I’m a Grown-Up Now, But Why Don’t I Feel Like One?

“They say if you wear a mask long enough, you come to consider it to be your own face. I wonder how long it takes?” asks seminarian and strongman N.C. Harrison.

I received my Master of Divinity about a year ago. Although I do not have a permanent ministerial position, this places me among the ranks of the clergy. Which means, more than anything else I think, that I have the power heal light wounds, banish minor demons and must use a mace or other blunt instrument instead of a sword in melee combat. It also means that I have joined the ranks of priests, pastors, evangelists and shamans as a religious professional. The M.Div. is a professional degree, after all, with a broad focus across the spectrum of Christian ministry, including classes in counseling, church administration (sort of like the political bickering around the Iron Throne, but involving more baked goods and with the only the Good Baptist Sisters anywhere near as big and fierce as the Mountain and the Hound), theology both classical and contemporary, and the hermeneutical analysis of religious texts and the spiritual aspects of non-religious texts. I am qualified to teach college classes in more than one discipline, and have enjoyed tutoring and talking with Sunday school classes and church meetings about topics both obscure and immediate.

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And yet, in spite of all of this professional preparation, I somehow do not feel professional. I know that some guys, when they dress up in the uniform of a white collar man, feel like a little boy pretending to be a man, wearing clothes from their dads’ closets. “Don’t call me Mr. Johnson,” they might say, “that’s my father, not me.” Or, when someone calls me “sir” in certain contexts, I sort of jokingly tell them that I don’t remember being knighted by any kings or queens. It usually gets a laugh, if the person is not unremittingly grim natured, and a little bit of jocularity improves almost any day.

Part of it, I think, is my size. I am a little taller than short, though a little shorter than tall, and broad, thick and heavy don’t quite capture how I fit into those three categories. Pressing three big wheels over my head is not difficult, for me, and once on the first day of a one hour weight training course in college, a classmate chided me for “showing off” while I was dead lifting—during my warm up sets, no less. With a beard and occasionally shaved head I feel less like the little boy wearing a man’s clothes and more a barbarian or animal who is trying to masquerade among the civilized by putting on a button down shirt that will barely close around his neck and trying desperately to avoid tearing sleeves that struggle to contain his arms.

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One of my memories as an undergraduate really brings the situation home, for me. I was sitting outside my school’s natural sciences building with two good friends. One of them, a pretty girl we called G., was playing with her Tarot deck. The other guy was a tall, handsome Samoan kid with longish hair and fair eyes. He was a little taller than me, a little slimmer, but we have similarly imposing presences and neither of us would have looked out of place with shades and a black t-shirt that read “Security.”

“Man,” he said, just as G. overturned the Eight of Swords, “I hate when people see me and cross the street.”

“Hey,” I replied, “maybe you’re just so big that they have to shift to get around you.”

“Don’t be that way,” G. said, inverting the Joker. “Don’t make light. He really seems upset by this.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I am. I mean, it’s like I’m Shrek or something. I mean, I wanna tell them: I’m not gonna grind your bones to make my bread.”

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I didn’t say anything, didn’t know what to say to him. I expressed sympathy in the best way I could, a gentle, firm hand on his bulging shoulder. I know how he felt, though I couldn’t quite say it, and I think he knew that I felt the same way. We were what might be called “large and in charge,” if we were actually in charge of anything, navigating extra-large bodies through a medium sized world. He brooded for about week over the whole thing, and then went back to being his sunny self. That’s just the way this guy was.

I’m not, though. I wish this wasn’t the case. I’m pretty sure I was born melancholy and will die the same way, presenting a corpse with furrowed brow and one hand pensively tugging at its beard. I shall go on dressing the part, though, putting on those shirts and slacks, occasionally struggling with a necktie, and hoping that I eventually feel at home in them, like I belong and won’t eventually be chased off by angry villagers bearing pitchforks and torches. They do say, after all, that if you wear a mask long enough you come to consider it to be your own face. I wonder how long it takes?

Photo–bark/Flickr