Spacetime Continuum

Living Lifetimes in Less Than a Decade (Background Part 2)

If you haven’t read my Background Part 1 post, check it out because it will give context to this post.

CONTENT WARNING: mention of suicide, religious trauma, and rape.

Beginning of Decontrustion

It was settled. I was accepted into Pensacola Christian College (PCC). August 2011 arrived before I knew it and my anxiety boiled over, though at the time I didn’t know what anxiety was. I slept poorly, ate poorly, and worried, triggering my first migraine. I haven’t had a migraine like that one since then, though I do get migraines still. My parents thought I was having a stroke—unilateral numbness moving up my body, and then the numbness moved to the opposite side. My dad called my mom at work, and she told him to bring me to the hospital she worked at just in case. After running tests on me, a doctor didn’t see anything abnormal and said it was most likely a migraine. He was right. While at the hospital I got the worst head pain I’d ever had, causing me to throw up. I was given a Loratab and sent home. After throwing up again at home, I slept for fifteen hours. Then in less than a month, I was to be leaving for a college eight hours away where I knew no one.

Growing up at the same church and school for the first 18 years of my life inevitably made my world small. I made friends by association mostly, not that I wouldn’t have befriended them otherwise, however, I also didn’t have much choice but to be friends them. Suddenly, I was in a new community of over 4,000 students from all over the world. I may be timid and socially anxious, but I am also an extrovert, so making acquaintances wasn’t difficult. At PCC, there aren’t sororities or fraternities, there are collegians. But still Greek letters and small communities separated by sex, where there are organized sports and outings, plus Christian service opportunities. I got into my third choice of collegian, the Omega Delta Rho Hurricanes, and I am forever grateful that’s where I ended up.  I played sports in high school, and of course I wanted to play in college. Playing collegian basketball introduced me to some friends who would change my world and my life for the better, more than they will ever know.

[Team prayer before the women’s collegian championship basketball game]

I’d heard of Samoa before, but I’d never heard of Tonga, where these now dear friends have heritage from. They immediately accepted me and celebrated me to the point I was skeptical. I had done nothing to deserve this love, so how could they love me. I felt odd, but loved my new friends and was deeply drawn to them. They invited me to their hangouts and introduced me to their friends and families. They proudly embodied their culture and shared their traditions with me. They spoke of their love for Jesus and they showed it too. But I was conflicted within myself. They listened to music and used language that I was always taught was wrong, was sinful. How then could they have such palpable love for Jesus and for others while doing things I’d always known as sin? I could not deny their testimony. I came to the conclusion then that maybe not everything I was taught was 100% truth. Their love and light became the first, though small, crack in my faith (if you can call something coerced and not chosen ‘faith’). Over the next year, I made more friends who challenged my faith much in the same way. Nothing big, but in such a way that confirmed my questioning.

Belief Shattered

Academically, my freshman year consisted of one semester undecided and one as an English major. I made the dean’s list my first semester and president’s list my second semester. By the end of that year, I had decided to change my major to nursing. Again, my first semester pre-nursing, I made the president’s list and my second semester I made the dean’s list. This is significant, not in that I did well, but in how my life changed suddenly and drastically. On the night of Monday, March 25, 2013, I was working on my Organic/Biochemistry homework. My mom called me while I was in the middle of my homework and I answered like normal, a chipper “Hi Mom!” But as soon as she said my name, my heart dropped. Something was gravely wrong. She could barely speak through tears, “I don’t know how to tell you this, but your dad is dead.”

Time stopped. My mind raced with terror and questions. “What? What happened?” I asked. Clearing her throat to try to  control her breaking voice, she said, “I think he was going through some things. He shot himself.” That didn’t make any sense to me. I had just talked to him on Friday. How could my dad have been suicidal? How could he be gone? He was a good Christian and I was taught that Christians can’t commit suicide. I couldn’t stop crying. From that moment on, time became slow, slushy, foggy, indistinct. I went home for a week for his funeral and then returned to school to finish the last month of the semester, but I barely remember it. My world shattered. My greatest fear had come true. I clung to the things I had been taught, to what I was always taught would help, to the cliches, the out-of-context Bible verses.

[Me, my mom, my brother, and my dad]

That summer, I could barely get myself out of bed and I ate very little.  What helped me tremendously was reconnecting with some old friends who were also questioning the things they were taught and beginning their faith deconstructions. We would have late nights talking or watching movies. They gave me motivation to keep going. They kept me from feeling lonely. As the summer came to an end, I felt okay, though sad of course, and was eager to get back to school. In my naivety, I thought that things would be just as they were before, because I believed and had faith (or so I thought). I had all the verses and knew all the sayings. I started my nursing classes and my clinicals, and quickly realized that I was not okay. I was having anxiety attacks, but I didn’t know what anxiety was. I had no language for what I was experiencing and no way of communicating it to anyone. I couldn’t handle clinicals with that anxiety. I stopped going. After a couple of weeks, the dean of nursing called me into her office. I sat across from her desk and she asked me what was going on. I was crying before I could speak a word, but managed to tell her that my dad had died, though not that it had been only six months since. She asked how he died, and when I told her suicide, she condescendingly told me that my dad was selfish and that I was being selfish. I half-listened from then on. She pulled up my courses and looked at my grades, showing me how I could still do well if I just tried hard enough. And that if I quit clinicals, I would fail the class and she would be very disappointed in me. She tried to shame me into succeeding in school while completely ignoring how devastated I was, that there was more going on than how hard I was trying. At the end of that meeting, she set me up with student care, which I didn’t even know existed.

Paralyzing Anxiety

My first appointment with student care was awkward and irritating. In my experience, there is no welcoming or loving atmosphere with Christian counseling. I did not feel that I could speak openly without being subject to judgement and shame. I briefly told the older woman what I was dealing with, as best as I could with what little I knew. Then in her nice but unfeeling way, she explained to me that I would have 3-4 sessions and then I should be on my own. But what did these sessions consist of? I was lectured about the same cliches and Bible verses that I had already been clinging to. She handed me a devotional book and three different lists of Bible verses. And that was all. Just talking at me and telling me to do the things I was already doing. How the hell was that supposed to help? By the end of that semester of nursing, I had already given up trying to ask for help from the people who loudly proclaimed their love for Jesus, yet continually shamed me. I felt that there was only one nursing instructor that I could look in the eye and be seen as acceptable, as human. The next two years were my deepest low points. I reached out to only a select few friends, because they had shown me that they loved me regardless of my struggling. They showed up and sat with me and cried with me. They kept me alive.

I didn’t realize just how bad I was doing or how hard things were until many years later. The staff and faculty at large made me feel that losing my dad wasn’t a big deal. My anxiety attacks kept me from being able to do my schoolwork. I couldn’t write papers anymore. I barely did any homework. I never turned in any lab homework. In my middle two years, I got by on tests and quizzes alone. Remember how I said school always came easy for me? And as a result, I made the president’s list and the dean’s list my first two years? Well, I leaned heavily on my test-taking abilities for as long as I could, until that wasn’t enough. I had gone from an A and B student to Cs, but mostly Ds, and Fs. It’s not that I wasn’t intellectually capable, I just didn’t know how to deal with my grief and my anxiety, along with being at a school that didn’t believe mental illness existed, nor knew how to practically help people who were going through difficult times. I spiraled downward in shame and self-loathing. I kept it hidden, too. It wasn’t safe to show my struggles, except to those few friends. Growing up in the environment of striving for excellence and righteousness, I was taught that poor grades were almost always a result of some moral failing or not trying hard enough, a fault of the individual originating from the individual. And because I had never struggled with school and was so deeply a people-pleaser, I believed that. So then, when I began struggling and failing classes, and I was met with shaming when I reached out for help, I realized how deceived I had been. All my teachers could offer was, “Just keep trying.” Or “Try harder.” But I was trying. So hard. And still I felt like I was unseen while falling through the cracks.

In between semesters, my friends at home and I grew closer. We had our eyes opened to systemic injustices and learned more and more about them. Learning more about racism was the biggest lens change for me, as sad as it is that it took that long. Being taught it was one specific type of behavior, I was insulated from all of the truth of racism and racial prejudice. Having negative experiences shatter my worldview and show me my religion’s grave shortcomings, I was curious to learn more outside of what I was allowed to learn growing up. I took these new-to-me understandings and questions back to school. Slowly, through experience, observation, and learning, I began to grow very spiritually miserable. Very little that I was taught growing up turned out to be good, and everything I had known and built my life on felt increasingly false. The people who embodied the institution of PCC taught me the kind of person I didn’t want to be. It was all a façade, just for show.

I had gone from undecided to English to Nursing to Biology, and it was looking like I wasn’t capable of graduating. I was scared and full of shame. How could I, the golden child, be incompetent? Useless? A disappointment? At this point, I felt at home when at school because my friends were there. The thought of not returning made me sad not only because I would be away from them, but because I would also be putting off getting a degree. In my desperation, I changed my major again. I took a semester of Graphic Design. I thought maybe doing art would be easier for me than trying to do sciences. I was also put on academic probation because my GPA had dropped so low. This and a combination of factors, one of which was a closeted relationship, helped me reset and refocus. I met with the registrar and figured out the quickest way to graduate. Graduation finally felt possible. During these last couple years of college, I became close with someone in a surprising way. We cuddled often and eventually starting kissing. After two months of this, I realized, “Oh! This is what it means to not be straight.” Ours was an on and off closeted relationship that lasted about two years. On the one hand, she helped me refocus and strategize my academic assignments. But our relationship was one of power imbalance and she had childhood trauma that she hadn’t dealt with leading her to be emotionally manipulative. The worst of it, though, was that she coerced me into sex many times, which I realized years later is rape. She would do this, then never let me touch her intimately, and then shame us both for being queer. As far as I know, she still believes being queer is a choice. The damage was deep and I am still healing from it.

Healing and Growth

After years of struggling, I finally graduated with a degree in Humanities and a minor in Biology. I was ready to be done with PCC. I had no idea what I was going to do afterward, but I was glad to be done. My life expectations had completely fallen apart and changed, which I was thankful for at the time. I was scared though. Everything I had known no longer was. I was angry and bitter at Christians, and especially PCC. I was ready to walk away from Christianity and religion. But the life and behaviors of Jesus still drew me. There was something different about Jesus, something separate from religion. I didn’t know what to do. My old friend from home invited me to a new church she had been going to, though that still felt wrong. And then she introduced me to a small community of people who had started a house church. I was nervous and skeptical at first. But these people have proven to be a life line. They reintroduced me to Jesus in a space that was rid of shame. They have challenged me and supported me. I love them deeply. Joining this community reinvigorated my desire for spirituality and understanding what it means to have faith beyond any desire I had before.

It was this community that gave me the courage to come out of the closet. I had been wrestling with my belief and understanding about queerness. Many Christians believe that being queer is wrong and they are most often unkind and hurtful. That is what I was always taught and always observed. My coming out story is longer and more detailed than I can fit here, but I can say it was a time filled with fear and dread, then hope and fulfillment. I knew that I would be challenged by my family and old friends, but I had done much learning and earnest praying and deep, dire wrestling with my faith. I had done the work and I had a supportive community. I was ready to live fully. I came out to immediate family and important friends, and then I came out to the world. It has not been easy, but it’s one of the best decisions I ever made. No regrets.

[Selfie I used in my coming-out-to-the-world social media post]

From my coming out until now, I have grown and healed in ways I never knew possible. I have learned so much. This and my previous post are my background, and with it my limited perspective and knowledge. What I have shared here is most of what has made me who I am today. The more I learn and grow, the more I find myself coming back to my child-self, who was intuitive and wise. In my constant growth and desire to learn, plus my insatiable curiosity, I have many thoughts and ideas, sometimes more questions than declarations. Those thoughts and ideas are what I want to share on this substack. And if you decide to follow my meandering and various thoughts, I would love to hear your thoughts as well. Community is vital as is learning from others who have different experiences from you. I hope this is another place where we can all grow and learn from each other.