I was born and raised on the Navajo Tribal Reservation, where my grandparents plied traditional knowledge but at the same time shared with me the importance of a white man’s way of life. In this day and age, they told me, finding a balance between the two is crucial to your own path. But it wasn’t until I left the reservation that I came to understand my purpose as a Diné woman.

Growing up I experienced both cultures every day—sometimes separately, sometimes tightly interwoven, like the strands of wool in a Diné blanket. At school I learned Western ideology. Meanwhile my grandparents, our family’s keepers of the Diné legacy, imparted Navajo history and culture, taught me that I am born to the Tachii’nii clan (Red Running into the Water, my mother’s clan), and born for the Ti’aashcí’í clan (Red Bottom People, the clan of my father). On Sundays we worshipped at a Christian reform church, where sermons, spoken in the Navajo language, gave thanks to both the Creator of Life and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Navajo Nation, whose settlement in the Four Corners of the Colorado Plateau extends back centuries before Christopher Columbus, is today by far America’s largest Indian tribe, with more than a million members—some identified by tribal status, others through family clanship. Diné Bikéyah, or Navajoland, encompasses more than 27,000 square miles across Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—larger than 10 of the 50 states.

My parents grew up around policies created by the U.S. government and other settlers to eradicate Indian culture. They met at Intermountain Indian Boarding School, where, they told me, they were compelled to embrace Western ways of life and avoid Indian culture because it would not help them or their children.

But they made a conscious effort to maintain their traditional identities, even as circumstances compelled them to adapt to western social norms. They eventually married in a traditional Navajo wedding ceremony on the reservation, but later moved to Oakland, California, as part of the federal Indian Relocation Act of 1956. However, jobs were scarce in the city and my parents soon moved back to the reservation, which is where I spent my formative years.

Peters with her grandmother, who passed away in 2008.

My mother’s path was to be a caretaker of our people, working as a dorm aide at a local boarding school for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which also entitled our family to subsidized housing. The place was small—my parents in one bedroom, one of my sisters and her husband and daughter in the other room, and me on the old couch. But it was homey.

The decor reflected my parents’ personalities. The corners were stacked high with copies of the Navajo Times that my dad never wanted to throw away. Blankets were piled throughout the house, my mom’s way of letting visitors know that despite close quarters there was always a comfortable place for guests to lay their heads. On the walls, rodeo posters hung alongside intricate Navajo sand paintings and flea market prints of R.C. Gorman’s Navajo women.

On the weekends I would travel 100 miles to visit my grandparents, who lived in a traditional Navajo hogan as they always had, observing the mores of their ancestors, without electricity or running water. On walks, my grandmother taught me the bounty of the desert. Juniper berries for medicine. Yucca roots for natural soap. Greenthread herb for Navajo tea. Once, when a horned toad climbed on my foot and startled me, my grandmother told me not to harm it. Horned toads, she told me, are grandfathers of the arrowheads: if you kill them you will get sick and someone close may die.

After that, I watched and followed the toads whenever I could, fascinated by their morbid power. I was drawn to their strong and clear purpose when I myself felt so powerless, and—as the years passed—purposeless.

As a very young child, it didn’t occur to me to question my family’s bi-cultural way of my life. But that changed when I was six. My mother and I were in our local border town of Farmington, New Mexico, and I had to go to the bathroom. As we walked past the town’s white restaurant, I saw a bathroom sign through the window, so I ran in. Almost immediately I felt a firm grip on my arm. I looked up and there was a woman—white, frowning—asking me sharply where I was going and then yelling at my mother, asking what the hell she was doing and ordering her to leave with her dirty child.

The memory is a blur of voices, but I remember the pain in my arm and the embarrassment as I stood there while the grown-ups argued, the urgency of my physical need ever more pressing, until I peed my pants.

I came to expect the slights and insults, though I never got used to them. Years later, as a teenager, I remember driving home with two friends after a movie when two trucks full of white dudes suddenly appeared. They followed us to the rez border and then turned around. We felt hunted on our own land.

When I was 15, I was assaulted, and, in a separate incident, my best friend was brutally murdered. Two other friends were killed in alcohol-fueled incidents—one was walking around drunk and was struck by a car, the other was hit by a drunk driver. These horrors left me in deep despair. I numbed myself with alcohol, and I attempted suicide.

The year I graduated high school, I was working at the local KFC and living in the family apartment. But I had recovered just enough from my earlier traumas to know that I had to leave.

Early mornings in the apartment were peaceful. Before my niece woke up and Sesame Street blared from the television, I would help my mother make breakfast, the aroma of desert sage wafting in through the windows, blending with the tang of coffee and spam potatoes.

One morning, while we waited for the biscuit dough to rise, I told my mother of my plans.

“Oh, Shi’awéé’—my baby—why do you want to leave?” she asked.

In that moment, I wavered. What would I be leaving behind? The red, dusty earth and scorching heat of my ancestors. The fresh pine trees, sweet sage, and smoky creosote bushes that brought reassurance, exhilaration. My birthright.

“If I don’t leave,” I told her, “I’ll go crazy.”

“Your grandfather told me when you were a child that you had an adventurous spirit,” she told me. “He said that you were a storyteller, and that you would leave.”

Leaving was the beginning, but eventually I came to understand that it wasn’t enough. I needed to go back to school. This may seem obvious, but to me it wasn’t. Higher education was never a value instilled in me—my parents only told me to find a job and not depend on others.

In college I made the most important realization of my life: The problem with the depiction of Indians in media—the romanticized portraits and Disney-fied portrayals—is the lack of understanding of our history as actual people, Indian people. Through studying other tribal communities, I rediscovered who I was as a Navajo woman, and, with that, my purpose in life: I would become a storyteller as my grandfather foresaw. My mission: to portray the realities and complexities of native communities.

Today my multimedia work explores the lives of real American Indians, not ethnographic ephemera. While traditions are constantly changing, I understand the strong ties I have with my culture and understand why we must maintain them as Diné people. I am grateful to be able to transform my experience into art.

The post It Wasn’t Until I Left the Reservation That I Understood My Purpose as a Navajo Storyteller appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Plus, I’m distracted by what seems a more pressing matter: my fast-approaching half-century mark.

Yes, I will soon turn the big 5-0. And the thing is, I’ve been struggling with how to commemorate the occasion, or really, what it means. My doctor pointed out it means it’s time for a colonoscopy, but I am yearning for more.

So I have decided to think of this milestone as halftime in the big game of life (I know, I know, that’s optimistic, but go with it), though I am still a bit sketchy on what the intermission itself should entail. No big act has been lined up (I’d settle for Coldplay without Beyoncé); no inspirational coach is ready to chew me out for the numerous screw-ups in the first half and to point out how I can do better in the second. I want to catch my breath, recharge my batteries, and strategize for what lies ahead.

These big milestones, of course, don’t happen to us in a vacuum. They are forceful because you witness all those around you—siblings, friends, work colleagues—go through them as well, many of them before you do. I’ve looked to my peers for cues on what to do when I turn 50. I am impressed and alarmed that many in my cohort seem to take their 50th birthday in stride, either shrugging off its significance or celebrating it with unabashed good cheer—going off to Vegas, or a dream golf vacation, or letting friends throw them an epic “surprise” party.

I don’t begrudge them their celebrations, but what I am truly jealous of is their apparent lack of need for a more contemplative halftime that blends some tough self-criticism with inspiration. Maybe it’s because these people are well adjusted and don’t need a course correction, an assessment of where they are or a pep talk. Maybe the point is that by the age of 50 you’re supposed to have figured it all out, and I am just behind the curve.

It’s hard to establish tidy milestones for the elastic middle part of our lives. Early on, life is organized around such occasions, formal graduations from each level of schooling with rituals that bake in instant nostalgia for the immediate past with soaring exhortations about what comes next.

And then we’re off to the races, facing a vast blank slate stretching into the far-off distance, where a fuzzy finish line can barely be discerned, with its nebulous concept of retirement offering the next concrete commemoration of where you are in life.

I exaggerate, to be sure, when you consider that getting married and having kids are obviously huge life milestones, and that depending on your chosen career, you may have plenty of discernible watershed moments to celebrate in your profession. But as consequential as getting married, becoming a parent, or reaching one’s professional goals can be, these are commemorations of those specific events, that we only rely on loosely, and often inappropriately, as proxies for where we are supposed to be in life.

They also happen (or should happen) on their own timing—they don’t fill my perceived need for a more universally observed halftime ritual.

Sadly, while plenty of people joyously celebrate their 40th and 50th birthdays, our cultural associations with “midlife” tend to be negative. Indeed, when I write “midlife,” you think “crisis.” Why can’t “midlife” be associated with “celebration” or “break” or “appraisal?” The Super Bowl puts on a big party at halftime, not a collective freakout, so why can’t we?

It’s no wonder study after study shows that people are happiest in their younger and older years; our culture has a harder time with the middle part.

The lack of a formalized pit stop in that vast blank slate of the middle part of life, an occasion to reflect on the lessons learned in the first half and gear up for a second one full of purpose and growth, feeds our anxiety about where we stand, and often leads to a sense of reckless denial.

Most of us do need a halftime reckoning. We’ve had our share of triumphs and disappointments, and we’re struggling to come to terms with the fact that certain opportunities may have passed us by already. Suddenly presidents are our age or younger, our kids are becoming more self-sufficient, and our knees keep reminding us that we’re not early in the game. But we’ve also figured a few things out, about ourselves and about the world, and if you give us a moment to think about it, we can set new goals and get psyched about what lies ahead.

Perhaps if I did some research I’d find that some Scandinavian country—it’s always some Scandinavian country—has figured out the properly enlightened find-yourself halftime ritual, and enshrined it as a lavish social entitlement. And no doubt there are certain workplaces that generously encourage sabbaticals, or even midlife gap years.

But I don’t think halftime has to be unrealistically complicated, or necessarily life-altering. I am looking for rites of passage that can be universal. Maybe it’s a voyage that you could pay for with tax-preferred retirement funds. Or some form of community service. Or simply a soulful observance like a religion’s confirmation ritual. Or maybe it’s about doing the one thing you’d never thought you’d do, or about writing your own life evaluation and sharing it with a confidant or mentor, who’d give you feedback, like a coach.

Our halftime breaks shouldn’t be pegged at the same age for everyone; it should be something you declare and observe once, on whichever birthday feels right, whether it’s your 35th or your 55th. I’m declaring it on my 50th, not because I expect to live to be 100, but because I can roughly call this the halftime of my post-school productive years. That’s reassuring, insofar as it buys me time to figure out what I want to be when I grow up, as opposed to gunning for an early retirement.

And if I do make it to my late retirement, at least the rituals and commemorations associated with the occasion will be a lot clearer.

The post When I Say ‘Midlife,’ Don’t Think ‘Crisis’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I grew up in Westpark, the neighborhood between Culver and Warner avenues a few miles north of where the 5 and 405 freeways meet. My first-grade classroom and my undergrad lecture hall at University of California, Irvine are only about 4 miles apart.

“Don’t you want to leave? Why didn’t you go away for college?” people ask when they hear that I got my bachelor’s degree last year from the university in the same Orange County city where I grew up.

The simple answer is: I like Irvine. Irvine is green every day of the year. Potholes don’t exist, and power lines are neatly tucked underground. The cops sitting on street corners catch rolling stops, because what else is there to do? Fight crime in one of the safest cities in America? There is but one registered sex offender for every 9,533 people living in Irvine; the rate in nearby Los Angeles is eight times higher. Irvine also has a central, convenient location—my family’s house is 3 miles from the 5 Freeway, 2.6 miles from the 405 Freeway, and 5 miles from John Wayne Airport. Irvine was (and still is) the perfect suburb to settle down in—a nice slice of sterile reality.

My parents moved here 15 years ago for all of those reasons. Plus, they felt that purchasing a house in Irvine was a better investment than staying in Orange, where they had bought a smaller house as a stepping stone up from their small Long Beach condo, and sending my little brother and me to private school. Irvine at the time was wrapping up a development boom: The city was still building the new neighborhood school when we arrived, so I spent half a year at College Park Elementary School before starting second grade at the brand-spanking-new Plaza Vista School.

I admit I live in a bubble. For the longest time, I fed people excuses about why I haven’t left. “I only applied to UC Irvine because I wanted to live at home,” I’d say. And if they were really interested I’d add, matter-of-factly, “Because I didn’t get in anywhere else.” That’s a lie, but people accept the answer: They can’t understand why the city of Irvine is, in and of itself, enough of a reason for me to stay for, and now beyond, college.

Many Irvine residents, especially college students from out of town, feel suffocated by the repetitive faux-Cape Cod- and Mediterranean-style communities. The nightlife is nonexistent, and even the stores feel redundant, with two Targets less than 2 miles apart. But what some see as a lack of character is to me a chance to search for one. Being boring is a character—and one that a lot of people seem to relate to.

There was this house party in college where someone made a constipated face when I told her that I religiously watched The Real Housewives of Orange County on Bravo. (The show is centered in Coto de Caza, a private community in southern Orange County, but they have filmed at the Irvine Spectrum outdoor mall from time to time.) While The Real Housewives franchise has expanded to include New York, New Jersey, Miami, Atlanta, and Beverly Hills, Orange County is the star branch. Unlike New York or Beverly Hills, where landmarks are their own kind of celebrity, writers have to pull something extraordinary from the ordinary in Orange County. A scene at a Happy Nails salon at the Irvine Spectrum leads to an intense narrative between a mother and daughter over what to do about prom night, which is something anyone in any suburb can relate to.

People seem to assume that this kind of boringness makes me ill-equipped for the world outside. It didn’t. Irvine made me curious. And not in the Disney Princess Ariel kind of way, where the world is full of rainbows and sunshine, but in an “I have to poke at the world” kind of way.

It requires me to dig a little deeper and ask better questions. On Friday nights, I have to get off my ass and look for experiences outside of Irvine, whether it’s getting lost in the one-way streets around Colorado Boulevard to find the Green Street Tavern in Pasadena or waiting in line till 1 a.m. for M&M’s glorious blueberry doughnuts in Anaheim.

And then there’s my interest in unconventional career paths. The folks in my neighborhood all have conventional jobs: teachers, accountants, real estate agents. The story of people following their passions felt like a myth in a land where SAT test prep is a big business and art classes were simply a hurdle between my high school diploma and me.

For my journalism workshop project in college, I talked to a Buddhist monk, Bishop Daigaku Rumme, who was the son of a Christian missionary. I learned that, in grade school, his family moved to Japan so his father could spread the word of God. But Rumme, who went by David then, didn’t understand why the Japanese needed saving when at home in America the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War needed attention. So after graduating from college in the U.S., he moved back to Japan and entered a Buddhist monastery. I read through the books Rumme wrote, watched YouTube videos of life at the monastery, and spied on his Iowa college campus on Google Earth. I drove an hour through downtown L.A. traffic to meet him in Little Tokyo on four hours of sleep during midterms, and I had to find the guts to ask him if he still didn’t believe in God. It took me eight weeks of hard work to learn what it means to live with passion.

But now I’m ready to leave. As a fresh college graduate without debt or mouths to feed, it’s time for me to take a jump and experience a few face-plants while I can still rebound. I want to meet more people with unconventional passions, and I want to see what trouble in the city looks like. I’d like to start with the closest metropolis—Los Angeles, just 50 minutes away. I want to learn to travel on a public transit system and also master the freeway traffic at rush hour. I want to know what it feels like to live in a city with nightlife that makes you hide from the daylight, and I want to be able to eat a fantastic burrito from a different taco truck every day of the week.

I’m not trying to escape Irvine. I don’t think a person has to leave Irvine to understand the world. But Irvine has made me comfortable with being uncomfortable. So when someone asks now, “Don’t you want to leave Irvine?”, I say yes, but not for the reasons you might expect.

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