I didn’t know better. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

I was seven and fascinated by my friend Kasey. She was a redhead, and she’d just gotten a perm. I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I told no one. I figured we were simply special friends. I didn’t know better.

I was twelve and in church every day of the week. The youth group had a special night where they told the girls that they would be worth less if they had sex before marriage, and they pressured us to promise publicly not to do so. I promised. I even got a purity ring. I had no sex drive toward men, so I felt like I was the perfect little Christian. Sure, I thought, I won’t have sex before marriage. It’ll be easy because I don’t even want to have sex. Ha! I didn’t know better.

I was sixteen and in denial about why I liked drawing women so much. One of my favorite songs listed same-sex marriage as on par with “date rape, felony, and car theft,” and I agreed with it. Gay sex was one of the worst sins a person could commit, after all. “Being gay isn’t a sin,” I’d say, condescension in every word, “but you can never act on it. God wants those people to be celibate.” I’d never met an out queer person; it was simply the thought of those people that led me to stick my nose in the air. I was inexplicably good at gay chicken games, though, getting closer than anyone else dared before pulling away. Why could that be? I didn’t know better.

I was nineteen and in therapy at my conservative Christian college for attraction to women. My counselor suspected I must be watching lesbian porn to cause such a thing (I wasn’t), and she advised me not to identify as LGBT+ but to simply say I was “experiencing same-sex attraction.” A member of a student worship team was fired from his position for coming out. I was terrified of anyone in power finding out about. The campus pastor, my home church, my parents. My life would fall apart if anyone knew I liked women. I didn’t know better.

I always thought trauma had to be something big, bad, a single huge event. But maybe it can be subtle, a shadow that looms over decades of my life. It hurts. I feel angry, betrayed, wounded. All those years of purity culture and homophobia, and I feel like I should have known better. But I trusted them—trusted my parents, trusted my college, trusted my church—to want what was best for me. But they had an agenda. They might have called it something else, something innocent, something benign, but it was an agenda. And they formed me into this hollow little statuette, elegant on the outside but messy and ugly and empty inside.

I hated myself, and I hated everyone who stood for what I refused to acknowledge I wanted.

Religion tore me apart, yet spirituality was the whisper that kept me sane in the carnage. A single candle flickering in the night. The things I had been taught for years were evil, were untouchable, were the only things that comforted me. The touch of a woman. A reassuring tarot reading. Relatable ancient beings. Whatever gods might exist, I found them in my own way.

I was twenty-six and bought my first tarot deck on Etsy. I cleansed the cards with a candle, prayed for clarification, and shuffled for the first time. It felt like coming home.

Now I’m twenty-eight and I have an entire drawer of tarot decks and a box of witchy supplies. I talk to YHWH, Yeshua, Artemis, Cerridwen. I don’t attend church anymore, but I listen to Joyce Meyer sermons on YouTube and read spiritual books. I said the words religious trauma about myself for the first time this year, and I’m working myself up to discussing it with my therapist. I married the woman I love, and my spirituality embraces our love.

I know better now, and that’s what counts. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

-Ivy L. James

Ivy L. James wrote her first story on Post-it notes as a child. Since then, she has graduated to regular paper and enjoys writing both nonfiction and fiction, primarily queer adult romance. She lives in Maryland with her wife and their corgi, cat, and two snakes.