There’s a side to me that you may only see hinted at if you only know me from this blog. I’ve talked plenty about how I’m LDS and work with the teenage girls. I have a link to the blog I write for geared to LDS Young Women leaders, but I also write for Feminist Mormon Housewives, and I don’t know that I’ve talked about that here.
Feminism is kind of a hot topic anywhere, but particularly within the LDS church, and since this place is not exactly a hotbed of controversial topics, plus I already had places to explore that side of me, I never brought it up here. I have seen people get really frustrated when politics or philosophy get in the way of the nice parenting and craft blog they like to read, so I thought it best to leave that part of me for the other blogs.
But sometimes I worry that that’s dishonest. Am I being prudent and polite? Or gutless and pretending to be someone I’m not?
I’m active in the Mormon studies community, meaning that I read and think a whole lot about theology and history and sociology and deep intellectual things. I go to conferences and present papers, I write (but never finish) articles to submit to the academic journals. I’m very very very slowly working on a memoir about the nature of memory and abuse. I have aspirations to be a literary writer.
So then I come back to this tension. Do I have to choose? Do I have to be a Serious Person with academic pursuits who has no time for scrapbooking? Or do I have to be a crafter who only focuses on the beauty in life?
The blogging “experts” (as if there really were such a thing since we’re all just figuring this out together as we go) say that I do have to choose. They say that I can’t market myself as a brand unless I have a single narrow focus. They say that I have to pick one thing within one thing within another thing or else I’ll never get anywhere. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
That beauty in the photo with me is Carol Lynn Pearson, a literary hero to every Mormon woman. She is an activist for gay and women’s causes, she is a devout member, she has written plays, poems, non-fiction, for every audience, and she has never chosen one part of herself over another. She is who she is, fulfilling the calling God has given her, doing the best she can by the light she has been given. And since it all comes from such a pure place, it all works.
That’s what I want for myself. I want to find the strength of character to be completely authentic, to incorporate all those parts of me into one honest self. To do the best I can by the light I have been given. I’m so grateful to have her influence.