Skip This Post If You’re Easily Offended

I missed Storm Large when she was performing in Portland, Oregon. Funny that I ended up seeing her in Scotland. One of my Authentic Storytelling clients encouraged me to see her perform as it’s an interesting storytelling experience. She was right! Storm Large (her real given name) is graphic and, some might say raunchy, but it’s her life and her experiences and she brings it all to the stage with a confrontational honesty that one feels she has brought to bear on herself. She strikes me as one of those rare people who look at the facts and myths of their life and has the courage to embrace the grotesque parts as well as the more ‘acceptable’ parts and turn it all into a landscape of hope.

She’s a six-foot-tall (1.83m) stunningly gorgeous, devastatingly clear-spoken woman who blows past sensual, sexual and mental boundaries and almost seems to be the personification of some people’s fears. Men are obsessed; women are freaked… and vice versa. I found myself observing the audience as much as Storm. Their reactions were erratic and alternatively disapproving and denying and in a turn of a moment, starkly self-aware and grateful.

I loved the way Storm brought herself to her story, hard and loud, messed with people’s sensibilities, and then brought them gently back to the ground so they could find the selves they knew and exit the venue. The line of one of her songs says so much about cultural expectations of men and women that have nothing to do with the way things were created to be.

WARNING: you might find the language and the ideas offensive from here on, so bail now. I think that this is what we need more of—to have our sensibilities offended. I find that some of what I’m offended by, I needn’t bother being offended by and what should really offend me I am numb to. I have ridiculous sensibilities and a whacked ‘offensive’ meter. I’m a preacher’s kid from the Bible Belt of America who also has a Master’s Degree from a seminary. I’m not the pot calling the kettle black; I’m the pot AND the kettle. It’s disturbing what I find I have been numb to. I need to be offended more than anyone.

So it goes like this in Storm’s song, ‘Ladylike,’—‘what the fuck is ladylike, if ladies like to do what the fuck they like… just like you.’ Let’s get real here, how many of you, men or women, judge whether a woman is ‘acceptable’ or ‘desirable’ based on how she behaves outwardly? Men, do you want her to behave with gentleness, elegance, discretion, be put together… ‘ladylike?’ But are you the knight who behaves with kindness, vulnerability, strength, chivalry… are you ‘manlike?’

Unfortunately, Storm has had to release a sanitized version of the lyrics that replaces the word, ‘fuck’ with ‘what.’ What the hell is wrong with our society? Who are we really trying to protect? Our children? Our sensibilities? Our myth of being civilized? Some sense that we are a God-fearing, Christian nation? Puhleeeeeaase… talk about taking the eye off of the ball.

And if you’re more offended by the fact that there are curse words in this post, get your head back in the game that’s in play on the field. We have a strange way of determining what is ‘garbage in’ and end up letting in all kinds of devastating thinking and ideas that we’ve fallen under the spell of that somehow have passed our ‘socially acceptable’ meters, while rejecting an idea that contains a curse word or a reference to sex. ~Gasp.~ How many people, families, communities and cultures have been wounded by the unrealistic and harmful expectations and behaviors that we hold each other to… when what we need in our world is more of the truth, and sometimes it must offend to get through to us. It is our fault that we are so numb that we don’t hear or pay attention when someone says the truth to us nicely. We need more people who are able to confront themselves as they are, where they are, and not live trapped inside a lie for their entire lives, left with this destructive and life-killing ache (to themselves and others), that results from missing out on how life was really supposed to be… how it was created by their Creator to be.

And if you’re offended because you feel that all of this strikes at the sensibilities of your religion, good. Religion is so often the most insidious and deceptive false god, a numbing agent, and is far more often the cause for crushing the spirit of God in this world than anything else combined. And isn’t it true that what we most zealously defend is the place where we are often blind to a stinging truth that may ask us to think and behave differently? A truth that could well set us free. For what binds us is almost always not what we are created for.

And that brings me to what I learned from my 24-hour experiment in choosing to offend my internal cynic and believe in everlasting human love. I learned things that may seem obvious, but sometimes it takes enormous repetition for me to get it. Anyway, I learned that it’s only something between me and my Creator, meaning that I can’t make someone else give it to me, or even expect it from them. I can hope for it, I can listen to them promise it to me, I can work hard with them to make it real, but I can only be sure of my own choice to give it. And it’s only really love when I give it without the condition that you give it to me in return. This is a bit beyond the maturity level of my humanity—perhaps it’s beyond everyone’s humanity if they try to make it happen on their own—and I feel calls for an ever deeper connection to God who loves eternally, which likely means more lessons and learning ahead for me. Oh goodie. I still want to believe in someone’s declarations of everlasting love and I want to hold them to it. I still dance around and withhold parts of me until I see you give me a little more of you. And I want to be more free of this nonsense so that I can love more truly, so forward I go.

I learned that it’s not wrong to hope for everlasting love from another and it shows the nature to love that lives in me when I believe and forgive and keep going forward, but ‘giving’ real, everlasting love is something that I must choose and it’s my choice and my responsibility. Your ability and commitment to love is not my responsibility, it’s yours. As a mother or father (hopefully) feels that searing, irrational, inexplicable, self-sacrificing (but not doormat, and often misunderstood) love for their child that demands so much from them, so should be the nature of love for any other. So, at the beginning and end of the day, everlasting love is a gift that I can choose to commit to and give, no matter what you choose. Good news, and not exactly what I wanted to hear… but, yes, what I needed to hear.

Back to the basics. Advice to self: Choose wisely whom you choose to give everlasting love to. It’s a f—ing big commitment. The dashes are my way of letting you back down to the ground gently. Do they make you feel better? If they do OR even if they don’t, go see a Storm Large performance. Might help and can’t hurt. No, really, it can’t.