Healing The Inner Child by Standing up to Christofascism
An essay on how I am feeling these days
Hello and welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, a newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control religion. Today’s post is for paid subscribers only, and it is a very personal one to me since it deals with the issue of trans and nonbinary kids being the cultural scapegoat for Christian fascists in the United States. Thank you so much to everyone who supports this newsletter, and who is helping make this a beautiful little community of resilience. If you are trans/nonbinary and are unable to afford a subscription, please reach out to me at dlmmcsweeneys@gmail.com and I will hook you up, no questions asked.
I am slowly going through my house and taking down all the religious art I have accrued throughout the years. As I have struggled with the awful ethical ramifications of white evangelical theology for several decades now, I kept trying to find solace in other branches and forms of Christianity. For the past few years I took refuge in the shelter of anarchist Catholic folks (a small niche, but a pretty cool one). But even those relics don’t move me anymore and instead cause me pain when I look at them. Instead of relief, I only see all the ways I tried so hard to fix my pain with religion, instead of learning to love and accept myself.
In my bedroom I had a little crucifix attached to a wooden plaque with a space for the candle, and I kept a few nostalgic rosaries hanging from it. The other day I took it down, broke off the fake metal crucifix, and glued a picture of myself as a 10 year old. I decided I needed a shrine to my inner child, much more than I needed an image of Jesus hanging dead from a cross.
Every day I wake up to more bad news.1 My phone is a little box that has kept me—an isolated autistic person—in touch with like-minded community. But it has also opened the floodgates of pain and suffering to me. I have been on a crash course since I was 19 years old of learning how the world I was told was under God’s hand is full of misery, cruelty, and oppression.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Healing is My Special Interest to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.