I was 17, sitting in a priest’s office, my hands folded neatly on my lap. He looked at me squarely. “If you were my daughter, I would disown you.”
Earlier that day, my boyfriend’s mother had sneered, “You will kill your mother.” My friend’s boyfriend told me I should just go through the motions, keep the peace — he was converting to please my friend’s family, even though he didn’t fully believe it himself.
The great offense: I had decided I no longer wanted to go to church. After twelve years of parochial school, I had real misgivings about the teachings, the way I’d received them. The tidy stories simply did not feel right. I think my exact words were, “I’m not buying it.”
My high school principal, a Christian Brother, didn’t encourage me, but he didn’t punish me either. “It’s important to ask questions,” he said. It was a small thing. I’ve carried it for years.
I chose confrontation over compliance — that scene, that situation, and others like it, on a variety of topics throughout my young adulthood. It didn’t stop with the church. A brother-in-law called me selfish, flat out, for choosing not to have children. My mother whimpered every time I packed a bag for another city, building a career when she expected me to live at home until marriage. My grandmother sniffed at opinions she hadn’t asked for. A friend needled me for years until I finally said something back and he dismissed our friendship, calling me combative.
There was a price for living faithfully to myself rather than comfortably for everyone else. But at 17, and for years after, I had no adult standing behind me. No one to tell me that I was being brave rather than difficult.
That changed when I got my first job out of college, producing for a local TV newsroom. The anchorwoman was a former hippie, a staunch feminist, and entirely unapologetic about both. She cursed when she felt like it. She didn’t soften herself for anyone, on air or off. And for reasons I still don’t fully understand, she took me under her wing — gave me stories to produce, put me in front of the camera, pushed me forward when I would have hung back. She took no shit from anyone, and somehow that included me getting some of her nerve by proxy. She was the first person who made being myself look like a viable way to live, instead of a problem to be managed.
I haven’t always chosen the harder path. There are other moments I went along to keep things smooth, and I still carry some of those with more regret than I expected. But in the ones that mattered most, I found the nerve.
Now I want to offer that permission for women just starting out — the ones who are looking at the life that’s been laid out for them, the roles they were handed before they had a say, and finding that little of it fits.
I help women at life’s thresholds ask the questions everyone around them would rather they didn’t, and then back themselves when the answers don’t match the plan.
The isolation in that priest’s office didn’t last — it couldn’t, not once I stopped performing for people who’d already decided who I was supposed to be. New people showed up, the anchorwoman among them, once I’d made room for them by letting the old ones go. The isolation I was actually afraid of is the one nobody warns you about: staying in every room, agreeing with everyone in it, and slowly losing track of who else was even in there with you — including yourself.