When I was about 13, I asked my mom for the first time when I’d get my period. Beverly Cleary was a favorite author when I was in public school, and she wrote at some length about periods. My mind had not yet grasped that I wasn’t a girl and that periods were not for me.
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My first day of school remains a vague and unpleasant memory, shrouded in the protective haze I tend to assign to experiences I’d rather forget.
I was fifteen. I remember not knowing what to wear, what to expect, what to do with my perpetually terrible hair. I remember that I didn’t own a backpack.
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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Carlos Andrés Reyes. Editorial note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published as a guest post in a series on March 2, 2016. Mary, the writer of this post, blogs at Threads of Stars. I grew up believing that I could break other people, break myself, break the world, with the
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“Trauma as I define it is anything that overwhelms the body’s ability to regulate itself. Our flight/flight/freeze response is located in the sympathetic nervous system, marked by elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, narrowed peripheral vision, and tightened muscles that are ready to run or fight at a moment’s notice… I’ve worked as a therapist for about fifteen years now, ‘somatically’ with people like Flora for about ten. I have found that working with the body is essential for resolving traumatic memory.”
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“Conflating demon possession with ‘madness’ hurts people. That may sound harsh, but this is a real problem. I have been hurt by this in the past, and in the present, and others have too. When people talk about an (apparently) mentally ill person and say ‘He was definitely demon possessed’ that hurts me as a person with a mental illness.”
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“A common Christian reaction to a de-conversion story, such as mine, is to accuse the ex-Christian of being a prodigal who is only angry at God. They believe that fallen Christian will always return to God because life without Him is purposeless and completely void of joy. They cannot understand a de-conversion because they have never experienced a de-conversion. No, I am not angry at God.”
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“My life began to flash before my eyes like a cascade of images simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Memories I had long blacked out began to resurface. I began to remember all the ways the Christians in my life had wronged me. I remembered rejection, isolation, and molestation. I looked within myself and saw a person void of confidence, petrified of social interaction, depressed, and suicidal. And I remembered all the ways I had wronged others.”
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“I saw myself in this kid. I saw the way I was treated as a child. I began to see many aspects in my manager that reminded me of my own mother. It was as if they were the same person. I began to see her arrogance, self righteousness, and the same mistrust of all things scientific. Every attitude, every world view seemed to be identical. And I realized that this is the attitude of most of the Christians that I knew.”
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“Most of the youth’s parents would not allow me to be friends with their children because my father was not a Christian. A fact made painfully obvious by his absence from our pew each Sunday morning. The thought was if we could not convert our father to Christianity, then there was something wrong with our own Christian walk. I was told this straight to my face on multiple occasions.”
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“For my entire life, everyday, from morning to night, I was surrounded by Jesus. Morning devotionals were followed by seven hours of Christian themed home school curriculum. The walls in our home were covered in Christian themed posters and, every evening, I took part in a second devotional. All of which, plunged me deeper and deeper into this delusion that almost nothing could pull me out of.”
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Homeschoolers Anonymous 