To Be the Good Christian Girl is to Be Stressed and Afraid
On religious trauma and never feeling like I was enough under the weight of evangelical culture/theology
CONTENT: religious trauma, disordered eating, body image issues, depression/anxiety
I promised myself that I would not be posting excerpts of my work-in-progress memoir on here, because I know that can cause issues with agents/editors on the route to traditional publishing—and I am dead set on traditional publishing; I know it takes a lot of work, but I have no illusions, I know I will face rejection, and I’m willing to put in the work.
But damn it, the topic that I wanted to write about this week (my experience of religious trauma as a queer person), I couldn’t write it without including/adapting large amounts from the first chapter of the memoir. So caveat to any future editor/agent who might find this (and I think the querying stage is still a long ways off for me anyway): If you want me to delete this, I will, but this excerpt happens to be the best possible intro to my experience of religious trauma that I can give to my readers (that’s why it’s also how I start the memoir, after a short intro/prologue about “getting saved” at a summer camp cry night1). This is adapted from the text, though some of my edits for clarity and getting rid of redundancy will probably be reflected in the manuscript now as well.
Side note: reading this excerpt over again with the newfound realization that I think I’m autistic2 makes the particular impact that my religious trauma had on me make even more sense and explains why I was so preoccupied with how I was perceived by my peers. But that is an essay for another day, and probably would be too much to add in the beginning of the memoir.
I will have some commentary at the end, but I will say this here: I am devoting my life to the hope that I (along with many others, no savior complex here) can help create a world where no other teenager or young adult goes through this hell.
So, here is an excerpt from the first chapter of my memoir, Butterflies in the Wilderness: A Queer Woman’s Journey Out of Evangelicalism. The chapter is titled “Seeds” because the Parable of the Sower (in the Gospels, not Octavia Butler, though I do want to read that too) becomes important in scenes after this excerpt.
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One of the first times I heard someone introduce themselves with pronouns, I had a panic attack. It was in the fall of 2016, my first semester of college, and I was attending my first meeting with the speculative fiction club/literary magazine on campus, Cyborg Griffin. At the meeting, everyone gave their pronouns as they introduced themselves.
I was surprised to find that, despite the fact that this was a women’s college, Hollins University (which I had chosen to attend for its strong creative writing and French programs), there were some people there who did not use she/her pronouns. The first few students to speak said their pronouns were she/her, but then a student with a short black pixie cut and thick black glasses said his pronouns were he/him. Another student, who had short brown curls and was wearing dark red lipstick, said their pronouns were they/them. A few other students said their pronouns were they/them.
At the time, I still had a very rigid view of gender, which came from my evangelical upbringing. My church taught me that sex and gender were the same thing; biological sex is the way God created someone on purpose, and it couldn’t be changed. From that viewpoint, the idea of someone identifying as neither gender, both genders, or as a different gender than the one they were born as was not just morally wrong (against God’s will), but impossible. That night, I wrote in my turquoise, floral-print journal about this club meeting: “I got really anxious and uncomfortable. Both because I’m me and because some people don’t identify as female here? This is a women’s college. People who identify otherwise should find schooling elsewhere. I’m kind of confused.”
My whole understanding of gender came from a few verses in the first two chapters of Genesis, the most important one being “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” The literalist interpretation of this verse, the one I was taught to be the only interpretation possible, was that there are only two genders, each person born into one of them and that God didn’t make mistakes. I knew that transgender people existed, but besides one person at my high school, I hadn’t met any. And it was during my first week of classes and at this club meeting that I was meeting non-binary people for the first time.
After these introductions were done, in my confusion and sense of isolation, I got really silent. Though I tried to keep my face blank, my chest started to feel heavy, like a hole was opening up inside it and ripping away any happiness that I might have been feeling that day, ripping away all the excitement of college and making new friends. I suddenly felt out of place, and alone. I know that some people might think I deserved to feel that way because of my transphobic beliefs. But I wasn’t taught anything about gender that was outside of that evangelical Christian bubble, except for some feminist ideas that I learned through Tumblr and in school. I literally didn’t know any better, and Hollins’ orientation for first-year students hadn’t taught me about gender either. I was too shy and socially awkward to ask someone to explain; I didn’t even know how to describe the discomfort I was feeling.
So I did what I always did when I had moments of panic, behaviors learned over years of panic attacks since middle school: I bit my lip, focused on my breathing, tuned out from the conversation, and let the chaos of my mind take over, questions colliding with thoughts in a mess that seemed never-ending: Why are people using these pronouns? This is weird. Am I going to fit in this club? Are they going to like me? What if they don’t? Do I want join this club or is it actually not for me… I was still physically sitting there, looking at the club president and the maps that were displayed in the room (we were in the social sciences building), but only half-focusing as she talked about what the club was and what it did, my mind elsewhere. Instead of asking myself why I felt this way or what I should do about this conflict with my beliefs about gender, I focused on the feeling of loneliness and not fitting in. I didn’t let myself go deeper into why. The panic gripped me like a chokehold, and I couldn’t clear my head. I think, without even realizing it, I was trying to escape, to deny that this was happening. I was disassociating as a defense mechanism. This disassociation was something I did often, and it could take many forms. It was always unconscious, though, something I couldn’t even control because it was so deeply ingrained in my mental processing.
I had developed this unhealthy way of processing my emotions in 9th grade, which was another time that I experienced a conflict between my worldview and my lived reality: I had a crush on a girl.
It was at my freshman homecoming dance. Though I mostly stuck with friends in my grade on the edge of the gym and had smiley, awkward photos taken of us and our dorky dance moves, at some point I ventured into the center fray of people dancing near the DJ. I pushed into a crowd of seniors, and I found a friend among the grinding bodies.
Her name was Brenna (NOT HER REAL NAME; NO NAMES IN THIS EXCERPT ARE REAL). I had met her in Creative Writing Club. Her red dress was several shades brighter than her dyed hair, and she was swaying up against everyone around her. She smiled at me and gestured for me to come closer, so I did. And right then, looking at her as she swayed, it was as if something in my head had clicked into place, the curves of her body suddenly present, the shine in her eyes, and I knew. I knew something was different, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I felt giddy and my chest got warm, the way I usually felt around my perceived boy “crushes,”3 but since I was having these feelings while looking at a girl, I didn’t recognize her as a crush at first. Though I was confused, I smiled back at Brenna and danced with her, letting my gaze go up and down, examining the details of the dress, the puffy skirt, the black tulle in a few places.
A few weeks later, as I stood in a bathroom stall before Creative Writing Club started, the image of me kissing Brenna came to my mind, unbidden, sudden. And that was when my confusion turned into fear and shame. Badly-translated verses from my Bible sprang up in my head like weeds, along with the voice of my youth pastor saying “dating leads to marriage, and marriage is only between one man and one woman.”
I wondered why this was happening to me. I thought that if I was a Christian girl, following Jesus as best as I could, then I couldn’t be attracted to girls. My church taught about the LGBTQ+ community as if they were people who did not go to church, people who spent their lives partying and drinking and engaging in other aspects of that never-elaborated-on-phrase, “gay lifestyle.” I first encountered that phrase not from the pulpit, but in an advice section on the thin, light pink pages of my teen Bible; the question asked was “Is it ok if someone’s gay?” with a hot pink question mark, and it gave the response that echoed my church’s beliefs: We can love gay people, but, since homosexuality was an “enormous sin…If we agree with God, we will agree that it’s not ok to live a gay lifestyle.” The advice section then pointed to a verse that supposedly condemned homosexuality, Leviticus 18:22 (and in fact my Bible’s translation, instead of using the traditional translation “do not lie with a man as with a woman,” said “do not practice homosexuality”).
In churches like mine, LGBTQ+ people were pitied, were considered to be confused or traumatized, and that their “unnatural” attractions stemmed from those emotions. I was taught that we could “still love” LGBTQ+ people and evangelize to them, but there was no acknowledgment that they were sitting in the pews, that some even attended youth group every Wednesday night. When I continued to have unbidden fantasies of kissing Brenna, and when I realized I was attracted to two other girls in school, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. The shame around the topic was so great, I didn’t feel like I could talk about it with anyone, not my youth pastor, not my youth group, and not even my non-religious friends at school.
I could normally talk to God about anything, but I didn’t even feel comfortable bringing these emotions to God, to try to “pray it away.” I had been told that these feelings I had for girls were “an abomination.” I believed that God knew my heart and knew what was going on anyway, and I knew that God could forgive all sins, but how could I bring this “sin” to him when I didn’t even understand why I was feeling these attractions? I was caught in a dichotomy of queer or Christian, and I could not be both. To acknowledge or act upon my crushes on girls and accept my sexuality would not only cause the loss of support and friendship from my church’s youth group but would also possibly cause the loss of my faith. My church taught that living in sin, especially sexual sin, led to losing your faith. I loved Jesus; I still had that same passion for him that I had when I first accepted him into my heart, and I did not want to lose him.
Instead of approaching these emotions of attraction and shame and dealing with them head on, I tried to distract myself. I had recently started to heal from my first bout of depression and I didn’t want this “issue” to drag me back down again, so I wanted to get rid of these feelings as fast as I could. I tried to focus on the boys that I believed I had “crushes” on, like the nerdy boy in my core friend group, or the handsome pen-pal I messaged and sometimes talked to on video chat. When ignoring my attraction to girls didn’t work, when the feelings persisted, I actively pushed them away to the point where I forgot about them.
Throughout the rest of my high school years, I would continue to repress and forget, becoming even faster and more “efficient” at doing so. By 11th grade, I even identified as asexual; I told myself that I was romantically interested in boys, but the entire concept of sex was not interesting at best and gross and scary at worst. As I was experiencing attraction to a girl, I would simultaneously be in denial that it was happening. I remember—that is, I remember now, but this was hidden from my consciousness for years— when I was a junior in high school, sitting on a bus ride home from a youth group event, right next to Sofia, a foreign exchange student from Spain with whom I had become close in the past few months. Since it was late at night, she rested her head on my shoulder. I enjoyed the feeling of her, the sensation of touch, a small form of intimacy. I knew that this was exactly what I wanted. Yet I also tried to immediately distance myself from these feelings, trying to think about something else, anything else, the attraction simultaneously bringing up intense fear. And when I walked off that bus, I forgot what had happened and would not remember until four years later, in a sudden realization as I was looking through journal entries from that time period.
I processed my attractions by repressing them, and eventually, any emotion that I deemed “bad,” whether that was attraction to a girl or anxiety about school or sadness about failure, was repressed, pushed down, ignored. No wonder I had such bad anxiety problems and a bunch of insecurities heading into my first year of college; I literally didn’t know how to process my emotions. Throughout high school, I had always told myself that I was getting better, that I had healed from my first bout of depression that happened from 7th grade until halfway through 9th grade. Really, I didn’t heal. I just learned how to disassociate from my emotions.
[section deleted for “brevity,” the only paragraph I felt fine deleting for this: I accidentally left my tote bag at the club meeting and my panic escalated]
I was struck by this sense that I wasn’t “doing” college “right.” That this wasn’t what I was expecting to happen. To suddenly feel so alone and to have these two situations back-to-back dragging me down like this, it shows how many expectations I put upon myself, going into my first year of college. I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted to eat well and exercise and succeed in my classes, make lots of close friends, and of course I wanted to keep being the good Christian girl I had always been, and evangelize to these new friends I would be making.
So far, besides the succeeding in classes and the few friends I had made in classes, I felt like a failure. It was only two weeks into the semester, but I was already judging myself so hard. Sure, I was still reading my Bible (either my purple teen Bible or the Bible app on my iPad) and not cussing or partying. But I had been very hesitant to bring up my faith with students who weren’t Christians. Though my roommate was a Christian, I felt like the odd-one-out on a campus that was majority non-religious and very liberal. Even though I identified as politically moderate, I held many conservative beliefs, in addition to the aforementioned beliefs about gender: I was pro-life; I believed non-Christians were going to hell; I believed God created the world, its animals and plants, and the first two humans in six literal days and therefore denied evolution; and I was against the “gay lifestyle.” Though I wasn’t entirely comfortable holding the anti-gay viewpoint, I told myself I believed it because my church told me that Christians were supposed to, and I was also seeing this same perspective echoed in my Bible, which I had been taught to believe was inerrantly true. I also saw this same perspective in the commentaries and advice sections in my Bible. My Bible said the church was true, and my church said the Bible was true, an evangelical echo chamber. I wasn’t curious about any perspectives outside of my church’s narrative.
That club meeting was the first time anything had so actively brushed up against my evangelical beliefs. But there was a moment in which I had relief from my panic. It turned out that a friend on my hall took my bag to dinner so that she could give it back to me. You would think I would become calm, one of my crises having been averted, but the dining hall only presented another challenge to my freshman self.
I didn’t want to gain “the freshman 15.” No, I would not be like some of my peers whose plates I looked at with judgment, projecting my own insecurities onto them as they loaded up their plates with rolls, pasta, potatoes, greasy meat, and not many vegetables. Or at least, that was what I had hoped. I had been too used to living at home where my mother provided me with balanced meals, and I didn’t have to think about it. Here, in the dining hall, I was presented with a lot of choices—pizza, pasta of all kinds, fries, burgers, barbecue, and various desserts. There were healthy options too; chicken or turkey, cooked vegetables, the salad bar, some soups—but sometimes I found that I couldn’t resist overloading my plate, especially when I was going through intense emotions. My preoccupation with the food that I ate would become so intense that I started writing down in my journal what I ate for every single meal, sometimes denigrating myself for my choices. I always told myself this preoccupation was for health reasons. I had thyroid disease (hypothyroidism and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis) and therefore was supposed to have a slower metabolism and be more prone to weight gain, but I was a bit of an anomaly, always having having an average weight for my height and age. Yet I would tell myself, as I looked in the mirror, that I was fat4.
When I met with my friend in the dining hall, I sat down with a plate of pasta, spinach, and butternut squash. I didn’t record in my journal how much of each, but half the plate was probably spinach. In this case, since it was a healthy meal, I was trying to make myself feel better after the waves of panic I had experienced. If everything else had gone “wrong” that day, at least I had one of my goals, to eat healthy, checked off in my mind.
I was not the only evangelical who had ever gone through this, feeling so out of touch with my body and my mind, in control of neither, and further hurting myself in the ways that I coped with this dissonance. In his memoir Boy Erased, Garrard Conley talks about his experience of growing up gay as a Baptist pastor’s son and going through conversion therapy. One of the ways the cognitive dissonance over his sexuality manifested itself was that he starved himself, eating only 500 calories a day, and over-exercising. His mother would later take him to a doctor and express concern that he was torturing himself, and he thought to himself, “This wasn’t torture. This was control” (269).
Writer and former evangelical Jamie Lee Finch5 explains in her book You Are Your Own how religious trauma, particularly the “purity culture” within evangelicalism that makes any form of sexuality taboo outside of heterosexual monogamous marriage, has a direct effect on the body and mental health. Most of the former evangelicals that I would later encounter through Twitter and research would agree with this, all of them having something to say about their relationship to their bodies and their sexuality, usually how the latter’s being repressed had a deep, traumatic impact on the former, in all aspects of their lives. Purity culture created in them such deep anxieties and insecurities, which took years to heal.
Finch writes so succinctly in You Are Your Own, “I was taught to fear my own body’s desires…I had heaps and loads of sexual shame and guilt poured onto my developing body and mind” (29). When the natural process of a developing sexuality (particularly a queer sexuality) during puberty is disrupted because of religious doctrines labeling such sexual desires as sinful, there are consequences. For Finch, the repression of her sexuality resulted in forms of compartmentalization and disassociation similar to mine. She eventually believed her inability to completely repress her sexuality meant that she was a sex addict, which only drove her deeper into the cycle of shame and disassociation. Prominent Christian singer and journalist Vicky Beeching discusses in her memoir Undivided how the repression of her lesbian identity eventually led to the development of a condition known as localized scleroderma, an autoimmune condition in which the body turns its own cells into scar tissue. Many women have also spoken out against purity culture in linking it to the development of a condition called vaginismus, in which the vaginal muscles involuntarily contract, making sexual intercourse painful or impossible.
When I went to my church’s youth group, the messaging of purity culture was constant, particularly when addressing teenage girls; we were told that we needed to stay “sexually pure until marriage” to please God. We were also taught that we needed to dress modestly so as to not make our male peers “stumble” into sexual sin. The common rhetoric to back this up (which was not grounded in the Bible at all) was that men were focused on the visual when they were attracted to someone, whereas women were focused on the emotional (personality traits) in their attractions. At the summer camp swimming pool, girls had to wear one pieces (that didn’t show any cleavage) or old, baggy t-shirts but the guys didn’t have to worry about what they wore (“no speedos” being the only restriction), parading around with their bare chests or tank tops that would be considered immodest on a girl (girls’ straps had to be the width of two fingers, and our bra was not allowed to show, not even a sliver—many girls wore camisoles under their tank tops to hide it). Girls couldn’t even wear yoga pants or leggings as pants, because, as our youth pastor said from the pulpit, when we wore them, “You can see everything,” that is, the outline of our vaginas and butt. Finch speaks to this part of purity culture as well: “I was also taught that anyone else’s desire of my body was to be feared—that I was the one to be blamed if someone else desired me” (29). This doctrine inevitably makes women ashamed of their bodies.
The specific language I was taught about sex in church was that it was good, but only within “God’s design” of marriage (and bad in any other context). Although my church taught that dating was okay, they encouraged us to set strict physical boundaries. We were told by pastors and youth group volunteers to “save room for Jesus” in all of our interactions with the opposite sex—not just physically but emotionally as well. We were told that in all our relationships (and all other aspects of life), we needed to “Seek the Lord first” in prayer before making decisions, and if it was a romantic relationship, we needed to start slow and always ask ourselves if “our heart was in the right place” in our desire to date the person (and of course, we could only date fellow Christians). These boundaries and guidelines were not supposed to be based in what we decided was best for ourselves, but instead were based in an attempt to control our sexuality.
We couldn’t trust our bodies as a basis for developing these boundaries because we were told not to trust our bodies, to “kill the flesh,” in order for our spirit to dominate and flourish. We were also told not to trust our minds/emotions/desires, because “The heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). We were only supposed to trust in God. Not even the verse that should have proved all that wrong and allowed us to trust ourselves—“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Corinthians 6:19)—could help us, because that verse was given to us as a reason to not have sex before marriage and to stay pure and modest. And of course, the focus was put on the phrase that came right after it: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”
I still don’t quite know what to make of the words “you are not your own,” although in my journey of faith I now believe that the apostle Paul of Tarsus, the first-century Roman Jew who wrote 1 Corinthians as well as several other letters that are part of the Christian Scriptures, was capable of being wrong. That is, I believe that Paul was human just like everyone else and that God wasn’t just dictating every word he wrote to every church. I think that he was influenced by the philosophies of his culture as much as anyone else, particularly in how he wrote in a generally dualistic way about the body and the mind/spirit. Though I also believe his words have been grossly misinterpreted by many Christians (mistranslated too), and that his words have been elevated in an idolatrous way to be equal to the words of Jesus. What if, instead of thinking of this verse in the sense of ownership on one side and loss of agency on the other, what if it was about mutual relationship? That we belong to God as God’s beloved, that we belong to one another? That we also belong to a community of human beings in which we mutually share of ourselves, through our bodies, our time, and our gifts? And that God loves our bodies and that it is a powerful thing that we honor God through our bodies and not in spite of them? But in the evangelical worldview which does not leave room for reimagining, this verse meant that anything outside of purity culture ideals would be defiling the temple and dishonoring God.
This obsession with the body and with sexuality under an evangelical belief system actually led to a complete disconnection from the body. It was as if our bodies—brain, bones and all—had been cut up into pieces and each appendage and organ were put into separate boxes.
It was also no wonder that I was so out of touch my body image and had a bad relationship with food. I was not alone in these struggles, either. Finch writes regarding the development of her eating disorder: “In a sense, this helped me get closer to succeeding at the standard of holiness set for me within my purity culture upbringing. I was afraid to develop, grow, and expand into the ‘wrong kind of woman’” (29). On the God is Grey podcast hosted by another former evangelical, Brenda Marie Davies, Finch talks about how she believes her eating disorder was intimately linked to what she was taught in the evangelical world about sexual ethics, what she was allowed to engage with and not engage with as it related to pleasure and desire. She did not learn her own body's cues about fullness. She couldn't sense when she had had enough, so she often pushed her body past the point that she was comfortable, binging on food, because she had never learned how to healthily engage with pleasure (“You Are Your Own – Jamie Lee Finch”).
When I think of myself during my first semester of college, the idea of not being “enough,” and not knowing when I had “had enough,” was all-consuming. I was not enough because I was not reaching my own expectations. I was “wasting” my precious college time. In the dining hall, I would not know how much food to put on my plate, and I would swing back and forth between putting too much or too little. Like Finch, I felt like I lacked self-control. I wondered if I was going to enough events, if I was talking about Jesus enough, if I was exercising enough, if I was balancing school and social life well.
This is probably because I was literally told in church that nothing in this world would ever be enough, that Jesus had to be my “enough,” that there was a God-sized hole in my heart that only God could fill6. But I didn’t make that connection back then. I didn’t understand that all of these insecurities that were colliding were connected, that my perfectionism, panic attacks, lack of self-esteem, and social awkwardness weren’t just because I had thyroid disease, a chronic illness that affected my emotional state. And although I was raised in the richest county in America, Loudoun County, in a culture that worshipped success and excellence, I don’t believe my perfectionism exclusively came from that, either. I think the main cause of my perfectionism was that I was dealing with religious trauma and had no consciousness of it. [and as I said, autism might also be a factor for the perfectionism, but I’m still actively processing that and definitely not in the stage to add content about it in the memoir yet]
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So that’s how I start my memoir (after the five page prologue/intro). Very intense, I know, but part of my target audience is folks who did not grow up in evangelicalism, and I want those readers to understand how serious religious trauma is. And for my other audience, the folks who did grow up in these kinds of churches, the folks who went through the same shit—I hope this deep dive can help give language to your experience, to help you tell the truth about what happened, which I believe is a huge step in the healing process.
There’s a new song that I’ve been listening to on repeat as I’ve written this post and edited the excerpt: “If It’s Not God” by Maddie Zahm7 . I resonate with it so deeply; like my own writing, it tells of the toll of being the Good Christian Girl, specifically a closeted queer one:
“They called me a sinner when I was a saint
Hiding in her bedroom, praying depression away
Killing herself for eternal life
And losing her interests to be a good wife
Set myself on fire
I let them call me the liar.”
This echoes my own story and the stories of my friends from youth group, many of whom are exvies8 like me now. We buried ourselves so deeply, and it took years of digging up to find the light and air again. We pushed ourselves so hard and we bought into the lie that we are never enough, when the truth is, we are enough. God’s love is abundant and God has given us our bodies and minds for our own and for our neighbor’s flourishing—we belong to one another, and we belong to ourselves.
I know who I am, now. I am able to live in my queer body and take her (I refer to my body with she/her pronouns, because my body is not an “it”) into whatever space I inhabit, and I can bring God into that space too. The sense of integration and wholeness I feel, I think it’s what Paul was talking about when he wrote to the church in Galatia (v. 5:1), “For freedom Christ has set us free.” And I’m so grateful to the people and communities that have shown me that, who helped me unlock the bonds of my indoctrination.
Were you the Good Christian Girl growing up9? If you were, how have you found ways to reconnect with your body, mind, and soul? How have you reclaimed your personhood and found your authentic self? Or if you feel like you’re just starting that journey, what kind of resources are you looking for to help you on the path of self re-discovery (this is not therapy obvi and if you want to process religious trauma with a mental health professional I highly encourage you to seek that; with that being said, I can recommend lots of good books, websites, and podcasts about healing from purity culture and evangelical theology)?
If you, too, are a Church Camp Cry Night Survivor, I highly recommend this sticker from my podcast pals at Couch Communion: https://www.redbubble.com/i/sticker/Cry-Night-Survivor-by-CouchCommunion/111200564.EJUG5
I have come to this realization through the wonderful community at DL Mayfield’s newsletter, God is My Special Interest. Our society thinks of autism primarily through the “Geek Syndrome” white boy stereotype, but what about the girls who were/are obsessed with God and felt that religion gave them all the answers for how to be a good person and have belonging and identity? Reading this newsletter, watching Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette on Netflix, even just reading a few articles about Demi Burnett (queer Bachelor contestant problematic fave) and her recent diagnosis as an adult, and talking to a few of my autistic friends in my life, it’s all been coming together, and I can say that I went down the, to quote DL, “on fire for God to burnt out autistic lady pipeline.”
Compulsory heterosexuality is a bitch. It was a couple years after coming to terms with my queerness that I realized my “boy crushes” in high school happened because I thought I had no other romantic option, and I was a hopeless romantic who wanted to be wanted; I wanted the kiss, the date, the romantic gestures, but not the boy.
I just want to be very clear that all bodies are good bodies and that fat is not a bad word. Folks can be fat and be perfectly healthy, that’s just the way their body is naturally. Is there a way I could bring that reflection into the text itself here—I obviously explore my body image journey throughout the memoir, but is more reflection along those lines needed here specifically?
Folks in the exvangelical/faith deconstruction sphere might know about some controversies re: Jamie Lee Finch, and also Brenda Marie Davies who I bring up later. I definitely am questioning why most of what I know about embodiment and healing from religious trauma is from white women (most of the books about those topics on my books-I-want list are also written by white women), and decidedly the vibes of these two women are very white feminist and I’m not about that (see here for what happened re: Davies and Finch in the spring, it’s a very long thing). On my podcast I have publicly said I cannot in good conscience continue to recommend their work. And yet I’m conflicted because the quotes I use from Finch really gives this section some extra oomph, and her work really did help give me language to tell the truth of what happened to me—religious trauma, disassociation. And I would want to bring in voices of women of color intentionally, thoughtfully, and not just for the sake of adding more quotes, you know? Any thoughts on this are appreciated.
Before college, the only verse I had ever heard from the Book of Ecclesiastes was this (and it’s not even the whole verse, it’s part of it, 3:11): God has placed eternity in the hearts of men. And yes I heard it exactly like that, even though the NIV, which my church used, now says “He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
The video is also SO GOOD:
Exvangelicals, which is itself slang/pun for ex-evangelical.
Or Boy! Or if you were socialized as the Good Christian Girl even though you’re not on the gender binary.
Well I can’t wait to read your memoir now. So much I can relate to in your post here. Best of luck in everything!
Wooooowww, your story and the ways that rigid evangelicalism seeped into all the different areas of your life and caused religious trauma are very familiar to me! I've written my spiritual memoir also. From your experiences of college being a culture shock of sorts, crush on a girl and feeling terrible about / repressing those feelings, to disordered eating (and understanding that from a context of high-control religion)...yup yup yup, feel ya there.
I'm sure you're fine with posting this stuff right now. One day in the future you can ask your agent / editor what they want you to do with this material - but I've also discovered that drafts go through so many iterations, this will be just another version of the final draft. It's all your story and this is the way you're telling it right now!
Look forward to more from you!