Like many misled children of the 80s, my parents touted some “facts” to shape my behavior that I clocked as law, because they were just trying to get through the day. (I would later take the batteries out of my kids’ talking/yelling/screaming toys and tell them they “had laryngitis” and to put them in the “hospital bin” and pray for recovery, so I’m not judging.)
I am a lifelong knuckle cracker with no gaps in my history. The first time I learned I could pop my knuckles, I began a 100-time-a-day habit that has never once lessened in intensity. I learned to pop all three joints, my wrists, and a very interesting sideways thumb maneuver. Because I imagine hearing that popping all day was (is) annoying to nearby listeners, my parents introduced the now much debunked warning: “Popping your knuckles will cause arthritis.”
Since my dad’s hands were already knotted with arthritis, I assumed my parents were basically Arthritis Doctors and knew what the hell they were talking about. They clearly understood the leading cause of arthritis, and I was on a dangerous path toward becoming a hand crone. This indoctrination lasted four decades, because when diagnosed with a weird hand condition a few years ago, I said to my orthopedic surgeon straight-faced: “This is because of all the knuckle popping, right?” (He had to explain that um, no, my condition is genetic and autoimmune-related, God bless and keep me.)
To varying degrees, most of us have built a trajectory around some untrue story and misunderstood the real cause and effect. Assimilate a lie early enough, and you can craft an arc to match, forcing the almost-right puzzle pieces to fit. After all, our brains crave a reliable story, constantly scanning for patterns and developing a narrative to bring order out of chaos. We don’t think in pure logic; we think in mental movies. So we adore tension and resolution, villains and heroes, black-and-white plot points, good endings. We believe in the classic story shape. We trust our versions to deliver the life we expected.
One of the earliest stories I heard, integrated, and believed was this: “Be a good girl, get good girl things.”
I idolized this narrative. It made such good sense. Do the right stuff, get the right stuff. What a safe and reliable transaction. Merit-based, behavior-centric, an equitable system all around. Here is the formula: Do your part and receive these outcomes. Respect the Gold Standard practices, and the structures will reward you.
I first assimilated this story in church. In my younger years, this created felt safety, because “being a good girl” was a pretty straightforward path through childhood. We didn’t have many opportunities to do crimes, so being good for God seemed doable. Our parents handled most of the logistics — driving us to church, signing us up for G.A.’s, praying before dinner — so we nestled into their rhythms. Plus, we heard every week in church that we were going to heaven and “the lost” were going to hell, so it seemed we’d picked the right team and things were going well for us.
This sense of God thinking I was good held until middle school. That’s when I remember the first tremors. The merit system was reliable until my merit came into question. I mean, with errant thoughts about boys and kissing and being popular and (considering) being sneaky, the transaction wobbled for the first time. Holy shit. The house had a structural flaw. I was already saved, so that couldn’t be it. I asked Jesus into my heart many, many times just to be sure, but one of the outcomes for being good was God loving me.
This is the season my journals took a dark turn, begging God to make me a better girl. Take away my thoughts. Take away my desires. Purge me of all this messy humanity. Make me pure again. Help me please you. Forgive me for all this wanting. I just want to make you happy.
My sense of God’s displeasure was so intense, I spent hundreds of hours investigating whether people could lose their salvation. I asked everyone. What was the tipping point? What behaviors or thoughts would take me out of the fold? How pissed could God get? I’d read the Old Testament. That God was terrifying and arbitrary and apparently loved to kill people for bad behavior. He’d burn cities to the ground. He’d send plagues and snakes and earthquakes for rebellion. He’d grant power to all the conquerors. Shit, he’d wipe out the whole world.
I knew enough to be scared of missteps.
So you better believe I tried to be good. I wanted to be so good. I wanted God to love me desperately. I tried to surrender everything that smacked of human impulse. I went to the Baptist college and married the ministry major. I didn’t drink. I never said no. I had two full-time jobs (mine and his), and the answer was always ‘yes.’ I left my eight-week-old firstborn for five days to go to youth camp as the pastor’s wife. I led and taught and hosted and served. I was going to be good or die trying.
The problem with this transactional relationship: Not only is God never pleased enough, but you are forced to inflate your own goodness. You have to. It’s all you have. You need it to stay current on the account. (If you aren’t sure about your standing, the other Christians will let you know.) So while chasing God’s elusive affirmation, you have to also soft-sell your own bullshit. Sure, you can keep “submitting your sins to the Lord,” but they never end and you never get there, so you have to gaslight God to keep your good status.
That is when I got super-performative — not just for God, but for you. I needed my goodness on lock. I wanted it blue-check verified. If you’re curious, diminishing your own garbage has *some negative effects* on, well, everything — not the least of which is marriage. It messes up our churches, because everyone is performing goodness instead of being human. It places a brutal burden on our kids because their goodness (or lack thereof) reflects on ours. I’m just spitballing here, but it could result in an entire generation of Christians who celebrate an immoral, racist, misogynistic, cruel authoritarian with a clear conscience, because they’ve performed their goodness by a different standard; I mean, just look at the Bible verses in their bios. They’re good people.
Because I believed a lie — “be a good girl, get good girl things” — I told myself the accompanying lies to make it work. Lies about my own goodness, lies about what goodness looked like, lies about merit and control. After all, you can’t support a lie with truth, so honesty wouldn’t do me any good in this system. (I mean, what’s a Christian Nationalist going to do? Get honest about his own inherent racism? Prioritize the fruits of the spirit and reject the depravity of the president at the expense of his own power and privilege? Come on. That’s what we have performative goodness for, guys. Just shove the puzzle piece in.)
But then I lost my marriage after twenty-six years in a blaze of trauma. I’d already compromised my account with evolving theology, so even after all that careful goodness inside God’s two favorite institutions, Church and Marriage, I found myself bankrupt. Despite all that manic trying, I couldn’t secure the good girl things.
Shockingly, two things turned out to be true:
1. I couldn’t be good enough to guarantee my husband would love me.
2. I never had to be good enough for God to love me.
In both cases, my “goodness” was unexamined at best, utterly inflated at worst. I wasn’t nearly as good as I wanted to be. But either way, the formula turned out to be a lie. It was never true. There is not a good-enough life that avoids suffering and ensures everyone loves me. There is not a bad enough life that separates me from the infinite, bottomless, pure love of God. Our own goodness only factors in as God made us in their image and called us “very good” from the jump. So there’s that.
I believed that early lie and built a whole life in the wrong direction. If I hadn’t fixated on my goodness as currency, I would have been a different wife with a different marriage. I would have been a different friend and a different mom. I’d have been a different leader and a different daughter. I was shackled to my own perceived goodness, because I thought it kept me secure with God and people. I thought it was keeping me safe, but it was only keeping me scared. I was afraid to lose everything, and in the end, I did anyway.
And what do you know? Here I still am: loved, free, human, medium good on my best days and sometimes super shitty. Some of my impulses are trash. I’ve been the worst. I’m nice but sometimes not. Like my brother responded one time to a fan who said,“Your sister is so amazing!” and he said: “She’s okay.” That’s about right.
We are “okay” humans down here living on this chaotic earth. We wring our little worried hands and over-respond and under-react and make small messes bigger and sometimes do the right thing. That’s about the best we can do. We’re medium.
We can never be good enough for a perfect life, and somehow we were always good enough for God. And I guess that’s the best news ever. I don’t know what God sees in us, but it’s pretty lovey dovey, and we can’t earn it or lose it. That’s the best Good Girl Thing I could ever hope for.
Lies don’t keep us safe, beloveds. Abandon the story and be free.
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” –John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“And now that we don’t have to be good, we can be free.” -Glennon Doyle, Untamed