House of Dreams

Once upon a time, I had a comfort zone. It was a cramped tiny thing, tightly circumscribed by class, language, church, family and culture. I lived there; surrounded by other little white girls and their nuclear families in suburban detached homes, with no idea that some of them didn't go to church on Sundays.

It was a long time ago and I don't remember it very well anymore, as distant and unreal as any story beginning with "once upon a time." Once upon a time, I was a princess in a castle surrounded by a moat, only I didn't know it yet.

Nowadays I don't have a clue. Two years ago, I was a married mom living in the big detached suburban house, driving to a government job every day, who was sedentary, rarely wrote (though she wanted to), and felt constantly like everything was wrong somehow but she didn't know what. In a few months, I will be a divorced mom living in a rented townhouse-thingie on a subway line, taking classes at a nearby university, who works out nearly every day, rides her bike all over the place, has written almost a hundred thousand words towards a novel (but split that in two halves, so I'm not nearly done), living off savings, and wearing clothes a few sizes smaller than before. The daughter has remained the same, but not much else. Maybe nothing else.

And it's not the first time.

Once upon a time, I was a little fundamentalist girl who grew into a fundamentalist teenager. I believed in the rights of the unborn, the sanctity of the family, the resurrection of Christ, the coming Rapture, and that slang was a sin. I was, in short, a sanctimonious brat. Then one day, I found the meaning of the dream I'd been having regularly for five years. Hey, Andrea? You're a witch.

Ouch.

It took two whole years--that's 730 days plus or minus, depending on whether or not one of them was a leap year--to begin to entertain the thought that I might not be evil. I can still remember the shock of that moment, the sensation of walls falling away. The old comfort zone looked suddenly like a prison cell.

It's happened more than once. Actually, it's happened repeatedly, more often than I can recount. It was a very small box at the beginning and now if there is a box anymore it's pretty damned big. A lot of those moultings have been recorded here over the past several years (marriage and parenting and difference and, now, work), so you're either already aware of them or you could be with a bit of dedicated browsing. But here's one I have never shared before: The Story of Andrea's Critical Reading Skills.

Just before my last year of undergrad, a friend gave me a book for my birthday. They didn't know it, and neither did I, but it was a classic piece of brownlash literature*, arguing for the unimportance of acid rain, the temporality of the ozone layer depletion, the arrogance of global warming concerns and the mathematical silliness of worries over deforestation. The only valid environmental issue according to that author was extinction. Three years of undergraduate education in environmental studies had left me utterly unprepared for these arguments. I was convinced.

The three years of undergraduate education in environmental studies had, instead, taken the basic environmental arguments for granted and worked to transform students into effective environmental investigators and activists. Three years of undergraduate environmental education and it was the first time I had encountered the arguments of the skeptics. Three years of undergraduate environmental education: I did not know how to evaluate the skeptics' claims or evidence, or take apart their reasoning. We had been taught many things, but critical reading and reasoning skills were not among them.

I grew up very closed-minded but by then that legacy had been long gone. There was no defence or barrier I could muster to that one book.

I'm afraid that during my last year of undergraduate environmental education, I was a bit of a jerk. I wrote papers outlining the skeptics' arguments and challenged every claim my teachers made in class. Shockingly, my grades on those papers were not as high as they had been. I was one angry almost-graduate, convinced that nearly the entirety of the movement to which I'd already dedicated the rest of my life was bunk. (By then, I'd read a few more brownlash books, all making the same claims on the same evidence by talking to the same experts.)

I'd been very comfortable in that little green box, and when it was taken away from me, leaving me--I was convinced--exposed to the elements, I was furious. Why hadn't anyone told me? Were they hiding the truth from their students to program them into lives of servile obedience to the cause? How is it I could have learned this from a casual birthday present the term before my last year of university?

What I didn't know at the time was that I had simply hopped from one little green box to another little brown one, and that the boxes had more in common than not: Don't question the experts. Trust what you read. If it's in print, it must be true. Hate the other guys, they're morons who don't understand progress/science. I stayed in the little brown box for about two years until, gradually, a more complete picture of the evidence began to penetrate and I stepped out of that box into another green, but larger one. I've been roaming around in this one ever since and have as yet found no cause to leave it. It's changed size and shape now and again, but it's the same very, very big box.

The last shreds of my environmental skepticism evaporated on a business trip to a conference on adaptation to climate change, where I saw for myself the effects that climate change is already having in Canada's far north (too far away from the urban centres for our politicians or business leaders to care).

In between those two moments--reading the book, attending the conference--I had made important decisions that would affect the rest of my life. After years of thinking I'd like to go into academia or maybe work with non-profits or both, I decided to jettison that nonsense and get a good job that paid well in the corporate sector--which I did, and loathed. I met and decided to marry a guy who wanted a stable middle-class suburban life with all the fixings--and you all know how that worked out. I bought a big detached house in the suburbs with that guy and hated driving everywhere, hated the material excess of it, hated the emptiness of what I was doing. All because a friend gave me a book as a birthday present that I didn't really know how to read, and I assumed that the change of heart it wrought was permanent. But it was only as permanent as snow, which feels eternal in January and by May you can no longer remember it. That, my friends, is an expensive lesson.

No book gets in under the gates anymore. No matter its claims or the persuasiveness of its arguments, I check for footnotes and bibliographies. I check the studies they cite, to make sure they exist (you'd be surprised). I read the abstracts at least to make sure they actually support the arguments the book's author is making. I look for book reviews, see if anyone had substantive criticism of the arguments or evidence. I take a look at the opposing side. Do you have any idea how many times since then I've read a book or article that misquotes or misrepresents the work of another author or scientist? Many, many times.

The first moral of the story is: Don't Marry the Book. No matter how sweet the courtship is, don't marry it. A book can be a friend or lover; it can also be a trojan horse, and the only way to tell the difference is to take it apart before you let it in. If you don't have time to take it apart, let it sit outside the gate until you do.

The second moral of the story is: A small hinge can move a large story. I'm sure you all have your own examples of this principle.

The third moral of the story is: Comfort Zones are Not Homes. They are stories; they have less weight and substance than air, and you cannot depend on them for support of any kind. Don't sit on the furniture, hang pictures on the wall, or put food in the cabinets. Treat them as extended and delightful versions of playing house. It's fun, but it's not real; it's good for now, but by tomorrow you may need or want something else. The less attachment you have to that house of dreams, the easier the transition will be when it comes.

The only way a comfort zone gets to be permanent is if you refuse to learn or change ever again. That's worse than learning to let it go with grace. Just don't get too comfortable in your comfort zone; if you are always willing to lose it, and can learn to see through the walls, it won't be so hard the next time everything turns upside down.

~~~~~

(This was part of Julie's Hump Day Hmm this week, about comfort zones. There wasn't a spot to stick that in in the body of the post today--sorry, Julie.)

*Brownlash literature is the environmental equivalent of backlash literature in feminism, in case you are unfamiliar with the term.

Posted by Andrea at June 4, 2008 9:16 AM under Books , Change Addict

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