I Was 15 When I First Shaved — What Amish Girls Are Never Told About Their Bodies

[00:00:00]It was 5:00 in the morning in the dead of winter. The fields beyond the windows were still swallowed in darkness. Every other person in the house was asleep. I stood alone in the small bathroom holding something in both hands. Not a weapon. Not anything the outside world would look at twice.

[00:00:18]A disposable razor, the cheap plastic kind, probably worth less than a dollar.

[00:00:23]I was 15 years old and I was gripping it as though it carried the weight of my Bible.

[00:00:29]Because in the world I had grown up in, a girl could lose her entire reputation over a choice that no one outside that world would even pause to consider.

[00:00:40]What I am about to tell you, I kept locked inside myself for 3 years. Not because it was wrong. Not because I'd caused anyone harm.

[00:00:50]But because in my world, the act I was about to perform, something so unremarkable that most people do it without a passing thought, felt as though it could cost me everything. I want to tell you what happened that morning and what it taught me about the difference between a body that belongs to God and the community and a body that belongs to the person living inside it.

[00:01:11]I grew up Old Order Amish in Holmes County, Ohio. This story reaches back further than my marriage, further than anyone asking what I wanted. It reaches into the years a girl spends learning the boundaries of a world before she realizes she is not permitted to learn the boundaries of herself. In my community, the Ordnung governed everything. The shape of a bonnet, the color of a dress, the style of a buggy.

[00:01:40]But its reach did not stop at clothing or carriages. It reached into the body itself.

[00:01:46]The belief underneath all of it was this. Your body was made by God exactly as he intended it to be.

[00:01:56]To alter it, even something as minor as removing hair, was to declare that your own preference held more authority than his design.

[00:02:05]No one stated this at the breakfast table. No one announced it while pinning a prayer cap or hanging laundry out to dry.

[00:02:13]But every girl understood it. A plain body was an obedient body.

[00:02:18]No one sat me down and taught me this directly.

[00:02:22]My mother never looked at me and said the words.

[00:02:25]I learned it the way I learned nearly everything, by watching, by registering what happened to the ones who crossed that invisible line.

[00:02:34]The most powerful rules in my world were never the ones spoken from a pulpit.

[00:02:39]They were the ones nobody needed to say.

[00:02:41]The summer I was 14, my cousin came to visit from Indiana. We were on the porch one afternoon, shelling peas in the heat, and she had rolled her sleeves up to the elbow.

[00:02:52]I glanced at her arm. Something I expected to see was not there. She noticed me noticing. She said nothing, just a small, barely visible shrug, and went back to the peas.

[00:03:06]I did not ask.

[00:03:08]You did not ask about such things.

[00:03:11]But the question lived in my chest for weeks, like something waiting to be named. A few weeks after that, I was in a fabric store in town with my mother.

[00:03:20]An English girl reached up for a bolt of cloth and her sleeves slid back.

[00:03:25]I saw her arm, and then for just a moment, her lower leg.

[00:03:29]I looked down at my own hands, my own forearms. For the first time in my life, I became aware of myself from the outside.

[00:03:38]Not with shame, just a sudden, strange alertness, like someone had opened a window in a room I had been sitting in my whole life without knowing the window was there.

[00:03:48]I did not feel sinful.

[00:03:52]I felt aware.

[00:03:55]And that awareness was almost more unsettling than shame would have been.

[00:04:00]I had spent my entire life being taught not to draw attention to the body, but no one had prepared me for the experience of paying attention to it myself. It was October when I found it.

[00:04:12]I was cleaning the bathroom, reaching into the very back of a cabinet, and my fingers landed on something smooth and plastic. A single disposable razor left behind by an English relative who had visited months earlier and forgotten it.

[00:04:26]I held it for a moment, put it back, and then thought about it for an entire week.

[00:04:31]Then I took it out and hid it behind the loose trim board at the bottom of my closet wall.

[00:04:36]I did not throw it away.

[00:04:38]And that decision told me something about myself I was not yet ready to hear. That first morning, I stood in the bathroom before anyone else had stirred.

[00:04:48]Frost on the window.

[00:04:50]Cold water in the basin.

[00:04:52]What I did took less than 10 minutes.

[00:04:55]When I finished, I emptied the basin out the window into the dark, put everything away, and went downstairs.

[00:05:03]My father's boots were on the porch.

[00:05:06]Wood smoke drifting from the kitchen stove.

[00:05:09]Everything identical to every other morning of my life.

[00:05:13]Nothing in the house had changed.

[00:05:15]And that was what frightened me most because something in me had. For 3 years I lived that way.

[00:05:22]The version of me who sat in church on Sunday morning and meant every word of every hymn, and the version of me with a razor hidden behind the closet trim.

[00:05:31]One Sunday, I stood beside my mother during the singing. The words about surrender coming out of my mouth, and all I could think about was what was waiting for me behind that wall.

[00:05:42]Like a question I was too frightened to answer out loud.

[00:05:45]I was not a rebel. I still loved my community. I still believed in most of what I'd been raised to believe.

[00:05:53]But there was this one small thing, this one private and invisible thing that I could not hand back.

[00:06:00]Three times I came close to stopping.

[00:06:03]Once after a sermon that cut somewhere too deep.

[00:06:06]Once when my sister asked me very quietly if I was all right.

[00:06:11]And once when my mother watched my face at dinner just a moment longer than usual. The way mothers do when they sense something they cannot quite name.

[00:06:20]Each time I said nothing. I was not becoming worldly. I was becoming divided. And I did not yet understand that those were two entirely different things. I thought the razor was the secret. Years later I understood it was only the beginning. After I had left, I was standing in my first apartment outside the community. There was a full-length mirror on the back of the door. I had been living there for 3 months before I finally stood in front of it. I was 22 years old. I had been a wife. I had worked and cooked and prayed every year of my life.

[00:06:57]And I stood there and looked at myself for the first time.

[00:07:01]I wept.

[00:07:02]Not because I thought I was beautiful.

[00:07:05]Not because I thought I was ugly.

[00:07:07]I wept because I finally understood the particular grief of being a stranger to yourself.

[00:07:14]I had lived inside this body for 22 years and had never been introduced to it.

[00:07:19]In my community, full-length mirrors did not exist. Mirrors fed vanity.

[00:07:26]So I had known my face in rippling water, my calloused hands, the hem of my dress when I walked. But the rest of me was someone I had never met. A stranger I had been sharing a body with my entire life. My community did not do this to harm me. My mother was not a cruel woman. She had grown up inside the same world, absorbing the same silences, passing them forward the way they had been passed to her.

[00:07:52]A system can cause real damage even when every person living inside it is certain they are keeping you safe.

[00:07:59]What I know now is this: Curiosity about my own body was not pride. It was not the first movement of a soul turning away from God. That girl at 15, standing alone in the cold before dawn, terrified of something completely ordinary, she was not losing her faith.

[00:08:18]She was only trying to know herself.

[00:08:21]I had been told that curiosity was the first step away from God. But looking back, I believe the first step away from myself was accepting that I was not allowed to be curious.

[00:08:34]The razor did not make me worldly. The mirror did not make me vain.

[00:08:39]They only showed me that I had been living in a body that everyone around me had strong opinions about, except me. If you grew up somewhere that taught you your own body was not yours to know, I see you.

[00:08:51]If you learned about yourself in secret and in silence, I want to hear what that was like. Share your story below. The first thing you had to discover about yourself alone.

[00:09:03]Next time, I want to tell you about the first night a young man came to visit me and what unfolded in the dark when neither of us had been given a single word for what we were feeling.