My So-Cultish-Life

11:11

Thirty nine years ago, I followed girls and women, not one of them nearly as young as me, into a locker room and put on a one-piece swimsuit covered in an oversized Hanes white t-shirt. I walked out into a junior high auditorium filled with hundreds of people toward a rented, above ground pool. I don’t remember who stood behind me, but in front of me was a gorgeous, seventeen-year-old girl who towered over me, caramel skin and ringlets of hair framing her face. She was the talk of the day because she wore a black swimsuit and no cover-up. No doubt she got a talking to later that afternoon.

When it was my turn I trembled inside. I swallowed prayer after prayer, that I wouldn’t slip and fall on the wet floor, pass out, or get my first period. Once I was in the water, a man, a stranger, put his hand on my back, and asked me two questions, “Have you repented of your sins, dedicated yourself to Jehovah, and accepted his way of salvation through Jesus Christ?” and “Do you understand that your baptism identifies you as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses in association with Jehovah’s organization?” But he asked them in Spanish, “¿Se ha arrepentido de sus pecados, se ha dedicado a Jehová y ha aceptado su camino de salvación por medio de Jesucristo?” y “¿Entiende que su bautismo lo identifica como testigo de Jehová en asociación con la organización de Jehová?”

I answered twice, “sí, sí.”

I was eleven.

What were my sins?

I felt jealous of my sister and wished I had her golden hair and her strength. (Envy)

I watched MTV at my cousin’s house and thought about boys. And then girls, and then boys. And these weren’t the thoughts I was allowed to think. (Lust)

Sometimes I was allowed to walk to a little store called Tayons and I would buy Ding Dongs with my monthly $5 allowance and scarf them down before I got home because I didn’t want to share. (Gluttony and Greed)

My mother let me get attached to another dog again, then had my father discard it somewhere in the country while I went to school. Later, she laughed as I cried because she couldn’t believe I was so upset over a “stupid” dog. I pressed my face into my pillow and screamed, then I started pummeling it with my fists thinking of my mother, wishing I could tell her to her face, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” (Wrath)

Some days I wouldn’t leave my room. Instead, I listened to the same cassette tape over and over again of songs I managed to record off the radio. Play rewind, play rewind, play rewind, while my bed remained unmade and my clothes lay on the floor. (Sloth)

Once I felt embarrassed to wear a dress my mother sewed for me. I wished I had more store-bought clothes like my peers. (Pride)

Turns out I had plenty to be sorry for. Plenty that required forgiveness.

I can’t remember the sensation of being underwater, but I can remember what it felt like to rise above the surface, those awful fluorescent lights in my eyes. I can remember thinking, Now, now I have done it. God can love me now. Maybe my dad, too. Because straight A’s and quiet obedience weren’t enough to garner his attention and definitely not his affection. But maybe God would have a talk with him. And maybe my mother would be happier, too. Maybe she wouldn’t need to pray so many tearful prayers, or talk about how much she wanted to go back to her country, how trapped she felt here with us and because of us.

When I left the cult I was raised in at twenty-five, a divorced mother with children ages two and five, an elder of the church (they say “organization,” which makes it even creepier) said, “Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to burn bridges? You’re alone with two kids. You’re going to need help.”

I told him, “I would rather live in a cardboard box on the street with both my kids than live a lie for one more minute.”

And he surprised me when he said, “I respect your honesty.”

Because it would have been easier to fake it and he would never have told a soul as long as I did everything I was supposed to do. He would keep my secret, that I no longer believed. It was the Great Unsaid.

He called me the night they announced that I had left the “organization.” An elder would stand on stage, address the entire congregation, and pronounce me spiritually dead to the only community I had ever known. Days later I would see “sisters” and “brothers” in grocery stores and gas stations, even my own aunt, and it was like that awful game kids play where they pretend you are invisible. But this wasn’t a game. They shunned me. They shunned my babies. I ceased to exist because I had broken a holy contract, an eternal promise I had made to God and the organization when I was eleven. A promise I was expected to keep for this life and the one we were promised after it, as long as we passed all of the tests.

A promise I made when I was eleven.

I was eleven.

I was fucking eleven fucking years the fuck old.

Fuck.

It was 1986. What were other eleven-year-olds doing on that Saturday, October 11, 1986? Were they watching cartoons? Were they riding their bikes? What were other eleven-year-olds doing to be loved?

On October 11th, 1986 when I was only eleven years old I made a pact with the Almighty in front of hundreds of people, my friends and family included. A commitment I would be held to for the rest of my life, a cage and a covenant. And when they served me my punishment, they were punishing a child, a terrified little girl, still so fresh and present inside of twenty-five-year old me. Underdeveloped, under-protected and now, unloved. Acceptance retracted. Affection abolished. All with just a few words spoken into a microphone in a room full of congregants wearing polyester suits and staring at their watches.

A fifty-year-old heathen now, a Bruja, a feminist, a humanist, a foul-mouthed Phoenix, I look back and I am so proud of that little girl. (Uh oh, Pride!) I don’t pity her any longer. I don’t wish to save her the way I have for so many years. Because now I think, What a brave soul. She walked among grown women, a prepubescent child, let a man push her underwater and rose up believing with all of her might that this would be the most sacred moment of her entire life. And maybe it was sacred, but not for the reasons she felt in her eleven-year-old heart.

It was misguided courage, but it was still courage. She was willing to promise herself to the unknown, to trust God, or the Universe as it were, and plunge into the depths of faith, a hand at her back or not.

So, today I celebrate that little girl. Because for decades she has offered me apologies for the trap she set, as if she still needs forgiveness. As if she knew we would someday take the fruit from the forbidden tree and finally, come to know ourself.

Today is sacred. I’m wearing red, my favorite color. Tonight I’ll sit with witches and ponder the divinatory meanings of the cards we spread before us. The cards speak, but in the end, we decide what we believe. We decide where to put our faith.