Belonging to ourselves, even now, even now
As a young teenager, my mother asked me to read Dr. Viktor Frankl’s great Holocaust memoir, Man’s Search For Meaning. It is about the realization one brave individual came to, in the midst of grave suffering, that he had something that no one could take from him, sovereignty over his own mind. Dr. Frankl is a survivor of concentration camps, a neurologist and a psychiatrist who fought to preserve ownership over his attitude and that fight provided him with meaning and a sense of purpose even while he was in physical captivity.
The Torah, the Old Testament and the Quran all include the story of Joseph and the coat of many colors. Joseph was sold into slavery by his elder brothers in Canaan, and soon became a powerful servant to Potiphar in Egypt who was an officer of Pharaoh. He first fell from grace after being falsely accused of rape by Potiphar’s wife (there is apparently a deep history of women fearing rape and men fearing accusations of rape) and eventually rose to power again after serving jail time and correctly interpreting first two dreams by fellow inmates and secondly, for interpreting Pharaoh's dream that predicted Egypt would experience seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. In one of his lectures on the Bible, Dr Jordan Peterson interprets the coat of many colors as representative of someone who is competent in many circumstances. Joseph was favored as a young son at home, he then proved himself to be a highly competent servant and maintained his skill even when in captivity. His fortitude eventually led him to take on the responsibility of being Pharaoh's most trusted friend and adviser, allowing him to prepare the nation of Egypt through properly storing food for future use which enabled him to save countless lives including the lives of his own estranged family members. Joseph and his eleven brothers are eventually reunited when hunger drives the brothers to seek help. The dreams that Joseph had as a young boy, predicting that his elder brothers would one day bow down to him, angered his brothers and filled them with a murderous rage. Their plot to kill him was tempered when the eldest, Reuben, convinced the group to sell him into slavery so they wouldn’t have blood on their hands and so that they could profit financially from his disappearance. The betrayal of his brothers paradoxically placed Joseph in the right circumstance to emancipate them all from poverty and starvation. Joseph’s life is a metaphor for the power of maintaining mental freedom in spite of high or low circumstances.
Dr. Tara Westover, the author of Educated spoke with Michael Ian Black on the podcast, How to Be Amazing about how she gained sovereignty over her own mind in spite of being raised by survivalist parents who held rigid and extreme beliefs that were often not in line with reality. She was also abused by her elder brother and learned how to begin rejecting his narrative of what happened by focusing on preserving her own perspective through honest journaling. She told Michael Ian Black that it would have been:
“…easier to fall back into that old narrative that my brother had given me than to experience what was really happening but that night after it was over I got out my journal and I wrote what had happened and for the first time I wrote what had actually happened and I wrote that I had been terrified and I wrote that I had begged him to stop and I would have torn my brother apart for what he was doing to me and while I was writing, my brother knocked on the door and he came in and he said, ‘oh that was just a game and it got a little out of hand and next time we’re having fun, you really need to make sure that you tell me if you’re being hurt.’ And then he left and I didn’t know whose version was right, I didn’t know what he had experienced, I didn’t know if it was a game or if he’d been hurting me on purpose but I knew what I had experienced; I knew that I had not been having fun and that to me it was not a game and I think in reaffirming my own experience, …I claimed something important for myself which is…the ability to live in my own head, to not immediately yield my own reality to the reality of someone else and I think it was a first for me; I think it was the first time that my brother attempted to dominate me and at the end of that process there were still two minds present, two distinct minds, not one mind having gained control over the other.”
Tara hadn’t stepped foot into a classroom before the age of 17 when she entered Brigham Young University as an undergraduate student who had never heard of the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement. She pursued a serious education both in and out of the classroom and eventually earned a PhD in History from Cambridge University. Her scholarship as a historian is evident when she recounts the story of her own upbringing and how she was able to first physically find safety from her complicated family and eventually find intellectual freedom as well. Again, Tara in her own words in conversation with Michael Ian Black:
“I do think that you need to get to a place where you are comfortable having your own experience of things, not necessarily to run over someone else’s and say, ‘well you’re wrong and I’m right’, but… its okay if you experience something different than somebody else does…of all the things that people can take from you, I think access to your own memories and the ability to keep hold of your own memories and judgments about the world and your own perceptions, I think that’s probably one of the worst things to have someone take away from you.”
In a sermon entitled “The Power of Influence and Association Through Standing in Holy Places” written and presented by Dr. Peter Beeckel, he listed five places he feels are the most holy and that should be treated with great care; he includes physical domains such as our homes and places of worship and concludes his sermon with:
“The last of the 5 Holy Places, the most intimate, personal and private, is the stage and memory banks of our minds…For in no place do we have more personal stewardship, moral responsibility and opportunity than the care and cultivation of the Holy Place of our minds…Like Abraham of old, as he left his father’s land for higher ground, we too will inevitably have to reject and leave behind the lower ground where many of us were planted or are walking…To stand in Holy Places takes desire, vision and discipline, but in no place are these more essential than in the creation of, and standing in, the Holy Place of our minds. Nothing is more dependent upon, and the result of, our moral, creative agency, than the development and cultivation of a virtuous mind.”
In her book, “Braving the Wilderness”, Dr. Brene Brown explores the meaning of this beautiful quote by Dr. Maya Angelou:
MAYA ANGELOU: You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great…
BILL MOYERS: Do you belong anywhere?
MAYA ANGELOU: I haven’t yet.
BILL MOYERS: Do you belong to anyone?
MAYA ANGELOU: More and more… I belong to myself. I’m very proud of that. I am very concerned about how I look at Maya. I like Maya very much.
Dr. Angelou’s sentiments echo Charlotte Bronte’s character Jane Eyre when she said, “I care for myself” while declining an inappropriate marriage proposal. May we all find the courage to care for ourselves by cultivating independence of thought and as we care properly for ourselves, may we be better prepared to care for those around us.