It’s 2007 and I’ve just gotten my braces off. When I write an essay in English class arguing that women are equally capable of being president, the pastor’s son calls me a feminazi. My boyfriend works at Baskin-Robbins and smells like waffle cones. I give him head in his Bronco at a stop sign on a country road near my house. I’ve never done anything so diligently in my small life.
When two of my five older sisters got pregnant in their last year at the public high school, my parents made the unwavering decision to throw away a relatively fair chunk of money on an education that covered algebra, the mechanics of a refrigerator, and a literal interpretation of Genesis.
This pre-K through 12 school, originally called “Day Star,” was just an extension of the church we attended, an extension with the unspoken but clear purpose of keeping the congregation’s children safe from sex ed and employing its less skilled members as teachers. All to say, I went to church six days a week from the first grade until graduation.
I didn’t love the dating pool of a graduating class of 18, but I genuinely, deeply, truly loved Jesus. It was the socialist doctrines. It was the grand narrative at play. It was brainwashing. It was romantic. It was, above all, transcendent.
But what is transcendence when the one transcending is inauthentic, controlled, void of identity? Evangelicals are all about your relationship with Jesus. When it comes to your relationship with yourself? That’s trite. Selfish even.
Then one day I realized the people teaching me about love seemed to…how can I say this gently…hate women? Like despise them? Especially sexual women. As one, it became clear I had to leave.
So I left. Then I rebounded with a Starbucks barista who looked like Tim Curry in a beanie, playing Wonderwall on a capo’d guitar. And Buddhism.
On the other side of this divinely codependent relationship with American Jesus, I was a lost late bloomer. I didn’t know who I was or what I liked or what I needed. I tried on new words: poly, pan, bi, queer.
It seems silly and self-critical now, but I was embarrassed to be exploring labels into my Saturn Return. I was embarrassed to go on my first date with a woman at 27. I was embarrassed how little I knew myself.
But that kind of disconnect is to be expected when your first breakup was with Jesus. You were never asked to be you. Your passions were outsourced. Your personhood had been a prop.
Of course you needed some time to find yourself. You’d spent all those years giving her away.
Here’s a poem from Portrait of a Person Who Pushes Love Away in Fear of Losing It about that void of identity—
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