From Alienation to Exploration: Breaking Free from the Iron Cages of My Life

The social experience of alienation has affected most of my life. I grew alienated from my core self when I attended Catholic schools and I've been working on changing that ever since. Those rules were hard to live by and they took their toll on my life, leaving me with social scars. I went from living what amounted to a child's utopian life to one like prison, where I attended school and met bureaucracy, discipline and repression. My imagination was stifled, my creativity crushed, and my expectations became nil. Alienated and demoralized, I became a factory worker. I smoked pot, worked and drank. I abandoned free thinking for years, repressing memories and drinking and drugging to keep away pain and fear. My social worldview narrowed to tunnel vision--with only a bottle in sight before me. It is only now that I am facing my demons in this paper. I'm allowing my sociological imagination a free rein: I'm finally putting my personal troubles into broader perspective in reference to family, society and my place in the world. My early years were happy and free, basically unrestrained by societal restrictions. We had the benefit of a summer home where I happily played and swam daily with my siblings and many cousins. We jumped into the water when the tide came in and didn't leave the water until the tide went out. We ran barefoot and in bathing suits. We had no hot running water: we hosed off the salt under the outside hose and our parents heated water in the kettle for our Saturday night weekly shampoos. We were a captive audience on Sunday mornings. We had to put on shoes (!) and wear dresses for Catholic Sunday Mass. We sat chafed and bored for the hour or so and then it was back to our freedom. The patriarchy of the Catholic Church kept the laws for our adult relatives, but we knew who ruled us--our grandmother was our matriarch. The women in our lives were the dominant authorities but my grandmother's gender role resembled more of a patriarchy than a matriarchy. She ruled the roost. Everyone knew her as Ma and her authority was well respected. She kept a watchful eye on us all, seeming to know just what every child was up to. Hers was a gentle benevolence: we respected more than feared her. This was the life I knew. Then came kindergarten. My family was Catholic, bringing us up that way too. One year, when summer had come to an end and we were back in the city, I was sent to kindergarten in a parochial school run by Lithuanian nuns. I believe that I just drifted along with absolutely no idea that my life was about to change drastically. I was just sent there, I didn't get much preparation: I just got a uniform, a white blouse, and a navy blue skirt with matching navy blue knee socks, and navy blue lace up shoes. I went from basically living in a bathing suit with no shoes to being encased in a uniform, my feet being choked in orthopedic style shoes. I went from belonging to one group, family, to instant domination by the authoritarian figures, the larger than life nuns. The worlds in my life changed from one socially constructed through my interactions with family, to one constructed by the nuns and the church: my new subjective reality was fraught with terror and confusion. My social reality was turned up side down. As Berger and Luckmann put it when defining alienation, I experienced "A loss of meaning: ... a disintegration of the socially constructed knowledge system" (Berger and Luckmann, in Wallace and Wolf, 277). I vaguely remember some things like enforced nap times, naps on blankets on the floor and saltine crackers for snack time. I mostly remember being shut up in the coat closet for talking. The coat closet was a press where the wooden doors pulled down from the ceiling. I stood in there for I don't know how long with the smell of wool in my nose and surrounded by coats. I stood in that "iron cage" cloakroom experiencing double consciousness, a concept which I learned recently from the readings of W. …