Changes

"Growing up is becoming who you want to be."

                -Gary, The Muppets movie

There’s something about going on a journey that changes you. Navigating personal development as a twentysomething, I’ve felt a lot like the Hobbits when they returned to the Shire after their worldview-altering adventures in Middle Earth. I try to talk to people who knew me as an adolescent, who haven’t been traveling the same roads, and they just don’t “get” me, especially if a generational gap separates us. It seems impossible to convey in one conversation what has taken years for me to learn.

Every generation experiences defining events that impact their personal beliefs. Like many Millennials, I watched the coverage of the attacks on 9/11 and subsequently lost a classmate in the “war on terror.” Rippling waves from the global financial crisis impacted my family and the job aspects of my friends who were just entering the job market. Just this past year, destruction from climate change, the polarization and increasing corporate takeover of Congress to the point of it becoming almost non-functional, and the shameless exploitation of faith for political gain rocked our country. These events affected—and will continue to affect—my peers and me for our entire lives. They have pushed me to deconstruct my beliefs and worldview as I’ve become exposed to different ideas and cultures and learned to start asking uncomfortable questions. The past year galvanized my internal makeover, and though I'm still under construction—as I hope I will always continue to be—I have emerged a new me. Like someone who's just lost a startling amount of weight, I've been eager for my transformation to change my friends' mortifying old perceptions of myself. Or, maybe I’m just overly eager to talk about my journey.

However, in the process of trying to reclaim my social identity for who I have become, I might have come off a bit too strong to a few of my old friends. Some of them have discovered that one of my favorite topics to discuss is how much I now disagree with American evangelical Christianity and the GOP. I’ve lived in Oregon my entire life, the first 18 years of which were in rural eastern Oregon. I attended a Christian college, where we often joked we were living in a bubble (how true that was). There’s a lot that I didn’t even know that I didn’t know. But things have changed.

In the past, I didn’t understand the purpose of staying informed or educating myself about politically or socially relevant issues because I didn’t understand how such seemingly distant topics affected me, the people I love, or the future of the country that I call home. Knowledge about current events and topics my peers weren’t talking about seemed like irrelevant minutiae, useful for games like Trivial Pursuit but not much else. Things started changing in the second half of college. I was encouraged to ask questions about topics like bioethics and evolution—a big step for an evangelical Christian girl who grew up in a conservative, small town. The great catalyst for my personal evolution, however, has been grad school.

Four and a half years have passed since I started work on my PhD. Learning to think like a scientist and adapting to life outside of the microcosms in which I had spent the entire prior part of my life has been transformative. Politically coming of age in a highly polarized and dysfunctional time in our nation’s history, experiencing a major recession and family hardships, and having the opportunity to explore viewpoints different from my former ones forced me to reevaluate what I had once taken for granted. The blinders I didn’t realize I was wearing slowly came off. I see the world and my role in it in a new light now. An increasing awareness of my own biases and willingness to revise my opinions presides.

Through this blog, I’ll be processing my evolving viewpoints on faith, politics, social issues, coming of age as a Millennial, and what things mean to me as a scientist and a younger citizen. If you are also experiencing big changes in your personal development, I invite you to join me on my journey. What sparked your transformation, and how are you dealing with it? Or, if you have no idea what I've been talking about, but wish to understand what is happening with my generation, please ask questions and stick around. I’m sure we can learn something from one another.

“Not all who wander are lost.” - J.R.R. Tolkien