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| Image credit: Photo by Malingering on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
The women's restroom in the basement of the Student Union was everything I dreamed college would be. The first time I used it, taking a tour of campus before my freshman year, I fell in love. At a glance, there wasn't much to love: the stalls were the same old industrial models whose circular metal locks never work properly, the walls were painted a drab institutional beige, the tiled floors were damp and grimy and there was graffiti everywhere.
But what graffiti! I walked in expecting to see the usual assortment of curse words and slurs and "Tina hearts Ted," but instead I found snippets of poetry and beautiful line drawings and questions like: "What does it mean to believe in God?" or "Is war ever justifiable?" And not just questions, but responses: dialogs and conversations in ballpoint and pencil and Sharpie that covered the walls and doors. I saw a place of silent communion for women in their quests for who they were and why they were here. About once a year, when every inch of space was jammed with thoughts, the maintenance staff would slap on a fresh coat of paint and we'd have a blank slate to restart the conversation.
One day, a group of friends and I were chatting and laughing over coffee, when I excused myself to use the restroom. I sat and read the walls and was filled with gratitude for my friends upstairs and for the opportunity to share in this strange underground community even when I was away from them. The walls felt like an extended group of friends, like familiar old books I loved to read over and over, like pen pals I'd never met. So, I grabbed a pen out of my purse and wrote, "I love coming here to commune with my friends, these walls." Then I went upstairs and asked if the men's room was as much fun. I heard that it very much wasn't.
A week or so later, I found myself back in the same stall. Only now someone had responded. "That's so pathetic. You like hanging out in a bathroom? Go get some real friends." I felt like I'd been slapped. I had written one sentence, an expression of my gratitude for something interesting to read and for the intelligent women at this college who gave it to me, and received a rebuke. My sentence and that comment ended up sparking an interesting discussion: about what people got out of the bathroom walls, what they got from real life friendships and what could be inferred from a single sentence. But I never joined in.
Honestly, the conversation had lost its joy for me. My only interest now was in defending myself and setting right this slander, but I knew it sounded unbelievable to say, "I'm not really a friendless loser!" And, after all, maybe I was pathetic. No matter how many friends I had or what we did together, I often felt alone. Whatever I was outside, inside I was still the new kid in grade school, the unpopular kid in junior high, the (too) smart kid in high school. Did people like me or politely tolerate me? Was I loved? Was I lovable? Based on a single sentence on the bathroom wall, a stranger had created her own version of the truth: that I was a friendless loser who lurked in bathroom stalls looking for companionship. And my own truth about myself, my world, my reality was so fragile, that her reality threatened mine.
A few weeks ago an acquaintance made a judgment about what he imagined must have been my circumstances growing up and (showing years of spiritual progress mixed with a very bad day), I snapped back at him that he was quite wrong. After all, I knew who I was and what my life had been. I wasn't any longer the girl whose reality was threatened by words on a bathroom wall. In the intervening years, I had married, had children, discovered my husband was an addict, nearly lost my marriage and my mind, and done a lot of work to learn to trust in my own truth. I decided to stop letting people push my reality around and start standing up for it. I was going to get him to admit that he'd been mistaken, that he didn't really know me. Instead, we skirmished with no real resolution. To my great anger and frustration, he would not admit that he was wrong.
Then it hit me that nothing had really changed. My truth was as fragile and as threatened as it had been years ago; I was just handling it differently. I was clinging to an image of myself, thinking that either I was right or someone else was, feeling I needed to determine the objective truth of my being and then defend it. And at that moment, my reality shifted in that beautiful way it does, and I saw that there is no objective truth to me. He wasn't wrong, but neither was I. The woman writing on the bathroom wall wasn't right, but neither was I. My life and the graffiti I leave behind, however I intend it, takes on its own shape to others. What's important is that I know and live my gratitude and my joy and my truth, and that I accept that others have theirs, even when it differs from my own.
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