A quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that I’ve been obsessed with lately: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

While the use of “intelligence” smacks of a pretension I don’t cling to, there is something to this notion of retaining forward movement in the midst of cognitive dissonance that seems central to the addition of my voice to State of Formation.

From K-College, I attended one nondenominational Christian educational institution after another. There were many times over those eighteen years that I was asked to share the story of my journey to faith—my “testimony”—with peers and teachers. It frightened me, and always inserted a sharp pain in the center of my sternum, just right of the heart. It was as if a burr or thorny stem was caught in the darkness of my throat, keeping me from forming the words that would define who I was in the Christian tradition.

So, when people asked when I’d “been saved,” I remembered at least three different occasions in school where someone had led me in a prayer that, they assured me, would secure my soul and make me into a new person. But I never felt new. I didn’t feel alone or abandoned in the existential sense, but I never felt remade.

This only sharpened that inner stab.

At one point in high school, I was hit squarely in the chest by a soccer ball. I had trouble taking deep breaths for days, and I wondered if something inside me had broken. My licensed-nurse of a mother assured me I was fine—it didn’t even leave a bruise or any external symbol that I was in constant pain. Eventually, I got my breath back, but whenever I ran a finger over my sternum, it seemed a jagged lump of bone had formed right over the phantom break. I couldn’t remember if it was always like that, so I took it as a bumpy reminder that it is often impossible to understand what is going on inside you, let alone convince someone else of what makes up the truth of your bones, your inner-structure.

Shortly thereafter, I began to feel okay about the fact that didn’t have a succinct testimony, or some two-minute pop song of a faith success story. Instead, my story is forming in the fused scars, and in the memory stored in the skeletal armature of my body.

There are places where the kind of cognitive dissonance that Fitzgerald intuits could be supremely harmful. Too often our ambiguities and indecision about who we are and what we believe can stop us from actively protesting injustice. External hurt requires external action. But, a kind of personal, internal dissonance can actually be just as restorative to humanity as joining the peace corp, or speaking out against Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell. It requires a daily, inward glance—a turning over of yesterday’s assumptions. What if, yesterday, you were wrong, dead wrong? To act like you’d figured it out would be a lie—a disingenuous assertion that things are either black or white. At our core, our remembered bruises tell us it is never this simple—that this kind of simplicity is the seed of bigotry and genocide.

Instead, I wake up some mornings and taking a deep breath is noticeably difficult, if just for a second. And then, there it is—I remember what it is like to hurt and to recover. I cannot help but bring that sense of recovery everywhere I go.

(photo courtesy of Natalie Parys Photography)