Humble Beginnings

“Never forget what it feels like to be this child” is scrawled on the pages of my bible in crayola.

an introduction to my story

With muddy feet and tattered hair that reached my knees, I spent my life on a farm in Mapleton, Oregon: population 900 with one yellow light as its beginning and end. Christian fundamentalism, financial struggle, and qualms with the US government led my father to unschool his 6 children. We were taught that formal education is for women without faith: only the sinful girls use science and technology. Instead we hunted bears, picked blackberries along the river, and learned to army crawl.

I am the only woman in my lineage who has graduated from University. This shatters me.

My father is an ex-military man built from iron; his religious fervor and subversive beliefs about governmental laws were emboldened by our local church which admonished us of the corrupt outside world, influencing my father to restrict our access to knowledge. I know now that there is a name for this type of system—cult—yet at the time, I had no name for it aside from isolation. 

This cult taught that man’s prerogative is sovereignty over women. As submissive servants, women embodied “humility” by sacrificing their futures. If one failed to be obsequious, she was emotionally and physically abused. When I was 9, domestic violence encased my mother’s mind with stone and my stranded siblings began to call me mommy. 

Back then, I could not access the ideas of “powerlessness” and “abuse” though the feelings were palpable in my piano compositions. The broken ivories and dusty tuning of my centennial piano held a glimmer of identity and humanity in an atmosphere where merely being a woman was dangerous.

Teaching myself and my younger siblings to read, I secretly ingested every book I found: Brave New World, Jane Eyre, Plato’s Republic, Confessions, etc. These words paired with my piano taught me that there may be other ways to live. Akin to Virginia Woolf, I began to crave a room of my own.

When I was 13, I began cleaning local homes, one of which belonged to a retired high school counselor—Lauren. When I met her, I did not know what a University or a counselor was, but I wanted to understand what had left “my” children full of lice and empty stomachs. Noticing my consuming interest in education, Lauren started to help me apply for universities in 2016, exchanging my house cleaning for her tutoring. I now experience agency, intellectual creativity, and a sense of physical safety because leaders like Lauren chose to take action when I did not know how.

Leaving my childhood and assimilating into a globalized culture is among the largest challenges I have ever surmounted. I self-funded an honors degree—working multiple jobs—while simultaneously learning most basic human skills like nutrition, hygiene, healthcare, cellphones, and even using clocks. Through this process I have developed a voracious desire for truth, resilience in the face of adversity, and a fierce sense of compassion. These qualities compel me to fight for humaneness both interpersonally and systemically, while emboldening others to do the same. 

My tour de force is the ability to think critically about the systems I partake in and proactively work towards sustainable change. Encouraged by my obstinate belief in justice for vulnerable women and their children, my mother has escaped and hopes to finish her college degree in business. For these triumphs, I thank Lauren, my peers and professors in the GFU Honors Program, the GFU Music Department, and many mentors who opened psychological doors for me that were once locked.

Having left my childhood community in a state of delicious idealism, I recognize viscerally and intellectually that my narrative of trauma is not rare, only the opportunities I have been given are. Abuse, lack of basic education, parental negligence, and poverty are normalities rather than exceptions. I continue to strive towards competence as a leader, listener, and academic in order to better advocate for “those children” and their mothers. 

Since leaving the cult, I have spent my free time solo traveling through 20+ countries, volunteering and teaching English to support my study of what I deem: “the common threads of humanity.” By teaching wellness classes, leading women’s self-defense classes, building mentorship groups for young girls, founding a community music school, eating dinner with refugees in Türkiye, as well as contributing to countless musical communities, I personally and professionally cultivate what I consider our “common humanity” through intentional action.

Inspired by my time working in Türkiye, I am currently examining the intersections between community assimilation and identity through the lens of displaced peoples. With over 4 million refugees in Türkiye alone, our globe needs communities which nurture agency and mutual understanding in more accessible ways, relying less on ideological similarities, traditional education models, and shared language—instead honing the fundamentally human acts of creativity, movement, and play. This need is especially poignant for women and children who have had no previous access to education.

There are few ubiquitous acts which bind us together from all histories and provide mutual grounds for communication regardless of ideology: one of them is music. Having personally experienced refuge and empowerment within my own creative endeavors, I hope to utilize the medium of music and collective creativity to restore a sense of agency and identity in displaced women and children, enabling them to assimilate into new environments while simultaneously nurturing a solid sense of self and past. By removing the need for shared language, we open the room for shared space. Utilizing that space for inclusion is my imperative.