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Interchapter J UMPER CA b LES AND DO Ub LE CO NSCI O USNESS AS A HA bI T O f M I ND “Um, I think it’s mostly a matter of confidence.” By this my brother meant that I lacked confidence. It was one of the first serious talks Dan and I ever had. I was living at home again after college and nine harrowing months at seminary; he was just eighteen . We were talking about the conversation I had with the man I rescued in the snowy parking lot of the mall by giving his car a jump start. I knew it was better to attach the ground cable to my engine block, but the man had insisted that connecting it to the negative terminal was better, black to black and red to red. If he had been helping me, I would have hooked up the cables any way he wanted, but since I was helping him, it seemed like he should have listened to me. But he insisted; I folded, and I was telling Dan this story because this kind of interaction was not uncommon for me. The explanation I pitched to my brother was an immodest one—an attempt to both understand and to cover the embarrassment I felt because I seemed unable to impose my will even when I was sure I was right. “This sounds odd to say, but I think it’s because I’m smart.” “Huh?” “Well,” I couldn’t quite meet my brother’s eyes as I propounded my theory, “I wonder if it’s because I think so much faster than most people, so that in the time they have to figure out one scenario, I can think of several, and then I’m unsure.” It was at this point that my brother suggested that a lack of confidence was closer to the mark. I tried to press my point. “But if I’m right, and I really do think faster, how would you even know?” He grudgingly admitted I had a point, but I could tell he wasn’t convinced, and to be honest, I wasn’t convinced myself. More than twenty years later, I think I finally see what I was trying to puzzle out that night: why was it that second-guessing myself had become a habit of mind for me, and why wasn’t my brother afflicted with the same kind of doubts? This little comparison/contrast exercise helps me identify three different ways my brother and I were socialized and thus the three causes of my second-guessing 68 C OM P ELLED TO WRI T E habit. First, I was the second child and oldest son in very traditional evangelical Christian family, and Dan was the baby of the family. My sisters—who were just one grade ahead of me and one grade behind me in school—and I were expected to live up to a strict code of conduct, which was not applied nearly as carefully to my brother, who was significantly younger than the rest of us. Second, while my sisters and I were model “preacher’s kids” to the extent that each of us graduated from the Bible college at which our parents met, Dan was a bit more rebellious and had a cool relationship to our brand of Christianity, which led my mother to wonder several times whether or not her Danny was “saved.” Finally, Dan is straight, and I was deeply in the closet at the time in a rural community in which there were no visible gay people who were not treated as aberrations to be ridiculed , dismissed, or pitied. Now I find myself wondering what it was like for my brother to grow up without developing the overly critical voice I cannot escape—to be rewarded for naturally taking to the kinds of manly tasks Dad also excelled at, and to have his life follow the heteronormative pattern so that one day he would stand in front of our minister father, who beamed with pride as he pronounced Dan husband to his pretty blonde wife. Dan was right that it “was mostly a matter of confidence,” but even that assessment made me feel less manly because it implied that this failing was a lack of character on my part. * * * The big pipe organ in the balcony at the back of the church sits silent while the worship team members, microphones in their hands, sing and sway...

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