Obadiah

    I meet Obadiah in Foxton Beach outside of Palmerston North, famous for its eponymous soft drink, Foxton Fizz. Obadiah looks like Jake Gyllenhaal and I’m excited to meet him, although I’m not sure how much I will have in common with him. He is tall and muscular, classically and obviously handsome—the kind of man the world was made for. He is the personification of the straight white man that everyone loves to hate and doors open for him that I’m not sure if he even knows could be closed. But then again, I’m sure the same is true for me with my pale skin and blonde hair and American accent. What blind spots has this given me? It makes me nervous that Obadiah works diligently for corporate capitalism—with my anti-materialist and anti-consumerist ideals, I try to live as far outside of it as I can. He’s lived in America but I’m not sure if that will be enough common ground. Maybe, I think, we won’t need to talk. 

    I realize right away that he’s intelligent, with a vocabulary that would make an SAT tutor proud and thoughts that dart behind his eyes before he chooses his words. It makes me curious, these thoughts he walls away. He walks like his destination is running away from him and he needs to reach it before it disappears. His stride is much longer than mine and I trail behind him like a child as he expertly cuts around pedestrians on Oriental Parade. He says that a woman he works with told him that “women can see you coming a mile away.”

    “I don’t know what that means,” he says.

    I laugh. I do. Poor sexy Obadiah, with his ruin-your-life potential for obsession that girls can see coming like LED lights on an empty highway. He looks like boy problems and luckily for him, I am not yet smart enough to avoid things that have the potential to break my heart. 

    The conversation flows easily and we eat fruit on the beach. I don’t remember how the topic comes up but we realize that we both grew up in religious families with lots of children. Obadiah was entirely home educated while I started public school in third grade and never went back. Obadiah tells me about his “loose cannon” of an older brother and I smile, thinking of my own loose cannon of an older brother. Some of our brothers even share names. 

    “If you’re the only person in the world with horns…” Chris says when I call him in Westport. 

    I suspect it was a lot different to grow up a boy among boys than it was to be an eldest girl in our religious system but it’s true that we lived similarly unique experiences. I can picture Obadiah in the homeschool cooperative I used to attend, taking the “dinosaurs didn’t exist” class taught by the pastor. With his quick wit and unusual humor, I can picture him holding his own amongst the chaos of siblings. I imagine that we’ve wrestled with some of the same questions since leaving our parents’ sphere of influence; struggled to adjust to a world that doesn’t behave as fundamentalist Christianity threatens it does.

    Religious trauma leaves a unique imprint on a person’s development—deep grooves in their self-esteem, sexuality, curiosity. The idea that you, existing as you are, are imperfect, flawed and unworthy of love is a notch in the psyche that those untouched by these philosophies do not have. Besides my siblings, I can count on one hand the number of people I know who share my background—Noah, Lauren, and now Obadiah. Noah has found his footing in the outside world and we are good friends but I have lost contact with Lauren. She has not fought the destiny laid out for her by others. Forbidden from education or career, she is held tightly by the cult she was born into and she will sacrifice her life and body for their Quiverfull mission, producing as many children as her body is able. 

    And as for Obadiah? Well, I’ve always got space in my life for someone who gets it. 

    I don’t often run into those who recognize the double whammy of religious extremism and the complicated dynamics of a large family; and I especially don’t expect to encounter this so far away from the Bible Belt. I’m a bit horrified when I think of how ready I was to preemptively discard my ability to understand or relate to Obadiah based solely on perceived incompatibilities. I know I should give people the space and time to show me who they are but I sometimes have a hard time overcoming myself to put this into practice. I have a bad habit of judging people too quickly, marking them one way or the other and then leaving little to no room for my opinion to change. I’m sure this strategy protects me at times but how much do I miss out on due to prejudice and hasty judgments? 

    As I get to know Obadiah more, I realize that he is like a turtle—he protects his soft and vulnerable interior with an armor shell of masculinity and humor. At times he pokes his head ever so slightly out and lets a sliver of vulnerability show. I am trying to get a sense of him while simultaneously trying my best to manage my own suffocating need to be liked and this makes me clumsy in my responses. I can tell that I’ve said the wrong thing when I see the wall slam down again behind his eyes. The turtle retreats. I want to understand him; want to know the 5 Ws of how he learned that vulnerability wasn’t rewarded; want to know how that plays into who he is today. I want to tell him that if it hurt him, then maybe it wasn’t love. I want him to know that he might be understood more than he thinks he could be; that he is not the first nor the last person to yearn for belonging without knowing how to build it or what the obstacles are. I get the sense that the world reacts kindly to him but that he can’t quite figure out how to engage fully in return and that this gives him a sense of frustration and even despair. What draws me to him is the complex puzzle that he is. He holds a veil of secrecy around him and I wonder what it might be like if he were to let it fall. Being known is the hardest and worthiest journey in life. 

    I think this is what the woman he works with truly meant: that it would oh so easy to fall in love with the potential of him, to throw aside my needs to try to heal his damage and nurture a version of him made up in my own head. But this is a mistake I’ve made before, a long and painful road whose end I know and whose length I don’t care to travel again. Already, I’ve assigned him a slew of positive attributes that I don’t know if he deserves because I don’t know him. I feel a powerful kinship with him based on shared dynamics and educated guesses made from knowledge of those dynamics. What I don’t know is if this history has made us soft in the same ways, if we share the same values, if we are on the same road towards connection and kindness. 

    Helper that I am—traumatized as I am—it is my instinct to push for the answers to my questions; to try to lower the walls he keeps between himself and the world. But I am not a therapist and he is not asking me for help with his life. If he wants to be understood by me and to understand me in return, connect with me, trust me—he will. As with everything, this is easier in theory than in practice and I struggle in how I interact with him. I feel off balance, decentered. I laugh at things I don’t agree with and hold back parts of myself to be liked. I know better than this but it happens automatically, the reasons for which I later turn over in my head.

    Part of it, I’ve decided, is that his at-times off-color humor puts a guard up in me. I hang back when I sense danger; go with the flow until I understand it. I can’t tell how much of this humor is him, how much of it’s due to the social circles he runs in or how much of it is that he hasn’t fully thought through how wary the things he says might make someone feel. I think maybe this kind of humor gets a response and he enjoys that but I don’t know what this actually does for him. I don’t know if he realizes that however jokingly he says offensive things, he is lending his voice to someone else’s hatred. I don’t know if he realizes that while he enjoys the privilege of jokes, real people face real harm. 

    Whether due to birth order or gender or education, something in the differences of our experiences is greater than the similarities and I am forced to reluctantly admit that we are not compatible. It’s interesting, though, to see how the complicated mix of ideologies that feed into religious extremism can affect two people so differently. This frustrated me at first—how can someone who was damaged by these ideologies not completely eschew the whole toxic mess, especially someone as intelligent as Obadiah? I see it with more compassion now—who am I to judge how someone wears the experiences they’ve been given?

    Post note: People are wonderfully complex and I’d hate to leave off a side of Obadiah that I admire. To varying extents, everyone takes too much ownership for the bad things they do and not enough for the positive things and Obadiah is no different. He helms an agritech company and, if successful, his line of work will effect exponential positive change on the environment. No matter who he is in his personal life and regardless of the motivation that drives his work, whether it be profit or status or something else entirely—the end result is something good and that matters.