A New Kind of Adventure

It’s 2016, and officially ten years since I graduated from high school. In all honesty it feels like it’s been a whole lot longer, just thinking about the things I’ve done in the last ten years, as well as the ways life and my family has changed. For example, my brother is married with two kids now!!! In the last ten years, Ryan finished his service in the Navy, moved around Oregon, met Kaleigh, had Gracie, got married, finished school, got a job with the Forest Service, and had a son, then moved back to northeastern Oregon! I’m sure many people who read this are like, ‘yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that happens in ten years.’ But, life has changed so much, in great ways.

I feel like my current adventure is really nice, fitted somewhere between being a responsible adult, and still having some leeway to be a bit reckless every now and then! Most of you know that I’ve been dating Greg for two years now, and we’re house hunting, if you can call the lack of finding anything for several months, house hunting. He came with two cats, so now I have cats. I don’t think I’ve ‘become a ‘cat person’ but I also don’t think I’ve ever been a ‘pet person.’ I like adventuring too much to have ever wanted to get pets, but now I have them, and they’re pretty cute. I also have a really awesome job, and I think this is the place I’ve most grown since returning from Rwanda.

I work in sexual violence prevention. For my first two years back from Rwanda I worked as a violence prevention educator in middle and high schools in Oregon. It was a really rewarding experience, and one that I had set a time limit on. Fortunately, my current job became available, and after much eye-rolling by my dad when I said I didn’t think I was qualified, followed by lots of ‘I think you’re more than qualified’ by my mom, I applied and much to my surprise they offered me the job. So now I commute the 40 minutes to Salem most days, and get to focus my energy on coordinating, supporting, and organizing prevention efforts around the state.

After a few weeks or months in this job I remember saying to my dad that I didn’t expect my life to lead me here, that I didn’t foresee this being a career goal for me, and he just kind of laughed. Turns out, when I really thought about it, much, if not most of my time the last ten years has been focused in some capacity on violence prevention. The last three years in particular, since I’ve been back, I’ve learned a lot about sexual violence and healthy relationships. I’ve learned how to talk about something, and be called-out and learn to talk about it in a whole new, better way. I’ve learned how violence prevention is never risk-reduction. I’ve learned about gender stereotypes, health promotion, and oppression. And this last one in particular is the place that I’ve learned the most.

I’ve learned a lot about how oppression works, and how it impacts our world on a systemic and systematic level. I’ve learned a lot about historical trauma, and the continued generational impact of targeted violence, acts of genocide, acts of persecution, acts of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, etc. I’ve learned about oppression and I’ve learned a lot about privilege. When I started learning about these systems of oppression as they still work in our society, things started clicking into place in my mind and in my understanding. On the phone with my mom one day, I said, ‘it’s like now that I’ve seen these things, I can’t unsee them.’ She has been such a useful sounding board for me in dissecting violence. 

Oppression is the root cause of violence – when we are taught, formally or more commonly informally, to value some people less than others. This is often based on things like class, race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender, age, and religion, among others.  And I began to see the different ways that we accept oppression and the different ways each of us reinforce oppression. It is so pervasive. I’ve always felt pretty attuned to sexism, and always been –true to myself – indignant by the injustices I perceived as a woman. Professionally, and personally as a woman, I am constantly confronted with the realty that women experience rates of sexual violence at astronomical rates. At this point, at least one out of every three women will experience sexual violence in their lifetime.

That’s insane. And for so long we’ve asked women to change their behavior to reduce the risk of this happening to them. If women could have stopped sexual violence from happening, we would have done it a hell of a long time ago. Much more seldom do we step back and look at what is causing this violence, and a lot of it comes down to what we formally, and more commonly informally, teach people about who they get to be. The stereotypes that exist in our society, like dudes are strong, women are weak. This example in and of itself is so limiting to who we get to be and so messed up how we reinforce it. We say things like ‘man up’ which is supposed to be a good thing, and ‘stop being such a girl’, which is supposed to be a bad thing. We use a series of derogatory words to put down and describe men that aren’t physically strong – most of which have to do with either being gay or being female. We use those same and other derogatory words to put down and describe women that are “too” physically strong.

 No one wins in this model. This model sets us up to already decide that some people are more valuable than others, and it happens so much that we’ve seemingly accepted it as normal, and decided this is who people inherently are. But this model hurts all of us, and doesn’t allow any one the opportunity to step outside of these boxes. This is true for so much more than just gender too. This is especially true currently when we talk about religion. We are in a place where we openly talk about how we value some people less based on their religion and we can actively see the violence that this provokes, including comments, and hate.

So this is one reason that I love my job. I am constantly inspired to try to make the world a better place. I guess my mom read me Miss Rumphius enough times when I was a kid… Anyways, I’ve been in my job almost a year, and every day I come to work, more pieces of this puzzle click into place, and I begin to see a little more of the problem and the solutions to violence in our world. I know this is not going to be easy personally and collectively. I know even people I love and are dear to me will disagree with me. But I know that part of seeing this puzzle come together means holding myself accountable to being better, to being open, to being more patient, to continuing to learn.

So this is my current journey, my current adventure. This is where I’ve learned, changed, grown, and improved over the last three years. I don’t expect to ever be perfect individually, but I expect myself to try every day, to not reinforce violent ideas, to lift up values like equity, to ask myself how I can be better each day, to continue to learn and be open to learning. I can’t unsee it, and honestly I don’t want to. I was raised in a social justice minded household, and I’m continuing to see how that affects all that I do, all that I am, and how our world works.