I’m supposed to (and I mean…I want to) be spending time creating a mental picture of what I want to make. Imagining what the photos look like. Visualizing who I want to make them with. Picturing the experience and what it feels like. Seeing it in my head so that I can make it real, so that there is direction. But instead of knowing what I want to make, I’m a lot clearer on what I don’t want to make.
And this is where it feels like it might be time to share some background. As a kid, and especially from middle school through high school, I was really involved in church. And by really involved, I mean that outside of school activities and working, most of my social activities were church activities. There were seasons where I was doing something at church – youth group, musical practices, attending services – seven days a week.
The best way I can make sense of this part of my life is that my home life was not safe at the time. As uncomfortable as it still is to share it, the truth is that there was a lot of dysfunction triggered by one family member’s addiction, and even this is an oversimplification of a messy and complicated situation. All these years later, there’s still a pull to protect and shield everyone involved by staying silent. Silence and avoidance were the family coping strategies, so I spent as much time away from home as possible. Church was a parent-sanctioned and approved place to be. And, for the most part, I genuinely enjoyed being there because of the people who were in our community. It felt supportive and fun and, compared to home, a mostly drama free place to be…which is why it’s hard to explain and confusing to unpack how my childhood religion is a trauma I’m still working to recover from.
Pain and trauma are not the same thing. There are two parts to my trauma here: the abuse that was taking place at home and the teachings (indoctrination is a word I’m hesitant to use) of church. As I’ve investigated my trauma, I’ve discovered that so much of it is rooted in being shamed. Shaming, like abuse, can be both covert and overt. Even when the shaming wasn’t directed at something that I did wrong, it was used to make certain things off limits, untouchable and undiscoverable. Being told and then believing that some activities were sinful and would take me away from God took away the power of having actual choices and the ability to make healthy, informed decisions for myself. Restriction and deprivation, especially of pleasure and basic human biological impulses, are powerful methods of control, most especially when they’re internalized. To make it even more confusing, behind closed doors, religious beliefs were used to uphold a patriarchy and strict parental control at home, while in public, there was an illusion and a performance of being a model of what a blended family should be. Performing was my entire existence: singing and music, but also playing the role of the good student and good daughter – and it was exhausting.
To be clear, I don’t consider most of the people that I knew, in the church that I went to, to be bad or harmful or abusive in an intentional way. Most of them were and are humans who were incredibly kind, generous, and loving. However, what I experienced during my time there was a system that promoted purity culture, upheld “traditional” gender roles and marriage, and perpetuated homophobia. Even when individual people were, the institution was not welcoming of people who were different, and did not welcome questioning doctrines or making space for alternative beliefs. Because I was part of that system, I also participated in, internalized, and evangelized those beliefs, and for that I have quite a bit of regret. Beyond just the church community I participated in, these messages came through the media I consumed at the time – Christian music and magazines. I was mostly, but not completely, sheltered from most other forms of media, particularly TV, and didn’t have recreational internet access until going to college. (I did get to read and devoured Harry Potter, mostly thanks to my librarian grandmother – I inherited my love of reading and libraries from her.)
The scars on my inner being showed up as a distrust and disgust of my body and what I’m going to just call savior-ism. What I mean by savior-ism is the idea that I would always be “saved” – that my life and my entire existence was not mine, but belonged to a higher power to manage and direct – and I took to heart that the price of being saved and given anything at all was that it was also my job to save everyone else, partly by sharing this belief system. Some part of me believed that my worth was based heavily on these two things – that my body’s worth was how pleasing it was to everyone else, and my worth as a human was how well I could care for everyone else. Even after abandoning this system, the rules around my body and the feeling that it’s my job to fix things for other people have stayed for a long time. But beyond my own wounds, upholding beliefs that are harmful, hateful, and simply aren’t true to shame people into staying and condemn them if they leave is why I had to go.
The unraveling began not long after high school, and there are still pieces that linger. It took me a long time to admit that it felt like a sweater I’d not only outgrown, but that I couldn’t get out of. Leaving the church was not enough. It’s like removing the thing that causes the stress, and but then still needing to deal with the stress itself. Extricating yourself from a belief system isn’t a quick process: there’s distancing, then prolonged grief as you lose threads that connected you to a community, feeling unsure of where you belong because this thing that connected you to everyone in your life isn’t there anymore, and trying to figure out how to rebuild something new. Still, beliefs that I don’t want to hold on to have a way of bubbling up to the surface. Talking about it with some of my family members is still deeply painful.
I’ve found a lot of healing in somatic therapy, in yoga, in breathing, in acupuncture, in moving intuitively, and in books (this list has a few of my favorites) – in body-based practices that allow me to explore and discover this part of myself that was cut off, that I was told would lead me toward evil and disconnection from God. In fact, the opposite is true. My body is the place and the vessel for feeling most connected to the rest of the world. Exploring what was off limits back then has also helped me delight in discovering a sense of self and autonomy. And finding practitioners, particularly women, who are trauma-informed, and have shared that knowledge, increases my feeling of safety and comfort in my body. In some ways, it is a reclaiming, but it is also a learning to trust and rely on the only person in this world that I have any amount of control over.
Maybe this is also an attempt to unpack how religion and this part of my family story (because for better or worse, they are intricately intertwined) interrupted my individuation. As a teenager, while all of this was taking place, there were adults who warned me that if I didn’t explore then, it would happen later in life. And at the time, that too felt like something to be ashamed of, as if it wasn’t “adult” to be discovering yourself. If I have any belief about how to be an artist, it’s that you use what you’re working through yourself, or the place you’re at in your life, to inform what you make, whether you’re aware of it or not, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in that. And what if an entire human life is just various stages of individuating, of becoming your very own person and watching others do the same? That feels like a purpose that is exciting and alive.
The place I’m trying to get to here is to explain why it matters so deeply to me that humans get to feel free. It feels vital that we each get to embrace our ability to show up in the world in a way that we want to, that feels authentic and like something we chose, rather than something that was chosen for us. And that there’s someone to be there, to walk with us, through the grief of letting go of what no longer fits. If I’m certain about anything about my past with religion, it’s that it is the thing I push off from. Which is why, no matter what I make going forward – photos, spaces for gentle movement and body discovery, pieces of writing – I know what it can’t be. I’m not interested in participating in any type of shaming or limiting the choices of any other human being. I’d so much rather be an advocate for each of us releasing the stories that aren’t working, and be a place of approval for all of us becoming more ourselves – and accepting whatever that looks like.