S1E6.2: Lauren Glazin | Blond Ambition Part 2
[Justin]
Hey, Justin here. Heads up, this is part two of a two-part episode. If you haven't already listened to the first half, I recommend you go back and listen to it first.
And now we'll pick back up and hear about how Lauren reconciled her Jewish and gay identities.
[Lauren Glazin]
But yeah, to answer your question from before, you know, how is my Jewish identity, my gay identity, and how did it intertwine when coming out? It was really tough. It was really tough.
And, you know, I grew up in an Orthodox synagogue in the UK. So the UK doesn't have tons of different strains of Judaism like we have in America. And it was sort of you're either Orthodox or you're Reform.
And we were Orthodox men and women sat separately in synagogue. Only a man was allowed to be a rabbi. It was very, very sort of.
Yeah, it was those those sort of gender roles. And I knew something felt a little off to me. I was like, this doesn't feel like something I really connect with.
And honestly, it was only until I started spending time in America that I understood that I understood that you could be Jewish in many different ways. And it was it was beautiful to connect with conservative Judaism, more Reform Judaism. And and those strains of Judaism, not only do they like embrace the gay community, there is massive that, you know, there is tons of communities of gay rabbis, of trans rabbis, of people, non-binary people who are very, very involved in those strains of Judaism.
I mean, it's it's not only accepted, but it's celebrated. Look, not not everywhere in Judaism. It's becoming more so, but it's and that in my later and in my later years, I'm sounding like I'm 100.
But, you know, in the last sort of 10 years, that's been so healing for me. And and I wasn't it wasn't it wasn't a massive repression being Jewish and being gay. There was other nuances for me in particular, have a gay brother.
And that really, you know, I thought there could only be one gay sibling in each family. And now we know that, you know, 30 percent of gay people have a gay sibling and whatever the stats are. But so there's other things that went into it.
But certainly it was very tough coming out in an Orthodox Jewish community. So much so that I I only really came out publicly when I moved to America, when I physically removed myself from that environment is when within four weeks of moving to America, I was exploring my sexuality. And.
That's been very interesting to unpack in therapy.
[Justin]
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, you know, living the American gay experience and growing up in rural Iowa, I can identify that, you know, in that home environment, it's not something you explore, you push it down, you hide it. And it's not until I think for many, I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I think for many in America, the gay experiences, if you're in that kind of repressive environment or conservative environment, you remove yourself from it and go find a new place where you can almost be anonymous to explore what that is and what that means for you. And it's interesting that you found this kind of freedom.
Good Lord, this is like so American. This freedom coming to the States and number one, being able to express your religion, but also being able to to come to terms and find your your sexual identity. Yeah.
[Lauren Glazin]
And the two are very intertwined. Like, I only look at Judaism and being gay in a positive light. And I don't look at it in any sort of negative way at this point in my life.
And I think it's I think being accepted by the Jewish community helped me accept myself. And again, not only accepted, like celebrated, like pushed to talk about it. You know, I remember studying with a rabbi where we specifically studied gay subtones of the Torah and, you know, and sort of like different sexual experiences that are talked about in the Torah that could have like a queer meaning.
Like, that's the stuff that I, you know, I do. How those two of my identities are intertwined, it's like so intertwined and so celebrated. So I only have positive views of being Jewish and gay in the same sort of breath.
[Justin]
That's incredible. It's incredible because I have a very different relationship with many religions just because I find I find their exclusion of, you know, primarily sexual identity. But secondarily, their exclusion of so many other things, religion, you know, in the U.S. being used to oppress groups of people. And, you know, and not just in the U.S., across the globe, religion being used to oppress. And I don't think that that's I don't know, when you go read the words, that's not what it's supposed to be about. Right?
[Lauren Glazin]
Yep.
[Justin]
And so that's why I've always had this like bristle. And as an adult, because what's interesting when you talk about kind of you didn't realize there were multiple ways to be Jewish until moving to the States. I actually growing up and I don't talk a lot about kind of my spiritual upbringing, but my family raised me as Lutheran.
And I really respect the way that my mother approached my kind of spiritual upbringing, because, you know, in the Lutheran religion, you're kind of considered an adult once you are confirmed and get your confirmation. And so that was her kind of like, you will get through confirmation. And then from there, you are, you know, by the Lutheran religion, spiritually an adult.
So then you go figure out where you go from there. And what I respect the most about that is that it gave me a foundation that I could work from. And then, you know, thankfully, my natural curiosity also pulls me in different directions.
So before I was confirmed at a younger age, my babysitter went to a Baptist church. And so I would attend the Baptist church with them. And at a very young age, remember, you know, accepting Jesus as my personal savior and, you know, being born again.
And so I concurrently attended a Baptist church and a Lutheran church and could kind of, you know, while they're both Christian religions, could differentiate what was going on between the two. And I think that's what led to then, you know, once I was 18 and left home, what kind of led to some of my spiritual liberation was understanding some of the hypocrisy that happens within all of that. And for me, there was a rejection of, you know, my church was emailing me trying to fundraise as a freshman in college.
And I'm like, so I don't attend your church anymore. And I don't have any money. So sorry, no.
And started to see it as like this fundraising thing. Anyway, there's my tangent on my religious and spiritual upbringing. But that's why today, like, I consider myself spiritual on my own terms, like in my own ways.
But I don't ascribe to any particular scripture.
[Lauren Glazin]
Yeah. And that's, I've had conversations, it was just Passover. And not to make this, you know, again about me and Judaism, one thing about me is I can make everything about me.
Here we are. But it was just Passover last week. And I hosted a Seder, a Passover Seder, which is a dinner where you talk about the story of Jews, the exodus from Egypt.
And we had some non-Jewish folks around our table. And they were sort of blown away by, I actually, there was a prayer that I found thanking non-Jewish people for sitting around our Passover table, because there's so many people that would not come and attend a Jewish event. You know, they just wouldn't.
And they couldn't, they sort of couldn't believe it. They were like, thank you for thanking us. Like, what?
The, you know, the Christian religion sort of would, I don't think would ever, you know, do that or, you know, whatever it might be. So it was just, it's really interesting. And we were having a conversation about being gay.
We were all gay at the table and being gay and being Christian, being gay and being Jewish. And your sentiment, you know, what you just said and how you grapple with it, but the spirituality side of it helped grow your identity is pretty much exactly what our friends were saying at the table. So I hear that when I talk about being Jewish and being gay, I hear your side of it a lot from the Christian standpoint.
[Justin]
Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that comes up for me is that when you're talking about Passover is that, you know, we also, Easter was this past weekend, Christian religion, Passover, and there's other holidays, other religious holidays around this time.
And I saw someone post on Facebook, you know, Sunday, Monday, something like that. And it was like, you know, however you celebrate, this is a time of rebirth and renewal and blah, blah, blah, something. And that hit me.
And I was like, oh, wow. Like there are, that's where when I tap into spirituality, it's like, oh, well, there's actually, you know, you look across all of the religions. And interestingly enough, there are holidays and the types of holidays that align around the calendar.
So whether you call it Christian or Jewish or, you know, any other religion, there's something energy wise, spirituality wise that's happening for us collectively.
[Lauren Glazin]
I think as humans, we need it. We need something bigger than ourselves to look to. You know, we need, we need like a higher power, the universe, whatever you might call it.
It's so essential to be able to look at just outside of our own brains and our own worlds and have something, you know, tied to spiritually. I think I will always, I will always appreciate that in myself and in other people is that spiritual side of it. So I think it's so grounding and so helpful.
Okay, not everyone cares about what you're saying, you know, like we are a chain of bigger events and things happening outside of us. Yeah.
[Justin]
Yeah. And I think, you know, for me, bringing it back to creating belonging and the creating belonging model is when we can shift to that perspective that, you know, kind of like lifting up to more of that when it comes to religion in how religion can impact someone's belonging. You know, going back to the core of love, going back to the core of, you know, including people and community and that, you know, whatever it is, we all may have some higher being that we're looking to and getting out of those repressive components of what people in pulpits are telling us.
[Lauren Glazin]
Right, right. And that's thinking for yourselves, you know, ourselves being individuals and, and doing, you know, I was saying this to you before, but doing the work individually on ourselves, like we got to understand ourselves before we're able to anchor our identities in other things. It's like, I've seen people anchor their identities in the wrong things because they were looking outside of themselves.
And so doing, you know, along with doing the inner work, you'll find your identities, you'll find things that align beneath the surface that you really can, or you, you do anchor yourselves in, even if we're not labeling them as identities, like they are like, you know, values and what's your purpose. I remember you led us through a workshop, like understanding our own individual purpose and it still sticks with me. I still use it, you know, three companies on.
So I still, I think even, even that as an identity is, is important. Yeah.
[Justin]
Yeah. I love that. I think the one thing that I want to pull out of that and to kind of put the punctuation point on the conversation is, is that idea of self-awareness and doing the internal work?
Because for me, that is the, if, well, two things that I want Creating Belonging to do. I want it to number one, get us to dig into ourselves and understand more about ourselves, dig into self-awareness. Every, I think, you know, Carl Jung said every advance of humankind only happened through self-awareness.
And so if we can dig into our self-awareness and then secondly, embrace and accept others and choose love over anything else.
[Lauren Glazin]
I have a question for you on that.
[Justin]
Yeah. Yeah.
[Lauren Glazin]
Why do you think it's so hard for people to accept other people? You know, if I'm just out here living my life and someone really disagrees, like why they, why is it so hard for them to just accept that?
[Justin]
Yeah. Well, so I think if we look biologically, we are wired. So in our need to be a part of a community, in our need to be a part of a tribe, we also sort for likeness.
And so this is where I talk a lot about the prehistoric parts of our brain that get in the way of modern life because yeah, 2000 years ago when we were living in tribes, you know, were we alive 2000 years ago? Yeah, we were. When we were living in tribes and, you know, absolutely.
We needed to quickly understand who was in and who was out for our own safety, for our own survival. But today the threats are not the same, but we still have the same prehistoric brain. And it's that prehistoric brain that is saying they're different from us.
Right. So we need to push them away. They're a threat.
And that's where I think we have to do a lot of work to override the prehistoric parts of our brain to understand, no, no, no, that's not a threat anymore. That individual is not a threat anymore. That, you know, whatever it is, isn't actually a threat.
But it's hard because it's a part of our brain that also keeps us alive every day. Right. It does also get us to jump out of the way of danger.
And that's why I think we push people away. But it's like you said, when we're not digging into self-awareness, and we're only paying attention to what's outside.
[Lauren Glazin]
Yeah.
[Justin]
It's very easy then to quickly sort likeness versus not likeness, and then just push those that are not like us away.
[Lauren Glazin]
That makes so much sense. Because I find myself doing it as well, you know, and I think that's where we go into overbearing. And I think overbearing is one of the quadrants in the model that we might not be able to see in the moment as much as other people can see it in us.
[Justin]
Yes.
[Lauren Glazin]
You know, I think that's a really interesting one. And the one that I think that's the quadrant where the self if we're living in that quadrant, or I guess I'll talk to myself when I was living in that quadrant. That's when I needed to do a lot of inner work.
So I'm not saying like being overbearing is like always terrible. But there's probably, yeah, there's probably things knocking at the door that we're not answering. Yeah.
[Justin]
Yes, the thing with overbearing is that we may not realize it when we're there, but it is very likely that we're doing others harm while we're there. And it's actually why so early on in the creation of Creating Belonging and building this work, I created an assessment, because I wanted people to have a tool that they could use to self to quickly identify, you know, through a series of questions, where do I sit on the model. And I found that it was doing the work to service because we are really good at overestimating ourselves.
You know, what's the stat I've used recently that, you know, actually, I think Al said it on an earlier episode, 93% of the population thinks that they're above average drivers, right? I've heard that, yeah. Yeah.
So, um, so we overestimate ourselves. And so we're like, Oh, I'm in belonging, everything's great. Like, I'm really accepting of others.
But there's so many blind spots that we have, and we don't realize it. And so what I found it, I burned the assessment, because I didn't ever want it to do a disservice of the work of it allowing people to not go into deep reflection.
[Lauren Glazin]
Right, right. You don't want to like force people into a box just because they have to if that's not, you know, if that's different for them. Yeah.
Yeah. That makes sense.
[Justin]
Yeah, so there is, you know, I think we can be an overbearing and not realizing it, not realize it. So we do need to, again, go into self reflection and also ask others. I love how all this is coming back together because there's, Al talked about, you know, the idea of internal self awareness and external self awareness.
So what we know about ourselves, and then what we learn from other people and how other people see us and how we show up in the world. And so we need both of those things to balance. Right.
[Lauren Glazin]
Yeah, no, I listened to that episode with Al, it was incredible. It was really eye opening. And it's, yeah, it made me think about social signals.
And, you know, when someone's talking to me about a topic I literally could not care less about, you can tell in my face. Like, I need to change, you know, like, I need to, that's a social signal for me that I need to tweak. And it's, I think we have, we have a lot of those, we don't realize our social signal signaling all the time.
Like, I've probably been sat here on this video, like, not smiling and like looking disinterested in my natural face. But, and that's, again, that's also social signaling, like internal, external. So it is very interesting.
I promise we'll stop. We can stop now.
[Justin]
But I know, you're making me think how much I, I'm conscious of that. And it's so weird in this new environment, because I'm literally like, staring at a camera. And I'm so used to staring at a camera and smiling and, and, you know, giving these signals that I'm interested, because that's what I'm, you know, trying to portray over cameras.
We're on all of these Zoom calls, and I'm constantly communicating over, over Zoom. But anyway, Lauren, this is incredible. And we're, I'm probably, I'm probably, we're just going to do the whole, this whole conversation, because it was an amazing conversation.
And I hope you all stuck around with us and found it as engaging as I found it engaging. Lauren and I could probably continue talking, and we probably will. But I want to thank you all for, for joining us in this episode of the Creating Belonging podcast.
Lauren, I always want to make sure that I'm giving my guests an opportunity to shout out anything that they want to shout out, self promotion, whatever it is. So here's your opportunity. What would you like to share or invite people to connect with you?
[Lauren Glazin]
Wow. That's the hardest question you've asked me. Yeah, just, just follow me because I like ego boosts, you know, so my, I'm Lauren Glazen on Instagram and LinkedIn, connect with me, ask me any of the, any other questions that you have.
And I love this model, Justin, and I appreciate you so much for inviting me and, and, you know, giving me a space to talk about some of this stuff.
[Justin]
Yeah, thank you for joining me, Lauren. Thank you so much. And we'll see you all again on another version of the Creating Belonging podcast.
Thanks.
[Lauren Glazin]
Thank you.