How Growing Up Going to Church Made Me Hate Myself
My little tale about being LGBT and growing up in a religious space
I never thought religion would be one of the hardest things for me to talk about but hey life is always surprising us. I want to tell, first, that I respect all religions and I truly find it beautiful that people have faith in something bigger than us, and that it helps them navigate through life. But, of course, for me, it is not the case.
I was born in a religious family, kind of. All my family says they believe in God, my dad and mom are Catholics, my sister I guess is just a believer, and my brother… well I don’t think he thinks about it that much, but he says he believes in God because why not? When I was a child, I went to the church a lot, not only to the Catholic one but also to the Evangelical one. And it was wild, to say at least. It is so strange to me now to think how those experiences shaped so much of who I am today and what I do and how I do things and what I expect of life, you know, about everything that makes me me.
It is important to say that I’m a bisexual woman and I didn’t know that when I was seven but somehow I knew that I was not entirely straight either. You know, if you are an LGBT+ person, when you were a child, you just knew deep down that you were LGBT+. I mean, I know now that I knew. And how I know that? Every time the minister in the church I used to go, said anything (always in a negative tone) about LGBT+ people, I felt it. Every time someone used the bible to say someone like that would go to hell, I felt it. Every time someone in my family made a joke, in a pejorative way, about being LGBT+, I felt it. I just felt all of it because I knew that it was with me, that they had a problem with me.
There are specific memories of your childhood that are engraved in your mind as if you were just done experiencing them and one of mine is when I was in my home and was debating with myself, trying extremely hard to convince me that it was okay to support LGBT+ people. My fear was that I would go to hell as my minister said. But while I was so afraid of going to the Devil’s home, I didn’t think it was wrong to support LGBT+ people, because after all, I didn’t see anything wrong with them — I guess I didn’t see anything wrong with me, either. So, my debate was very warm and at the end of it, I promised God to pray extra prayers in the night to make up for it. And that was my life for a while, me praying for God to forgive me because I didn’t think LGBT+ people should go to hell for just love who they want to love and be who they want to be.
As my anguish grew bigger, I was slowly stopping coming to the church. Not only because I felt like I wasn’t welcomed there but because I was — and very much still am — a very logical person, too rational for my own good, and a lot of the logic of the church didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t — and still can’t — understand how people can connect with something they can’t see, worse, they don’t even have proof that is real. And now, being an adult, I can find the beauty in it, but nevertheless still hates it very much. Probably it is one of the big reasons why I hate myself; and I’m not trying to find someone to blame it, but I can’t deny the fact that I grew up going to a place three times a week to hear some old man say to me that God didn’t accept me, that I was wrong and that I would go to hell. I mean, they sound a little guilty, right? And all this followed me, still does, wherever I go.
15 was the age I was when I told my long-term friend that I liked girls and it was crazy. I don’t remember much of it just that I spent weeks building the courage, I had a panic attack when I sent the messages, and that she accepted it so well. It was like a huge weight came off my shoulders, but I still wasn’t okay with any of it. It wasn’t until I was 18 years old that I fully accept it, or at least I was tired of running away from the inevitable. But the thing is: I now know I like girls (and boys and everything else) and I still hate myself for it and I’m ashamed of it. And for me the craziest thing is that I don’t think any bad things about my LGBT+ friends, I would fight any day a homophobic for them, but for me? Well…
It’s also strange to me how I spent so much time running away from my experiences in church and I only realize it when one morning I wake up and read a letter that I had written the night before (I had taken too many pills and some alcohol because I wanted to feel something — yeah that’s a problem for me to deal later) and I had told myself how much the “Christian guilty” was eating me alive and that’s when I knew Jesus had something to do with it. I still don’t know how to approach this, I don’t believe in God, I don’t even have faith anymore, so it’s all too tricky. I’m a person who hates themselves because a being, that I don’t believe is real, hates me for being a lady that loves ladies. It doesn’t make a lot of sense and I’m a being of logic, so it makes me upset.
I still yet to come out to my family and I’m still afraid of that — I try to be badass about it but really, I’m just like any other person, I just want them to accept me and love me even if I’m not what they think I am. And I guess this is a dilemma that all LGBT+ person goes through, — even the ones who didn’t grow up in a homophobic church — the world still is a place with a lot of people like my old minister, so it is hard for anyone no matters where they are or where they came from.
I envy people who went through something like that and made peace with God, I don’t think I ever can do that.
But, you know, I can still try.
