Continued from Part 1.
I was thirteen when I fell in love.
He was four years older. He went to my church. He was part of my Christian theater group. I felt like I had won the lottery: love and shared faith. Innocence and righteousness braided together.
We were virgins.
It took months before we even kissed.
My first kiss.
Before that, we smiled. Followed each other. Held hands. Sat together during services and talked about sermons afterward. It felt electric and pure and holy all at once.
I was praising myself even more as a Christian then.
I had a partner.
A future.
A visible path.
What I didn’t understand yet was that part of my attraction to him was his certainty. He talked often about waiting until marriage, about doing things the right way. What I didn’t yet see was the fear underneath it.
He had already crossed lines he felt ashamed of.
He carried guilt he didn’t know how to metabolize.
And instead of questioning the system, he tried to save himself by obeying it more fiercely.
I loved his philosophy. His curiosity. His questioning. It reawakened something in me I had buried, but he was trying to force his answers back into a box that would keep him safe.
I didn’t know then how much weight that box carried.
To showcase duality in its truest form, it was only natural that the first death I ever dealt with would occur alongside my first love.
Both my grandfather and grandmother on my mothers’ side died at the same time, within days of each other.
I could not comprehend what was happening.
I understood the truth that they were physically dead, but I could not understand why there was so much pain for my mother. I remember wondering why God would give so much pain to her, to me, to all the people experiencing my grandparents’ death.
At the funeral, I was asked to speak. I could not take off my sunglasses. I did not feel comfortable crying, expressing all of this pain outward into an audience. After that, I couldn’t go to the reception. I could not take off my sunglasses. I could not interact with people. I could not even sit in a room and manage my emotions.
I was distraught. Overcome. So I sat in the car.
My mother tried to bring me out, but I think she really did understand, and she did not force me. She was distraught herself, concerned, worried, and she didn’t know where to put it.
Someone else did.
A woman we used to call my big sister came out to the car, threw open the door, and told me to stop acting like a child, stop being a selfish brat, and get in there. She told me that it was my responsibility to show up for the people who were there to pay their respects to my grandparents and my family.
I refused.
It escalated, and I honestly can’t remember exactly what happened after that, except that I never went inside.
Something that was also happening simultaneously alongside the death of my grandfather was that my boyfriend and I had gotten caught doing what kids do. Messing around. Multiple times.
My parents were very upset.
There had always been questions about age, but my mother had always been supportive. I think she saw that I was a mature person and wanted to give me autonomy. I know she took criticism for that.
But it was becoming harder for her to believe us.
We were saying we weren’t doing anything, and yet we were doing something. We were trying to affirm that we weren’t doing anything outside of the Bible. The Bible didn’t specifically say anything about certain things, so we thought we were okay. Kissing was okay. Fooling around was okay. As long as we stayed away from certain lines, we thought we were safe.
Looking back, I can see how abstract and dangerous that logic was for children.
Then entered a new youth pastor.
He was the cool guy. Young. Open. I looked up to him. My boyfriend became very close to him, and by extension, so did I. For reasons I still don’t understand, he decided that my boyfriend and I were sexually active and that we needed to have a conversation.
This was the first time something felt deeply wrong.
He asked us questions about our intimacy. We were timid. Uncomfortable. We didn’t lie, but we left out details. He said he needed to understand so he could help.
After that meeting, he wrote a letter with his wife who helped run our youth group.
The letter said they knew we were having sex and that it was important to work through this together for the sanctity of our souls.
We were not having sex, but the letter tipped everything.
My parents were unhinged. No matter how many times I said we were not having sex, the doubt had already been planted. Who do they believe–a teenager or an adult pastor?
Around this same time, with my grandparents dead, my family grieving, and my body under scrutiny, my boyfriend and I crossed the line we had been circling.
We had sex.
There was immense conflict before, during, and after. Confusion. Fear. Shame.
I wanted to do it. I’m still not entirely sure why. Maybe hormones. Maybe love. Maybe wanting everyone to be right so the judgment would stop.
My boyfriend was terrified.
He kept asking if this was a sin. If we were going to hell.
Something inside me (intuition or logic? I still don’t know) told me it couldn’t be that simple. That this could not outweigh everything else. I was more at peace than he was, and that is why I was completely devastated when he told me that I had raped him.
As an adult, I can see what he was doing. He was trying to wash his shame away by putting it on me.
But I was a child, so I didn’t understand that. I buried it. I tried to convince him that we both wanted it, that we were both responsible, that this was the sin we had to carry.
Our relationship continued. For years. Breakups. Cheating. Reconciliation. It faded and resurfaced between delusional romance and unhealthy friendship for over a decade.
Sex. Death. Authority. Religion. Power. Shame. All of it collided before I had the capacity to metabolize any of it. And something in me broke.
After everything collapsed, I didn’t drift away from God. I severed.
Faith didn’t gently fade. It imploded. What replaced it wasn’t freedom or clarity, but something harder, sharper, and safer. Atheism. Not as philosophy, but as armor.
I rejected prayer, spirituality, intuition, and anything that couldn’t be proven, measured, or defended. God felt cruel. Religion felt manipulative. Faith felt like a trick I had fallen for when I was too young to protect myself.
If belief could be used to shame me, silence me, and turn my body into a moral battleground, then belief itself was the enemy.
Logic became my refuge.
Science. Mathematics. Certainty. Things that didn’t ask me to surrender my agency. Things that didn’t punish curiosity. Things that didn’t pretend to know more than they did.
Before all of this, I had been many things: a writer, a poet, a dancer, a musician, an artist, a singer right alongside my love of math, chemistry, biology, and systems.
I dreamed of being both.
Art and logic.
Creation and proof.
But when I went to college, I was forced to choose, so I chose mathematics.
Not applied math, but pure mathematics. Theoretical. Argument-driven. Abstract. Even there, belief still existed, though disguised. Proof rested on axioms. Ideas accepted as true so that truth could proceed. I failed most of my applied science courses. I hated rigidity. I hated pretending certainty where there was none.
Ironically, the two classes I earned perfect scores in were number theory and linguistics. Pattern. Meaning. Structure beneath language.
Still, I didn’t see the pattern yet.
After graduating, unsure of who I was allowed to be, I hid behind a master’s degree in business. Then I moved to San Francisco. I entered sales. Then marketing. I was surrounded by men who believed in logic, money, optimization. Masculine energy that valued certainty over nuance. Marketing, ironically, requires intuition. Psychology. Emotion. Humanity. But I was constantly asked for definitiveness I couldn’t honestly provide.
And slowly, something shifted.
Atheism–the claim that nothing exists beyond what we can prove–began to feel just as rigid as the religion I had escaped. I couldn’t deliver certainty there either.
So I retreated again. Into agnosticism.
“I don’t know” became safer than “there is nothing.”
In my free time, I returned quietly to the spaces that let me not know: art, books, philosophy. I still created, but it was strained. Constrained. My dominant hours belonged to finiteness.
During this time, my partner–now my husband–was walking the same line. He is both analytical and creative. Together, we fed each other’s need to be finite so we could survive. Make money. Be safe. We slowly starved the infinite parts of ourselves until I burned out completely.
Continued in Part 3.
