I remember. The first time I was told that what I wanted was wrong. I was a child, my mind a universe of possible futures— astronaut, neurosurgeon, concert pianist, marine biologist. Lives that promised a kind of freedom, excitement, adventure. Each dream felt like a door opening onto freedom and discovery, a life in the stars, concert halls, and ocean waves. But for me, the doors began to close, one by one. Gender, they said, was destiny. Good girls did not dream of worlds to discover; they dreamed of becoming good wives and good mothers. Modern feminism was wrong, I was told. A woman’s life, I learned, should orbit family, husband, obedience. Self-sacrifice was virtue; service, a moral calling. I had no interest in those things then and I have none now. Yet my resistance was a flaw, rebellion, disobedience. Ambition. Dreams. All of it, framed as moral failure, as if the mere act of imagining a life beyond what they dictated made me unworthy.

I remember the first time I was told I should not exist. I remember the room more clearly than the words, the stillness of my peers who felt certain they were doing something righteous, the weight of authority settling into the air as the youth group leader read aloud from Leviticus, his voice calm, practiced, untroubled. I remember looking around, searching the faces around me for hesitation, for discomfort, for any small sign of rupture, and finding instead only nodding heads, neutral expressions, a collective seriousness that told me this condemnation was not only not debated or questioned, but agreed upon. I did not yet have a definition or the language of queerness, only a sensation of moving through the world at a different pace. But that was enough. That unnamed part of me was already condemned, already made dangerous, before I had learned how to understand it.

My parents had sent me there to find “good friends,” as in the kind who knew how to obey without asking why, who mistook silence for virtue. I asked questions anyways, not really intending to provoke, but to understand, to test the edges of belief and see whether they held. This got me labeled as difficult. Too outspoken. A disturbance. Emails followed, sermons, videos, explanations sent late at night, attempts to return me to the “righteous path”. I was told my doubts were proof that I lacked faith, that belief should be effortless, that the unease I felt was not a signal but a failure. Once again, the problem was not the world or their teaching, it was me.

Fear should not be taught to children but that’s exactly what was taught to me. Fear of my instincts. Fear of my ambition. Fear of the sound of my own voice when it grew too sure of itself. And as I was taught to fear, I learned to watch myself, to question every desire before allowing it to surface, to treat wanting as something that required permission, justification, restraint.

When I came home crying because my ballet teacher called my thighs thick, I was told that god made me this way and that I should be grateful. Gratitude was offered as consolation, yet it did nothing to ease the wound, instead, it taught me that feeling pain was something to be ashamed of, that hurt should be swallowed quickly, quietly, and that to speak of it was to reveal a lack of faith. I learned to apologize for feeling anything at all, to suppress suffering into silence.

Perhaps religion was meant to offer hope. Perhaps it still does, for some. But what I learned was how easily it becomes control, how belief can be sharpened into a weapon that justifies hate, violence, and oppression. I see it now in laws, in politics, in wars waged in the name of righteousness, where righteous morality is proclaimed while compassion is ignored, used to decide whose lives matter and whose do not.

I do not fully blame my parents. I understand, in part, that they believed they were protecting me, teaching goodness, offering certainty in a world they themselves had learned to fear. But the child I was, and the adult I am now, still carry what was learned there: the instinct to shrink, the reflex to doubt myself before trusting my own knowledge, the sneaking suspicion that who I am, if left unchecked, might be dangerous.

I do not fault the child I was for wanting to believe. Belief was offered as hope, as shelter, as belonging, as a way to live. But I grieve what it cost me, the years spent folding myself into acceptable shapes, the time spent learning how to disappear in plain sight.

And so the trauma is not only what I was told, it is the voice that stayed behind, the one I learned to use on myself.