They say “higher power” like it is supposed to feel safe.
Like the word should soften something in me
instead of tightening everything inside my chest.
But it doesn’t soften anything.
It makes everything come back louder.
My father used God like instruction.
Like authority. Like permission to do anything and still call it righteous.
He said it was in the Bible.
So it became law in our house.
And I learned law there meant pain you were not allowed to question.
I learned early that scripture could be used like a weapon and still be called love.
I learned obedience meant silence.
I learned silence meant survival.
I learned survival meant disappearing inside myself so no one could see what it was doing to me.
I was made to kneel on a broomstick in the corner. Small room. Smaller me.
Like I was something that needed to be pressed down into place.
Arms held straight out to my sides until they shook so hard I stopped feeling like they belonged to me. Textbooks and phone books placed into my palms until pain became the point and not the warning.
No hesitation. No softness. No confusion about what would happen next.
Just fear learning my body better than I ever got to.
I was sexually abused in that same house where they talked about God like He was watching over us.
Like He was protecting something.
Like He was not also in the room being used as justification.
And I still don’t know how to hear “higher power” without my body going cold first. Without something in me bracing like I’m about to be punished for existing again.
This has followed me into adulthood in ways I don’t always have language for. There have been times it has driven me to the edge of wanting to disappear.
Times I have been suicidal.
Times I made an attempt on my own life and still woke up inside the same mind that remembers everything.
Sometimes in AA rooms I sit there and feel like I’m splitting in half. One part trying to stay present. One part already back there, waiting for the next thing to happen.
My body hears it and thinks of control.
Just control disguised as something holy.
Some days I feel anger so strong it makes me want to tear something apart just to prove I still can. Some days I feel grief so heavy it feels like it’s sitting on my ribs. Some days I feel nothing at all and that feels worse than both
because it means I am not even reacting anymore.
And still I stay alive in it.
Still I sit in rooms where words land on me like they don’t know what they are touching.
If there is something higher, I don’t know its name. And I don’t trust names that have ever been used to hurt me.
But I notice what does not ask for belief in order to exist.
Trees continuing to grow anyway even when nobody is watching. Air filling my lungs without asking permission or offering comfort. My body surviving things it was never meant to carry and still not fully giving up on me.
And something in me that keeps choosing to stay anyway even when nothing about my history makes that choice make sense.
Maybe it is just survival that never learned how to stop becoming something more.
And I am tired in a way I don’t know how to explain without sounding like I’m breaking.
