The High Cost of Conformity
“The
reward for conformity is that everyone likes you—except yourself.”
That's a quote from contemporary author Rita Mae Brown, and what she means, of course,
is that one of the high costs of conformity is the same thing — everyone likes
you except yourself.
For years, many of us tried to conform to the ways of the world so we could at
least feel as if we fit in, but we our attempts only made us miserable and
unsuccessful. Then those of us who became Christians discovered the faintest
glimmer of hope in one of the first Bible verses we learned, Romans 12:2: “Do
not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your
mind.” That sounded so wonderful at the time—our minds could be renewed,
transformed. We could be conformed to the image of Christ—who wouldn’t want
that?—and we could have the mind of Christ, as 1 Corinthians 2:16 tells us.
What’s more, most of us were introduced to the kingdom of God after hearing some message, in some
form or other, about God’s unconditional love for us. Maybe it wasn’t phrased
that way, but somehow, we all understood that God loved us, warts and all. Yes,
He wanted us to clean up our act, but that would come in time. The important
thing was to surrender our lives to Him and to His love. He would take care of
the rest.
Except some of us never gave Him a chance to. We set about re-creating ourselves, not
in God’s image, but in the image of a “good Christian,” whatever that is. And
the church—which, of course, is us—began laying one condition after another
on us. We did this to each other, but we hardly knew that that was what we were
doing at the time. Weren’t we simply trying to help our brothers and sisters
overcome temptation and avoid a life of ruin? Instead of the freedom we had
been promised, and the freedom we promised others, we found ourselves trapped
in a prison of our own making.
Many of us became miserable all over again.
When I first became a Christian, I had been a ’60s wild child. I had emerged from a life of debauchery, and I was determined
to get this whole Christian thing right. So I changed the way I dressed and
talked and partied, and I became the good little Christian girl. But I didn’t
deal with the temptations that had once attracted me to the wilder side of
life.
No problem. I knew how to handle at least one of those ongoing temptations. I’d get married! Now there was something I
was sure I could do and do well. I wouldn’t feel like an outsider anymore,
because I’d be married—which at that time was a huge prerequisite to being a
good Christian woman, and still may be. But I had married a man who wasn’t
saved, so I was an outsider once again: A married woman who came to church
alone.
Not surprisingly, the marriage fell apart. I tried to fit in to the church once again, but now I was a divorced
woman—too old for the college and career group, too divorced for the young marrieds group, too much of an oddity to fit in anywhere else. This was in the
1970s, and I don’t think things have changed much since then. Regardless of the
church’s role in making me feel like some kind of alien, I hadn’t dealt with
the problems that formed my contribution to the failure of my marriage, so the
blame was squarely on my shoulders.
I eventually remarried. I was now married to the kindest man on the planet, and we started creating a family. Motherhood!
Now that was something I knew I could be a success at! I was on the fast
track toward becoming the best mother on the planet. I started homeschooling my
first child when she was still in the womb—and this was in 1983, when homeschooling, at least on the East Coast, was virtually unheard of. But I had
been a reporter, and I had done a story on the one homeschooling family in our
area–who, by the way, were Orthodox Jews—and I knew homeschooling was legal
in New Jersey.
I would not only be the best mother on the planet; I would be the best homeschooling teacher on the planet. I even had
a teaching certificate to whip out if anyone ever challenged my right or my
abilities to teach my own children. Just let them try! I’d start speaking to
them in a dead language like Latin or Greek and show them just how smart I was.
I was smart all right, but I never dealt with the perfectionism that
transformed my house from a restful haven to the modern-day equivalent of the
Little School on the Prairie. Most years I created my own curriculum and had
enough school supplies for a classroom of thirty kids, even though I only had
two little ones at the time.
Finances were not just tight, though, they were close to nonexistent. After years of sacrifice and living a barebones
existence and even relying on the kindness of others for our groceries most
weeks, I got an offer I couldn’t refuse: A Christian magazine offered me a job.
I fully believed this was God’s will for our family. I still do. But I believe
in retrospect that there were some things He wanted to accomplish in my life
before I took this step. The magazine was willing to wait several months for us
to sell our house and make the move from Delaware to Florida. But I was not willing. I looked at the
salary they offered and left my family behind to sort things out while I got
settled in Florida. But I had not dealt with my failure to
trust God with our finances.
Two years later, I ended up on the floor of a hotel, about to sever my relationship with God, at least in terms of any
expectations I might have from Him. Throughout my entire life as a Christian,
my perfectionism had become closely intertwined with my attempts to fit in:
with the church, with other mothers, with other homeschoolers, and now with my
co-workers at the Christian magazine where I worked.
And I felt I had failed. I had failed at every last thing and every last opportunity God had given me in my life. And I
blamed it on Him: Why couldn’t He have made me normal? How could I have failed
so miserably at everything I tried my hand at? And why, if He loved me so much,
did He allow so many people to stare at me and look at me funny and treat me as
if I was some sort of freak?
I could only come to one conclusion: I was this major disappointment to God, and that’s why all the other women at the
Christian conference I was attending were getting their socks blessed off while
I was sitting on the floor of my hotel room in a nearly catatonic state.
I could have used a bit of Luis Palau’s wisdom at that point. “God is not disillusioned with you,” Palau once said. “He never had any illusions
to begin with.”
But I may not have believed that at the time. I got off the hotel floor. I had decided that God and I would go our
separate ways until I finally came face to face with Him in heaven, which I
knew was still part of the deal. I would still be a good little Christian girl—I just wouldn’t expect anything more from Him for the rest of my life.
And that proved to be the pivotal point in my life with God. Because eventually—a significant time later—it led me
to realize that I could never live apart from Him again.
Within a month of that night, I came to one of the most startling discoveries of my life. Here I was, a bona fide,
card-carrying Christian, working for a Christian company, involved in a
joy-filled church, married to the kindest man on the planet, the mother of two
of the most wonderful girls on the planet...and I was suffering from a severe case
of chronic depression.
How could I ever admit this to anyone? But how could I ever get help if I didn’t admit this to someone?
When I couldn’t take it any longer, when I knew I was going to shatter to a million pieces if I didn’t do something now,
I called my pastor. At least, I think I did. I ended up on the phone with him
somehow and, for the first time in my life, uttered the word “depression” as a
description of the condition I was in.
I will forever be grateful to him for the first piece of advice he gave me: Get to a doctor immediately. He knew—he knew—that I was so far gone that I could not hear any spiritual advice whatsoever,
and that I probably couldn’t even hear the voice of God anymore. He was right.
Antidepressants brought me to a place where I could hear both my pastor and God again. For most Christians, I suspect, that
would be the end of the story, because most Christians would follow through
with what their pastor and God told them to do. I did, of course, to a point.
But I was still working in this high-pressured magazine environment, working
impossibly long hours and trying to be the best editor on the planet.
And once again, God said Enough. Only this time, He stopped my heart.
OK, so it wasn’t literally Him that stopped it. It was the paramedics who had to reboot me after my heart had
been racing at 200 beats per minute for almost two hours. Now that got
my attention...for a while. A day or two, I’d say.
Then I was back to work, and for the next eight months my life gradually became a living nightmare—a nightmare that
ended only when I made a second trip to the emergency room, this time for what
appeared to be a stroke. It turned out not to be, but still, the effects of a
lifetime of trying to fit in by trying to be the perfect … whatever … had taken
their toll. I was suffering from a stress-related neurological disorder. I will
probably be on medication to alleviate the symptoms for the rest of my life.
Apart from a miracle of God, there seems to be no cure.
Since Memoir of a Misfit released I’ve heard countless stories from women—and men—who have similar stories to
tell. [Tell me your story!] The details are obviously different, sometimes significantly so. One
woman I heard from is a model and successful TV actress, and yet she feels like
a misfit.
The one thing we all have in common is that each one of us has paid a high price for trying to fit it – trying to meet
other people’s expectations and trying to become something God never intended
us to be.
My message to other misfits goes far beyond the usual “just be yourself” message that we so often hear. How can you
“just be yourself” when doing that means subjecting yourself to ridicule? How
can you “just be yourself” when you don’t even know what your real self is,
because you’ve piled on so many layers of confused identity in your attempts to
fit in?
E.E. Cummings had this piece of wisdom and advice, and I think it’s a good one: “To be nobody but yourself in a world
that is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight
the hardest battle that any human being can fight. But never stop fighting it.”
With God, of course, that fight turns into a certain victory. When we stop trying to be everybody else, and we
finally surrender and say, “OK, God, You made me this way. Do with me what You
will. Use me and my royal weirdness in any way You can to bring about Your
purposes on earth. And I will stop fighting the nature You placed within me
when You so lovingly created me”—when we do that and say that, we have
finally reached a point where we can embrace and befriend our misfit nature and
give up all our pointless attempts to conform to some manmade or womanmade
or churchmade standard for what is normal and acceptable.
Carl Bard once said this: “Though no one can go back and make a brand-new start, anyone can start from now and make a
brand-new ending.”
And that’s my hope and prayer for you—that if you are a misfit or if you at least sometimes feel like a misfit—that
you can start from now, thank God for the way He made you, learn to love your
quirky nature, and go on to make a brand-new and wonderful ending for your
life’s story.
Click below for additional articles:
Embracing Your Misfit Nature
© 2007 Marcia Ford . Permission is granted to print out for individual personal use only.
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