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When I was a kid, I had the fear of God in my heart. I feared my parents, and I feared life. I thought all this meant I was a good kid. I thought love was giving part of yourself up for someone. I thought it meant being eternally afraid of what they might say to you, or do to you. God was like the sun, but not 93 million miles away. He was in my backyard, watching my every move, unbearably close and intense, seemingly unavoidable.
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TW: I say this with love: please read this with discernment. I write about times I had suicidal tendencies and survived domestic violence and coercive sexual encounters. I am sending you so much love.
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I’m not kidding when I say it’s a miracle I’m alive. College slowly drained the life out of me like a reverse IV drip. That was when I started having these grey ass dreams about walking up and down “the strip,” as they called the collection of bars and restaurants right off campus. Behind the strip, I shared a crappy apartment with one of my best friends, Jenna, and even though the living situation was much better for me there than last year, I was still very much not okay.
I would become aware that I was dreaming and not be able to wake up. I’d be trying to move my legs, “I have to get up or I’m going to be late for class,” just to wake up and remember class was canceled and that’s why I got to sleep in.
I’d feel intense loneliness in these dreams in a way I couldn’t really describe when I woke up. It was the sad memory of my dream that just haunted me and left a residue like something sticky. How in those dreams, I just wandered around feeling so alone in a way I didn’t talk about when I was awake.
I had started going to a Unitarian Universalist church and it honestly saved my life. I’d been doing all this research online about different religions. Hundreds of religions in the world and not one of them spoke to me. I felt “spiritually homeless,” though I didn’t have a word for it at the time.
My sophomore year, my boyfriend cheated on me and blamed it on my depression. I couldn’t believe it when my friends told me that was not normal, because I thought I wasn’t.
Cause even though I was a national merit scholar, I thought engineering school was hard and I thought that meant something was wrong with me.
When I told my mom senior year of high school that I was agnostic, she started crying. And on mother’s day that year, she burst into my bedroom, where my sister and I were hanging out, to tearfully proclaim she failed as a mother.
After the pastor’s “train up a child” lesson, I actually had thought it might end up going this way. I just thought we might talk about it or she might say something in passing. After I’d gotten a full-ride scholarship to university I just couldn’t understand what it was she wanted from me.
God was nowhere to be found and neither was the unconditional love he promised. The void I sensed when I talked to God was growing bigger and so was my despair.
UU Church went like this: We would sing a few songs from the hymnals and a pastor would come up and explain their theological teaching and connect it to human dignity. After 4 years going to a catholic school and thinking some of the teachings were a little strange, human dignity was the teaching that stood out to me most and made sense as an innate principle. The teaching in my church growing up was that humans are inherently evil and could never be saved without Jesus.
I love how connected I feel when I come here. And I hate that it’s off-campus, there aren’t any other college students here, and when I get back to my dorm I feel alone.
I start bargaining with the Universe. Like, my senior year of college, taking 18 credit hours and hoping the pain will end soon, I tell my therapist “if next year is not better imma head out.”
But next year is not better. When I show up to my job in Atlanta, hundreds of miles away from my college and my hometown, the guy who hired me to work for him isn’t there. No one thought to tell me that until my first day either - “we thought you wouldn’t show up.”…. ya don’t say!
I was thinking I was going to have a mentor with a decade of simulation and teaching skills guide me the way I’d specifically made sure to ask he could in interviews. I asked how much 1:1 time I’d get so I could learn from him directly, and he assured me it would be a lot (lol). Instead, I got teammates 2-3 years than me fragmenting their time to teach me opposing methods and complain that I “learned too slow.” Each day I got more depressed because I realized how much things had been set up against me. Did the Universe hate me??
I would sit in the bathtub and look up and wonder why the Universe didn’t just snatch me up right there. I hadn’t wanted to be there 4 years ago and I certainly wasn’t happy now. I loved walking around Atlanta and seeing people who looked like me, but I barely had energy to do anything. I was exhausted from work and depressed. I couldn’t afford tickets home for the holidays and my live-in boyfriend never paid rent but always complained about how I’d “made him move there.” (When I offered to pay for everything for us to move back to our hometown, he refused.)
At that point, I hated him. I hated that no matter what I did, I was never good enough for him. I hated that I did 100% of the strategizing in the relationship and also took the blame for everything that didn’t work out. I hated that I was super sad and that he’d been with me so long he didn’t care anymore. I hated that even when I would spend a Saturday in bed cause I was exhausted, he’d convince me to lay there, still, so he could have sex with me. I would detach myself from my body to appease him. I didn’t realize what he’d done was r*pe at the time, but felt so numb inside, the feeling was almost familiar. Just more emptiness, nothingness. Later, he’d say “what’s the point of living with your girlfriend if you can’t have sex all the time?” And I’d argue with him and cry, but feel so alone that I didn’t see a way out.
It was just me, and the Universe I’d been making deals with but who apparently isn’t listening. I’m back in the bathtub trying to think about my whole life story. I started in kindergarten and talk myself through the friends I had, the things I believed, the things that annoyed me. Who did I think I’d end up with? How did I end up in this situation?
And after all that it became so clear. This abuse developed from a self-hatred I no longer identify with. But I felt like I was addicted to this person. I was addicted to them communicating with me and validating that there was nothing wrong with me.I had no one else to tell me I wasn’t a bad person for not believing in the religion my peers held so dearly. I had no one else who didn’t believe I deserved to go to hell. I realized if I was truly going to survive, it wasn’t by staying in this dead-end relationship. It would be by becoming strong and learning how to validate my own damn self.
I went back home to live with my parents while I started my new job so I could afford to keep paying for my ex to live at the apartment.
“He feels like I left him there,” I told my dad.
“Well, you did.” he said.
It took me several times of breaking up with him for it to actually stick, and even though I gave him 3 more months rent-free in my apartment, he called me a few days prior to move-out day to say he’d packed all his stuff in the car my dad had gave him and left everything else. I flew back out to Atlanta to find a filthy apartment, rotting milk in the fridge, and furniture I’d left in an effort to be kind. I spent hours cleaning and panic-filling the rental car with furniture I’d wanted, wishing I’d packed it up on the moving truck with everything else. I drove the furniture over to Goodwill in between trips to the building dumpster and doing work for my actual job, which I had to take a half-day off of. The lady I dropped it off with remarked how lucky I was I could just donate this stuff and start over. I wanted to scream at her that this was one of the worst days of my life. I didn’t bother. I just went back to the apartment and scrubbed and scrubbed until I couldn’t anymore and the next morning repeated the same until I reached the deadline. My heart was completely shattered. I’d been betrayed in a way I never had before. And in a way I decided I never would again.
This intense, angry, possessive, impulsive, sudden love was God-like. and I realized that God did not love me.
But I did.
And then everything changed.
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