TW: religious trauma, community-related trauma
When you’re raised in a tight knit strict religious community, no one tells you that you could lose it all, every friend, every mentor, every person you looked up to. Of course the threat is always there, because that’s how they keep you behaving correctly. But there’s never any plan to behave incorrectly. But even if you do behave exactly the way they want you to, nothing is actually protecting you from being devoured by them. And the first time they devour you, you pretend it didn’t happen bc these people “were just doing what they believed was right before God.”
Then you grow up and go to college…
But no one tells you that the same exact wolf that devoured you then might be here too, just in a different sheep’s clothing. A New Community, with fresh paint, a catchy name, a trendy coffee shop and a pastor in skinny jeans. It’s Hip ™️ And they say to you they would Never do what the others did, what the others did was Not God’s Heart. So you naively trust them and dive into the deep end. You pour everything out, only months later, to climb out dazed and stumbling away only barely realizing you were being used to fit their narrative. They were using you as their poster Prodigal Girl …except for the fact that up until that point you had never even “run away” from the church.
But now, you were running for your life, bc once again the wolf was shedding its clothing and coming to devour your soul.
You run to a little corner of the internet and find comfort with other people like you… queer and traumatized. And as foolish as it sounds you begin slowly trusting a community… again….
Until that little community tears itself apart bc, as we all know, hurt people hurt people.
And if 3rd times the charm, then that 3rd time trying to “find community” was plenty charming.
So now you just watch people in their lives. Wondering if they’re happy. Wondering if their lives turned out the way they had hoped. Wondering if their cishet wedding was everything their little hearts dreamed it would be. Wondering if they’re buying that Turkey in preparation for a friends gathering of their wonderful, uplifting, encouraging church community that never fails them or let’s them down.
At least…. that’s what I do.
