Dopp Juice Archive

The following article will appear in Riseup.net‘s upcoming educational publication about safety and security in online organizing. You get to have the sneak peak here.

Blogging with Split Personalities:
How I Created and Reconciled My Separate Spaces On the Web
by Sarah Dopp

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m a compulsive blogger. It all started in high school when I created a website under a pseudonym and used it to tell stories about my love life. It was a thrilling and introspective project that resulted in a lot of great writing. Unfortunately, though, I was so terrified someone would connect it to me that I never saved a backup copy. That website has since expired, and those words are now lost forever in the murky underbelly of the Internet. First lesson learned: If I’m not going to claim something, I can’t hold onto it.

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Age is a silly thing. I work with someone who claims to play with his age the same way I play with my gender, and I think it’s a fair analogy. Age is a biologically-based number with lots of social constructions built up around it. I don’t really get to change my age. But I get to play with it.

Today I turn 25, and I’m not being quiet about it. Thanks to the beauty of social networking websites, hundreds of people are aware that it’s my birthday and are taking the 30 seconds out of their day to congratulate me on it. I’m being ambushed with text messages, emails, direct messages, and facebook wall notes. (Thank god I’m not getting that many phone calls.) I’m over the phase of trying to pretend it’s not my birthday and feeling neglected when people don’t magically remember it. I have no problem telling you. IT’S MY BIRTHDAY TODAY. I don’t want gifts. Just acknowledgment. Just jump up and down with me for a second. Help me make it a little more real. Help me convince my subconscious to make a shift in self-image. Help me close the door on age 24.

What’s the difference between today and yesterday? Not a year, that’s for sure. The difference is a social construction. “25” means something different than “24”. It means a quarter of a century. It means I can rent a car without paying the Irresponsible Driver Penalty. It means I’m in my “mid-twenties” instead of my “early twenties.” It means I’m three years older than the average age of college graduation, which means I could, legitimately, based on mainstream standards, reasonably do the jobs I do now.

At some point in my life, I fell under the impression that I wouldn’t be taken seriously until I turned 25. I called bullshit on that notion a long time ago, but I still noticed the raised eyebrows. Now that I’ve hit the number, I’m done with the eyebrows.

I’m 25 years old with 11 years experience building websites and reading poetry at microphones, and four years of self-employment in the tech industry. I’ve never lied about my age, but I’m done with trying to walk like I’m older than I am. I get to be 25 now. And all of the middle fingers I’ve been giving social constructions for the last handful of years can relax. I made it. So there.

A Jewish friend of mine called me tonight after attending a lecture on the history of Christianity. When I answered the phone he started speaking a mile a minute about charisma, redaction, contradictions, Paul, gentiles, marketing strategies for salvation in ancient times, and the difference between “what likely happened” and “what was written about later on.” The lecture gave him a framework for looking at the story of Jesus in a way that actually made sense to him for the first time in his life, and he was bursting with revelations.

He said, “I had to talk to someone about this, and I knew you’d understand.”

My mom is a liberal UCC minister who is married to a Catholic. My aunt is a Reiki healer who is married to an Episcopal priest. My uncle is a Methodist minister. His son married a female rabbi. My other uncle and his wife and kids are all born-again Christians who have done extensive missionary work in other countries. My other uncle is 17-years sober recovering alcoholic who hits his knees every single morning and every single night to thank God for keeping him alive another day. My grandmother has been teaching Bible Study since God created the heavens and the earth, and she will continue to teach it until she gets swept up by the Rapture.

My mother says, “There are many ways to get to God, but you need to pick one.”

In the spirit of both acceptance and rebellion, I’ve been calling myself an Eclectic Agnostic since I was 16. This means that I don’t care who wrote what down in any book; I acknowledge that I am human, and that I don’t get to know much of anything at all. It also means that I play around in religion like it’s a swimming pool full of finger paints. I’ve considered myself a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Pagan, a Christian, and a whole lot of other things that I’m not quite sure how to label. As far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re all different words for the same experience of feeling connected and recognizing the importance of life.

A friend of mine in high school said to me, “You can’t just up and be a Taoist.”

I walked away from Christianity when I started picking apart the words. The image of a personified God made absolutely no sense to me. I put my hands on my hips and announced defiantly, “No, there is NOT an old man with a long grey beard in a white robe sitting in a big chair in the sky behind a pearly gate, pushing buttons and turning levers and determining what’s going to happen to us next. Uh-uh. No way. Ya’ll are stupid.” Fortunately for me, my über-religious family is also extraordinarily patient and accepting of the fact that people need to find their own paths. I’m a logic-brained writer. My path takes language very seriously.

If images of God are just metaphors, then aren’t monotheism and polytheism essentially talking about the same thing?

So I picked it apart. For awhile, I was convinced that Time was my higher power. It’s way more powerful than me. I’m always trying to speed it up or slow it down and I have absolutely zero impact on it. It’s also a reliable force to lean on when I need help. If I just let Time do it’s job while I focus on doing my own, it will pretty consistently save my ass.

That’s like God, right?

But I keep coming back to the core of my spirituality — a space in my life that I only started to be able to refer to as God again about a year ago (although I find I get fewer raised eyebrows when I refer to it as “The Universe” in the Bay Area). I recently grappled with it from a gender perspective and ended up with a beautiful poem that healed a lot of my old anger.

If we are all made in the image of God, then how in God’s name can God be gendered?

Tonight I found my thoughts on someone else’s blog. The completely amazing Emma McCreary wrote a beautiful post about the difference between our culture’s old ideas of God versus its new ideas of God. It perfectly sums up the tension I’ve felt around religions and explains why I keep going back to it: the new ideas work for me. In typical Emma fashion, she writes in a voice that is fluent in both Business and Spirituality — a mix I too rarely get to enjoy. Please go read her post, God is Bottom-Up, and tell me if it doesn’t resolve all of this stuff and put us all onto the same page once and for all.

I think the joy ninja’s got it.