![[_1120462.jpg]] {a modern iconographic Jesus on a cross painted above a church door} I remember you in a fit of rage. You picked up my grandmother’s lamp and smashed it on the floor. You cornered me in the bathroom and punched a hole in the wall by my head. I remember me fuming and suicidal, smashing the back of my head against the shower wall. I punched you in the arm like I used to play fight with my dad, and you called me the abuser. You were always the victim. I was? When we get together now, it’s difficult to compartmentalize all of the different seasons we shared. You cry when we talk about my friend who’s now in an open relationship. You tell me, “I didn’t consider you,” talking about times you bought things only for yourself. I met you when I was 16. We divorced when I was 28. How do I address these years of my happiness mingled with some of my deepest pain? “What you love the most will hurt you the most.” I wonder if this is true. When I called my best friend to tell her I was divorcing you, she told me I was being selfish. When I told my mother, she said, “I’m disappointed in you.” My brother still can’t stop talking about the “good ‘ole days” when couples worked out their troubles without divorce. Why did you all expect me to stay? As a child, I buried myself in stories. Losing myself in books, I’d imagine worlds where I was a strong, powerful, and autonomous person. I dreamed of being somewhere else. I escaped my present by dreaming of the future. I believed my life would be better when I was a grown-up and able to make my own decisions and pursue life on my terms. As a teenager, I dreamed of being “the best” (at many things), but my teachers and coaches knew that I wasn’t willing to give up everything to achieve it. I approached music, sports, and academics with average enthusiasm and performed better than many of my peers. Being above average was easy for me to achieve, and it was generally what was expected of me. I was always disappointed in myself. For a while, I obsessed over becoming a master of something to avoid being a master of nothing, and because of my upbringing, I poured every ounce of myself into becoming the most religious person possible. Thus becoming the holiest of the holier than thous, I made myself a judge of every Christian’s religious shortcomings. For a long season, I used religion to construct my more perfect world. In my late teens and early 20s, I pursued life like I was a desert father from Christianity’s past, committing myself to celibacy (short-lived) and pouring myself into studying Christian teachers and philosophers. I branched out of my denominational upbringing and learned the ins and outs of Christian history, exploring Jewish, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian practices. I began to experience my religion on a deeper, more spiritual level. My pursuit became deeply intellectual and philosophical and gave me grandiose ideas of myself and the future. I became a kind of superhero in my own mind, empowered by the Christian god’s “Holy Spirit.” My ex and I met during my junior, his senior year of high school. He didn’t want to date me, so he wasn’t a threat. But we spent a ton of time together, chaperoned by another close friend. The three of us enjoyed each other’s company. She told me he and I were going to get married one day, and we eventually did because I never liked any other boy I’d ever met. He and I married because that was the only story we thought we could tell with our lives. We connected on a depressive level. Deep down, we both hated ourselves for who we thought we couldn’t be, who we thought we couldn’t love. So together, we constructed a world where we felt seen and important. I forced him to help me create a life where we could build a kind of religious utopia around ourselves, and in our ultra-religious state, we rejected our families’ milder religious practices and sought a chosen family who would support us in our quest to build god’s kingdom on Earth. Though Christian leaders like to tout the Bible’s inclusion of women, I grew up in a patriarchal society that continually questioned my worth as a woman, and with every bone in my body, I wanted to resist that narrative. I clung to stories like that of Mary Magdelene and Esther, women marked by men but who also influenced them. But finding a husband and building a family was as much a societal narrative as it was a religious one in the Middle US. In college, my religious community saw my relationship with my high school best friend as the ideal Christian relationship. He and I were each other’s firsts for everything—kissing and sex. Knowing I enjoyed writing, my mom wanted me to write a book like _I Kissed Dating Goodbye_ by Joshua Harris, who’s known to regret writing it. So many seasons to think about. . . so many people to acknowledge and maybe to hurt. For a few years, I prayed every day, “Lord, keep me. Don’t let me turn away from you,” desperately afraid that some deep part of myself would decide to sever me from the religious realities I’d always known. But something kept hanging me up. Anyone who knew me then will be shocked by the drastic changes that have happened in my life. But it wasn’t until I left religion that I began to realize my fullest potential and happiest dreams. I’ve been encouraged to write about my religious upbringing and how I walked out, but as I’ve begun diving back into my past, I’m surprised by how grounded religion kept me. I think as important as it will be for me to assess the damage done, it’ll be equally important for me to remember the wealth of purpose, community, and love, too. In my senior year of high school, I lived with two Christian missionaries in a small town in Kansas. A woman from the Dominican Republic and I shared a large space in their basement. She didn’t speak English well, and I didn’t speak Spanish well. So, she and I spent time trying to learn each other’s language for the four months we lived together. She was a missionary, and I wanted to be a missionary like her. Becoming a missionary is not a casual decision, but at the time, I did not fully understand the damage done by Christian colonizers. It was easy to push that record aside as history, ignoring the way missionaries continue to damage communities across the world, today. But because I wanted so badly to become a missionary, I was offered the means to travel and became one of the few members of my family to leave the United States. My mother was a PK, a pastor’s kid. My grandfather planted several churches in the Mid-South and South of the United States. He also traveled to India several times to work with Christian leaders there. My mother grew up in the shadow of my grandfather’s will and disapproval, and I grew up in hers. I have mostly fond memories of my grandfather, very few of him standing up and preaching to his congregations. Wreaked with diabetes, Parkinson’s, and several strokes, my grandfather sat in his recliner with church elders by his side, his preacher’s voice then barely a whisper, speaking to those who would listen. My mother’s mother, Ruby cared for him at home until his death. I aspired to be like him, a writer and a high school English teacher. Sure, if religious routines were not so deeply engrained in my family’s life, perhaps my upbringing would have helped usher me into a fuller sense of myself as a teenager. But life is complicated. I married my high school best friend and had two kids with him. Then, we divorced and have better lives apart. Would I have found this life without them? It’s taken me a little while to come to terms with the realization that the things I struggled with when I was young were not just because of religion. And it was because of my deep devotion to my religion, my desire to learn about and deeply understand the origins of my religious practice, its history, and its connection to the rest of the world, that I was able to finally walk away from it with a fuller sense of self. I wonder what’d they think of me now when they see me with my family. My life was never going to go the proper way.