Rurally Screwed.
That's what I want to be.
That's what a gal named Jessie Knadler is. Rurally Screwed.
In her memoir of the same name, Jessie K. recounts how she fled the very rurally screwed life of Montana for Manhattan at the age of seventeen only to return to that rurally screwed life, but this time in southern Virginia with her cowboy husband Jake.
See, I had similar aspirations. I wanted to flee podunk, redneck Winfield, MD, although Manhattan wasn't my destination. (Instinctually I knew I wouldn't survive there, spiritually speaking. Wouldn't thrive there is what I should say. You get my point. Anyway.)
After I graduated from South Carroll, I fled Winfield and headed straight for southern Virginia to Southern Seminary College for Women in Buena Vista. The college wasn't a seminary in the traditional sense. It was a private, all girls junior college with a history dating back to 1868, not far from Lexington--home of Washington & Lee University and Virginia Military Institute--precisely where Jessie K. and her family reside now.
While at Souther Sem, I was gonna make myself over. I was gonna transform myself from a socially awkward wallflower whose shyness came across as aloof. I was secretly ashamed of how my dad and uncles had dirt permanently lodged under their fingernails, my grandmother's canning, the redneck trucks. I never felt like I fit in. I was gonna find myself a fine man who came from a long line of southern gentlemen. Never mind that a college boy from the oh so preppy, private, very monied Washington & Lee University would have been attracted to me, in part most likely, to piss off his mother since my background no where near matched the expectations she would have had for her son. No matter. And forget about a VMI boy; they were way too patronizing. (Sorry, Jessie K.)
In my mind, when I returned to podunk Winfield, no one would recognize me. They would be quietly stunned by my metamorphosis. I had grand plans (and a rich interior life that doesn't always match reality).
I didn't last two months at Souther Sem. I despised it there. Here's the thing. I went to the college because my mother wanted me to. I knew I wouldn't like it there, wouldn't fit into this monied world where we pretended rigorous academic life when in truth my seventh grade science class had been more challenging than any of my classes combined at Southern Sem.
For Pete's sake, the campus had a barn where the students could board their horses. (To be fair, they did have an excellent equestrian team.) You could take an equestrian class for your gym credit instead of the traditional gym class. Not me, though. We couldn't afford the extra fees associated with gym-class-as-equestrian-riding.
I share this with you to give you an idea of the level of gentility of this college.
Students came from all over the South. I think I was as "Yankee northern" as you could get even though Maryland is, technically, south of the Mason Dixon line. Most of the students had been riding and show jumping since the age of grade school (if not sooner) or cheerleaders too stupid to attend any college but their parents, bless their hearts, couldn't condescend to enroll their precious daughters in community college. Such a thing would be disgraceful and appearances meant a great deal.
I found the unspoken goal of finding a husband at nearby W&L University or VMI--the very goal I had, mind you--to be suffocating.
I didn't last two months. I couldn't carry on the charade. I despised myself. For leaving Winfield in the first place, to think I could be better than anyone I left behind. For coming to Southern Sem when deep, deep down I knew I wouldn't fit in. For dropping out, that I wouldn't thrive there. I personified self-mortification.
In February of the following year, I enrolled in community college.
What does this have to do with Jessie Knadler's memoir Rurally Screwed?
Not a cotton pickin' thing.
But like Jessie K, we have learned not to make ourselves over in someone else's image, according to someone else's expectations. Motivated by the belief that the self we have couldn't possibly be good enough so we transform ourselves according to the expectations that we think the other person has.
This is a very difficult lesson to learn.
I will probably never be rurally screwed in southern Virginia or Oklahoma or Colorado, raising hens and writing in the attic of an old farmhouse because Joseph wouldn't be comfortable living in a place where people are outnumbered by cattle. (I keep telling him that Oklahoma needs teachers too, but it falls on deaf ears.)
Jessie K. has made a life for herself on several acres with her husband and baby girl, a rescued dog and chickens. Her memoir Rurally Screwed is engaging and heartbreaking at times. But goodness and grace spring from that despair.
Stop what you're reading. Set that book aside for now. Instead, read Jessie Knadler's memoir Rurally Screwed. It's that good.
P.S. Southern Seminary College for Women is now Southern Virginia University, a liberal arts college that "promotes the standards and values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." That's so not even remotely what the college was when I was there. For two months. Just sayin'.
