By ErikJMS
It was a long time ago, but I swear I never meant to get this old and
it is disorienting to finally have hit forty, and then forty-one, ...
and then forty-nine, and now fifty, especially since I was supposed to
kill myself at twenty-five.
The story is a little complicated, but I am going to jump into the
middle of it and see how long I can stay afloat for this episode.
Things that are useful to know about me from the start:
When I was born my body was such that I was declared a girl, but I got
it in my head that I was a boy by the time I was three. A bunch of
childhood trauma drove that realization into hiding, so I came out as
a dyke after high school, somewhat gradually from about 1979-1982.
Then in about 1995 I sort of remembered that I wished to be
male-bodied, and in 1997 I started taking testosterone and
transitioned from female-appearing to male-appearing. My actual gender
identity became a bit fuzzy after transitioning, but I call myself a
transsexual male when pressed for something specific.
I was sexually abused and raped by a family member at age 11 and raped
by a stranger at age 12. That was the trauma, or about half of it. I
did not tell anyone about the stranger rape until I was 20, and I kept
the family molestation a secret for a few more years after that. I
have PTSD from that and from growing up threatened with the Lake of
Fire and the Rapture.
I am psychiatrically disabled, in part from the PTSD and in part from
a recurrent severe depression. My last big crash was the winter of
1997-98 and I am still recovering and might be for the rest of my
life. This last crash earned my diagnosis the tag of "with psychotic
features." There were voices, but they weren't hallucinations. I have
a very vivid imagination, and that became their echo chamber.
I am one of those tentatively self-diagnosed autism spectrum adults. I
am more introverted than anyone I have ever met anywhere at any time,
I was late learning to talk, and I have sensory problems and severe
social phobias around specific types of interactions. I do not have
any money to pay for an assessment now; when I was a child in the 60s
and 70s, autism was not something that was screened for unless one
were extremely non-functional.
So there's some background. You might be able to guess the story just
from those starting conditions, but I will fill in some details
anyway.
I was transplanted from the Pacific NW of the US to the Deep South at
the age of two. My parents had become born-again Xians sometime before
I was born. I don't really know much about how that happened, but when
we moved to Georgia they started attending Baptist churches and
eventually settled on Southern Baptist doctrine. The church they chose
was evangelical and about as fundamentalist as you could get:
everything in the Bible was literally true, cigarettes and alcohol
were tools of Satan, and homosexuality was so taboo it wasn't even
considered a remote possibility for a living, breathing person.
My parents took us kids to a church play when I was about six, I
think. It depicted the Last Judgment, where the "lost" were thrown
through a tinfoil covered doorway into "hell" and went screaming their
heads off through dry ice smoke, red flashing lights, and roaring
thunder. I think there were stairs leading down; "hell" was probably
the church basement.
I was scared shitless. Was that going to happen to me? No, or at least
not yet. I do not recall my mom's precise explanation except that I
think I was told I was too young to understand and I did not have to
worry about hell until I was old enough to understand. I started
worrying anyway because what I understood at that point was that
eventually I was going to be looking at that door myself, somehow.
A couple of years later I was in fourth grade, and I found a Jack
Chick tract in my classroom one afternoon: "The Beast." If you haven't
read it, you can find it at the Jack Chick website and it looks now
exactly what it looked like then. Mobile guillotines were depicted
beheading people who were left behind after the rapture and who
refused the Mark of the Beast. This was the only way to be saved after
the rapture.
I was scared shitless. I had never heard about any of this part of the
religion I was being taught. In Sunday School we got Old Testament
stories and during church services I drew pictures on the bulletin.
This was all brand new stuff. I asked my mom if she would explain this
tract to me and we sat down to read it together and she basically said
that although the details might not be exact, it was all true. This
was really going to happen, and I really would be left behind if I
were not yet saved.
I was eight years old, and I would be left behind, because my family
were all saved by that time. Sit with that for a bit.
The way to be saved at our church was to walk the aisle, alone, at the
end of the service, during the invitation. I'm sure most of you are
familiar with the ritual. When you got there you talked to the
preacher about whatever was "on your heart," but they emphasized
coming forward to be saved.
Our altar calls were subdued affairs; we did not do all the
pentocostal speaking in tongues stuff, but given my introversion and
fear of strangers (the preacher was as good as a stranger to me), I
was literally frozen in terror at the thought of walking up there all
that by myself while everyone watched. Nobody ever offered to walk
with me. Apparently it was not genuine or something if you didn't do
it by yourself.
Time passed. I was molested and raped and stayed silent about it. I
tell people had I stopped speaking altogether by the time I was 15,
which is true in some ways, but that would be getting ahead of the
story. During this time I became more and more obsessed with the
threat of being left behind. My parents bought the Hal Lindsey books.
I read them. I was certain that the rapture was going to happen at any
moment. If I was home alone and the rest of the family was late, I
would panic, sure that the rapture had happened and that I was going
to have to face the mobile guillotines if I wanted to be saved then.
It would be too late for the "easy" way.
I prayed every night. I accepted Jesus into my heart over and over,
but it never "took" because I was convinced that one was not saved
until one walked, and so I did not feel anything because I knew what I
really had to do. But walking scared me more than the rapture did,
apparently, because I could not make myself do it.
I think I must have been about 13 when my parents invited some of the
church ladies over to our house for the express purpose of saving me,
or giving me the "push" that I obviously "needed," or something. This
part of the story I really don't like to talk about, because it was
embarrassing to have to tell these ladies that yes I believed all that
you just read out of the Bible but no I hadn't walked yet. It was a
revival week, I think, or maybe it was just a Sunday afternoon--we
went to church Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, every week.
Whatever day it was, there was church that night, and it was
understood that I would be walking.
I did. It was awful. I felt like I had been exposed and betrayed by
these people who claimed to love me, and here I was in front of the
church in all my shame. An endless line of people would queue to talk
and shake hands with all who had answered the altar call when the
service ended. Kisses from perfumed church ladies. Hugs from tobacco
smoked men (we were not sure they were really saved). Everyone touched
me in some way and I did not want them touching me at all.
I won't say I wasn't relieved--I was! I would not be left behind now.
But the whole experience was so twisted and protracted that when I
went into my near-psychosis in 97-98, the screaming voices in my head
eventually morphed into church ladies and preachers who told me that I
had to come back to the fold. That was the extent of my conditioning,
the depth of the grooves worn into my brain by an obsessive terror
that lasted almost my whole childhood.
There was other emotional abuse too, but this represented the worst of
it. Once I was saved, then the sermons that affected me the most were
those which said we had to witness to others (yes I was way too shy to
do anything of the sort) and those which said that any lag in what
should be our constant joy as born-again Christians was our own fault
for some sin or impure thought or another. I stopped obsessing about
the rapture and started obsessing over the numerous indications of my
unworthiness.
I say I stopped talking at 15. I was starting to slip into my first
recognized bout of depression (my first unrecognized bout occurred
when I was eight). Every night I prayed for help but none came. Just
more shaming sermons that convinced me this was all my fault. I began
to despair.
By the time I was 16 I was beginning to see through all the
double-binds and circular reasoning that had been used against me my
whole life. I had begun to note that although g*d was said to answer
every prayer, he seemed not to respond to mine. The catch phrase used
to cover all cases was, "g*d always answers prayer; sometimes the
answer is 'no'", but I began to wonder about a supposedly
compassionate g*d who was apparently ignoring me while I slipped off
into silent grief and bewilderment.
I think I will stop here for now. Tell me, if you have any thoughts on
the subject, how you might suppose I might have been doing around this
time. I came home to an empty house; both of my parents were working
by then. At times the person who had molested me would be there. The
molestation itself had stopped for me. In the spring and summer we had
tremendous thunderstorms and I felt like the lightning had it in for
me personally.
Well, I survived. I will say that much. And eventually I decided that
the church's doctrine was far too small for me. But right now I am
tired.
Hi!
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