nervous system knew it was unsafe to be me, or at least to take up space in the form I’d been born into.
If I couldn’t be the boy my grandfather hoped for, and wanted to avoid the bullying my mom endured, the only space that felt safe to occupy was my mind. My body and its unruly emotions was a space of betrayal. My mind, however, was a safe uncluttered space.
So, I learned early on to live mostly from the neck up. I walked through the world trying to not think of myself as a female. It was my nervous system’s very sophisticated way of protecting me.
And by minimizing the reality of being a woman, that’s how I could “do anything a boy could” — honoring the wishes of both my grandfather and my parents.
For a time, this worked.
I found a way to seemingly fit into male dominated environments: I donned modern armor (the power suit), learned to speak the language of warfare in the boardroom (“capturing market share”, “crushing it”), and locked away my emotions (in the name of “professionalism”).
I often outpaced my male peers, and could make men squirm with the piercing quality of my intellect.
In fact, I played the game so well that I even fooled myself.
I thought I was advancing the cause of feminism by proving what I’d been told as a child: do anything a man can do. But in so doing, I was unconsciously reinforcing the conformity culture I was trying to avoid.
In trying to resist the rubber stamping my grandfather tried to impose on the world, I became an echo of a man replicating patriarchy.
Rather than the conformity being explicitly imposed like it was for my mom, I absented myself from myself. And since nature hates a vacuum, I created a space for patriarchy to claim the space that didn’t feel safe to claim for myself.
There was no need for rubber stamps or laws to strip me of sovereignty over my own body because I’d already unknowingly been conscripted as a foot soldier.
I unwittingly became the echo I’d been trying to avoid becoming.
“The delay of an echo is directly proportional to the distance of the reflecting surface from the source and the listener. …A true echo is a single reflection of the sound source.” - Wikipedia
It’s confounding to see how these dynamics rippled across the generations.
Uprooting himself to move to the other side of the world, my grandfather thought he might find freedom from war; but it just led to war with my mom. Unconsciously renouncing my own femininity, I and many other women of my generation thought we were building a future where gender was a non-issue, but has led to an era of unprecedented reversals of women’s rights.
What we were all avoiding has come full circle.
Without space for our wholeness, we were all stuck in our survival responses — each of us mistaking our efforts to find safety for our personalities. My grandfather wasn’t intentionally cruel; he was simply in fight mode. My mom wasn’t consciously charming, she was in fawn. And I wasn’t choosing to be disembodied; I was in flight.
None of us was embodied in our authentic power because we were operating out of our reactive and unconscious stress responses, trying to soothe our overwhelmed nervous systems facing perceived threats of not living up to an external ideal. Our constricted nervous systems were making these decisions below the level of our conscious awareness.
And so long as we were all in fear, our nervous systems were all reflexively contorting us to fit the conformity cultures we inhabited — cutting ourselves off from our full aliveness, creativity, and expression.
While conformity cultures seem to offer order, safety and efficiency, rigid systems are never resilient in the face of rapid change. The harder we try to insist that life conform to ideas of how it “should” be, the less feasible it is to adapt and more prone our worlds are to collapse.
The very thing conformity cultures are optimized for – stability – ultimately leads to their demise.
Echo derives from the Greek word for “sound”. Echo in Greek mythology is the nymph whose ability to speak was cursed, leaving her able only to repeat the last words spoken to her.
I’ve always marveled that bats – creatures of the night – use echolocation as a superpower to navigate through the dark. Rather than rely on what they can perceive through their eyes, they use frequencies far above the range of human hearing. By stepping out of the usual way most mammals are embodied, echolocation lets them occupy a unique niche where there are fewer predators and far more food.
The secret to their superpower is that when they emit sound, they let the space reflect back to them the interference patterns from the environment. They’re clear about the sounds they’re creating. The reverberations coming back only serve to tell them what’s in the environment; they don’t mistake echo for sound.
My voice teacher’s most common question to me is: “Do you realize you’re out of tune?”
Many times, the honest answer is no. But, I’m developing a felt-sense in my body for when I’m off key.
And I still struggle when she cues me with infinite patience to “Relax the body,” and “Drop breath into the body” so that my rib cage and lungs take up as much space as they can.
At times, I’ve thought that perhaps I was a bad student because I couldn’t will my body to do these things on command.
But I see now with the benefit of time and current events that I wasn’t intentionally being obstinate; my body was simply afraid of embodying what might betray me.
And on those rare, but growing occasions, where my nervous system is settled and my body is relaxed enough to take up the space it naturally wants, that’s when I create the truest tones I can that are not only produced from deep in my core, but are clear and resonant.
This is how I reclaim my voice. Rather than be the echo, this is how I originate the sound.
So, where are you the echo vs the sound?
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this question, or what this essay stirred in you — drop a comment below!
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