Be Yourself

A tale of authenticity

During my first semester at Taylor University, in the fall of 2020, I noticed a phrase that was plastered on a hanging sign outside the old student center. It was big enough to be noticeable, but not necessarily huge. It could be ignored, but that would require effort. The sign hung down from the spherical building next to the short staircase that led to the center's clear-glass doors and windows. It simply said "Be Yourself".

I have no idea where it came from, but I vaguely recall the phrase being mentioned during an orientation or introductory class. It seemed to be a theme that some of the faculty had workshopped in a lounge meeting before the semester began, but hadn't really committed to, which is why this sign only hung at this odd place on campus. I thought very little of it initially, and it seemed too trite to consider for longer than three seconds, but over time, my apathy softened.

I began to take note of it when I walked to class, to lunch, to dinner, or back to my dorm room. One moment I'd be pondering if the joke I told landed, if the cute white boy I met did like me, if the invitation to Wendy's at 1 am was a true expression of being sought-after, or if I'd finally break into this circle of three guy friends I envied so much, and the next moment I'd come across this sign, Be Yourself. It interrupted my ponderings, which raced rather than walked, in a circle around my head, unmoored from any center, loudly clanging symbols of angst with nothing to quiet them. The interruptions were never long enough, but they lasted for the right amount of time to get me to breathe, to reconnect with this rootedness that was so easy to forget in this suffocating place.

I walked by the sign before I would speak up in class, challenging my conservative professors to see the hood as a site of something more than chaos and social decay; if it could produce me, it could produce more students like me. I glanced at it before I would ask more hard-hitting questions at the Boren Student Center high tables, across from those pale smiles and polite eyes that looked at me with a pity I resented. They were always so keen on telling me what they believed, but I was far more interested in why they believed it. That wasn't a question a Taylor University freshman Bible major was trained to answer, and few students in other majors could answer it either. I'm not sure they resented me for asking as much as they were embarrassed by the question.

By the time the leaves started to fall, the trees changed color, and summer haze was replaced with a cool mist, Be Yourself had become something of an internal anthem. It wasn't just interrupting my spiraling brain, nor was it giving me temporal encouragement; it was anchoring me, giving me a center. A place within me was forming, with less fear, less angst, and less concern for external blows.

Perhaps that's why I felt so little consternation for social consequences when I called out a guest lecturer, in public, at a departmental event for racist statements (this gentleman made numerous statements downplaying lynching, slavery, and said Mexican Americans weren't "real Americans" when they immigrated and formed Mexican communities). His book was later dropped from the course, and I received a sincere and almost tearful apology from the professor who invited him, as well as a later apology from the department chair.

Maybe it's why I chose to join the Student Senate early in my first semester, to refuse to go to chapel or any of the churches near campus, (even though this was a quick way to get oneself made an "untouchable") and to tell that cute white boy I liked him (ok maybe I got a bit too carried away). Evidence is circumstantial, but Be Yourself felt less and less like a cliché attempt to remind freshmen to reject some abstract idea of peer pressure, and more and more like a direction from God Himself.

Indeed, He became more visible to me in my most daring moments. He kept my feet on the ground and my head screwed on tight when I walked around the small Christian campus, in the middle of rural Indiana, the heart of the most reactionary and antagonistic politics to my existence ever conceived, and felt, even for fleeting moments, that I had a right to be there. Only something this absurd, his audacious, could come from a God who, over and over and over again, calls us to lean in further and further into our humanity, even when its vulnerabilities can leave us exposed to bruises and wounds, even when its highs and lows can leave us questioning whether any of it is worth it, even when our refusal to see it in ourselves and celebrate it in others locks us into a seemingly endless loop of social decay and rage. Our humanity, "being and remaining human" in Toni Morrison's words, is our most consistent Divine calling.

After some cajoling, I convinced my parents to let me go back to school for the "J-term" January semester in the winter of 2021. When I got back to campus, in twenty-degree weather and sheets of snow, Be Yourself was gone. Being the cynical and disaffected liberal student I was when I wanted to be, I chalked up the sign's disappearance to institutional hypocrisy. Of course, they removed it, I thought; they don't really believe it anyway. Over the following few semesters, this theory intensified, as I lived with the consequences of being myself on Taylor's campus and had falling outs with friends, was passive-aggressively kicked out of my old church, changed dormitories, and switched majors twice. I carried the old wooden cross of hugs and enthusiastic "hellos," which turned quickly into fist bumps and awkward smiles once the huggers and greeters knew I was gay. This wasn't a reward, and it certainly wasn't a way to win social praise; it was an imperative I had to myself, one I couldn't shake even when the fright of it meant I had few allies and even fewer close friends by the time I decided I had to leave.

But in hindsight, as the trauma of the Taylor years becomes easier to articulate (the first step to being healed, I think), it is evident to me that God put that sign there for a reason. It couldn't have possibly just been for me; I wasn't the only queer student at Taylor, and compared to many, I was fortunate to have supportive parents and mentors. And yet, God has an interesting way of anointing our heads with oil, giving us an oasis in a desert, making a "way out of no way", both in our individual and communal lives.

Every time I begin a new chapter of life and move to a new place, I think of Be Yourself, not just as a tired cliché rejoinder but as a prayer.

God, help us be ourselves on this day, and give us the courage to be ourselves again tomorrow. Amen