Shewmaker sisters, 2003
Preparing to fight claustrophobia before a seven-hour bus ride, I download a few recently released albums—I’ll need something new to distract myself if I start to panic.
A few hours into the drive, with a supply of snacks, no one in the seat next to me, and the beautiful Turkish Mediterranean coast rolling by, I start to feel properly at ease. I open up Spotify and flick through the small number of playlists and albums available while offline. Given my recent enjoyment of Charli XCX’s “360”, I click on the bright green Brat and begin to listen.
The songs creep by without much note as I stare out the window. “Von dutch” and “Apple” stand out as particularly fun, but I begin to remember that I generally prefer playlists over albums … and then, the album’s penultimate song. Wait, what? Did an album largely about clubbing through the night just transition into a reflection on the possibility of motherhood? Halfway through the song, I put it on repeat and listen three more times.
When I finally let “I think about it all the time” transition into the final song, “365”, I barely clock the return to the album’s “party girl” status quo. I feel dazed and enchanted, completely caught off guard by Charli xcx. I’d never heard anyone talk about the possibility of having children like this before—in this uncertain and questioning way that takes seriously what one could miss if they have children, and what they could miss if they don’t. I’d certainly never heard it sandwiched between such a celebration of youth and independence as Brat.
…
October 2024
I have a Halloween dinner with my boyfriend, his housemate, and his housemate’s four-year-old—who is having the time of his life in his Spiderman costume. Entertaining the four-year-old together afterward, we sketch knights, “play magic,” and feel like a little family.
When I wake up the next morning, I come upstairs to find my housemate already sitting on the sofa. She’s hard at work on a crochet project, which I eagerly ask about. She shows me the soft yarn, her first attempts at a magic circle, and explains that she’s making a gift for her pregnant friend’s baby.
At dinner that night, she proudly shows off the result of her day’s work, and it’s the most adorable turtle plush I’ve ever seen. My heart is raw from my dinner with Spiderman, and I feel like I might cry. “You have to take this away, or I’m going to get baby fever,” I tell her.
…
Every time I smile at a baby on public transport it feels like another stone is added to the cumulative weight of the previously recounted moments, and this accumulation is scraping up against something within me. There is nothing at all surprising about these experiences—so why do they feel so dissonant? I’ve been letting this question percolate for the last month.
…
I grew up in West Texas, steeped in a general environment of conservatism and “traditional family values,” even if my parents were practitioners of a more progressive worldview. It’s hard to synthesize what exactly this means, so to share a few impressions in lieu of a proper analysis:
- Eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant on Sunday after church with my family, eight-year-old me argues strongly about how much better John McCain will be for the country than Barack Obama.
- The older single people at church or at my parents’ university are looked on with an unstated but distinct regard of pity. Somehow, in their eccentricity, they’d missed out on being married and having children—the best things in life.
- The church I grow up in is led by “elders.” Women elders aren’t allowed—the only leadership role for women is in the Children’s Ministry or as “elders’ wive.”.
- At eleven years old, when my friend Kat offers to lead prayer for our summer camp small group, our camp counselors look at each other uncomfortably. “Um, why don’t we have one of the boys lead us in prayer?” responds the male counselor.
My contrarianism toward the conservative portrait above came on with puberty. I suddenly felt awkward in my body, awkward in my environment, awkward in my previous thoughts. I did disagree with the role defined for me as a girl, for the path laid out for my future self as a woman, and my disagreement provided great explanatory power in middle school, when one is so terrified to be left out. I began to define myself in opposition to what I was told: instead of being nurturing, I was unemotional; I did not want to be a stay-at-home mom, and in fact, I never wanted to have children or to be married. When I got my first period, I remember feeling as if even my own body had betrayed me, and I now had to oppose its reproductive intent for me as well. I declared my intention to get a hysterectomy as soon as I could.
I built my adolescent identity upon this foundation of contrarianism, though I did not recognize it as such at the time. I was not actively taking stances simply to be different from other people—I truly did believe in my words and my actions—but at the same time, a part of me thrilled to have people argue with me over my vegetarianism, my espoused pacifism, my touting of Bernie Sanders as the best presidential candidate in 2016. I was this angry little plant whose photosynthesis had somehow been corrupted—instead of converting sunlight to sugar, I converted the ideas from my environment into their opposites and built myself out of their blocks.
…
A slow-motion identity crisis was kicked off by my moving from Texas to Grand Rapids to study at Calvin. I began to ask: if I developed my sense of self in opposition to my conservative environment, but no longer find myself in this context…who am I?
I’ve always enjoyed finding nuanced answers to seemingly simple questions. I remember being in my political science classes at Calvin and realizing that all of the hard-set, oppositional ideas I had were a bit more complicated, that there was often some shared value that could be found on the “other side” of the issue. The more I learned, the less of which I was sure. However, this evolution of my worldview started as a principally academic phenomenon.
In Brussels, the political nuances are yet more complex. In the multi-party, coalition-based parliamentary system, there are shades to every issue. People have to compromise and find middle ground in order to govern. Governing is a slower process, as is progress, yet the complexity can be an advantage; changes tend to stick because they’ve been built around consensus.
Coming into my adult self here, I feel I’ve come to reflect Brussels. My appreciation of nuance has grown beyond the academic and the political, stretching into the personal and into the core of my being. With this comes a growing appreciation for creativity, which so often grows out of friction. I am trying to build a life for myself that centers creation, and not simply consumption. Contrarianism is in a way innately consumptive—you take something in, and you become the opposite of it.
As I work to build myself and my life differently, moving beyond inverted ideas, I am reminded of Walt Whitman. I’ve loved Whitman’s Song of Myself since high school, and it is only growing more resonant. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
You are a beautiful contradiction, an elegant one.