General content warning: This is a piece about the crossroads of our current socio-political landscape, through the lens of the author’s upbringing and life experience.
Mentions of emotional and physical abuse, rape, religious trauma, gun violence, school shootings, racism & hate crimes, and others.
Topics and themes touched on are handled respectfully, but told unflinchingly.
W
H e a l e r
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It’s 2005.
I am being raised to be a weapon.
I’m ten, or so. They split the boys and the girls off into different classrooms after worship. Pouring ancient ideas into young ears. For the Nth century in a row.
Carving tenants of morality into our minds that even years of reflection and therapy will struggle to erode.
I don’t know what happened in the girls' classrooms. I don’t know if I want to know, truth be told. But the boys’ were strange, looking back.
Full of grand, heavy words; spiritualism couched in militarism. Or perhaps the other way around.
They tell us that we are Soldiers of God.
Protectors.
Providers.
Defenders.
That ours is the call to lead. To sacrifice. To rule.
To channel and bask in righteous anger.
They tell us, in so many words, that there is a war coming, and we need to be prepared.
That a day will come where the armies of Evil would descend on everything we held dear and wipe out as many of us as they could.
A war that would end in fire and death and the blood of innocents overflowing the gutters.
Grand, heavy words, with no instruction on how to bear their weight.
Like so many young people, I learn to embrace this doctrine. To take pride in it.
As if the greatest contribution I could leave to this world is to die - noble, faceless, nameless - for a righteous cause.
Like so many young people, pride simply a mask for something else
Rage. Pain.
Pain we rarely have words for, at that age.
Rage from our lives not belonging to us. Rage from hypocrisy.
Rage from bruises dealt by pastor’s sons.
Rage that we have to bury.
Rage I hid in a crypt carved deep into the meat of my soul.
I wonder how many of us still feel it some days. The siren call of biblical Wrath; Raised with a moral compass no one around us seemed interested in following.
Whispers in my veins calling for justice.
~
It’s 2008.
I am twelve, maybe thirteen, I think, and suffocating under the weight of expectations. Trying to ignore how the air I breathe feels dangerously thin, growing thinner.
The youth aren’t dismissed for our usual separate classrooms.
They have a surprise for us today, instead.
The church has brought a group of prophets from other congregations to speak over us. If we have spoken in tongues, we are allowed to meet with them.
A swarm of us file out of the pews.
And over the commotion of a crowd forming rough rows and lines, I can hear the callings being given to the boys around me.
Prophet.
Warrior.
Leader.
Missionary.
Pastor.
I am shy. It will be many more years before I understand the "why" beneath the unshakable feeling that I do not belong here.
For now, I am simply “shy.”
Like the last film of water trailing after a wave.
Trailing after the others, slow to return to the ocean.
Trailing after the others, dreading the overfamiliar male paw clapping on my shoulder. The humiliation of some self-important, patronizing snake telling me what the course of my life should be.
It gets blurry, around there.
I don’t remember her face.
Sometimes she has frizzed, curly blonde hair, others long red locks. Sometimes she is tall and stout and sometimes short and frail and sometimes any number and blend of traits.
But I still remember her weaving through the crowd to me; the purpose and intention in her movement.
I remember a watery but even but steady voice, - “Hi sweetheart. You feel ready?” - and how she offered me her hands, and the inexplicable, almost crushing relief that it’s this person, and not one of the others.
I remember her cool, soft fingers around mine.
I remember it took her less than 2 seconds to speak my calling.
And I remember the small smile beneath closed eyes as she quietly told me, “Oh, you’re a healer too.”
And my heart cracked down the middle.
At the time I was disappointed.
I had made a home in my Anger. She was well-fed, and had grown nearly beyond my ability to contain.
Born into a world that would not let Her speak. Confused and directionless and distrustful and vicious — and pain, She was in so much pain. With nowhere to put it.
What was I, if not my anger.
What good could I possibly be capable of, all sound and fury.
What healing could a weapon possibly bring to anyone.
At the time I felt relief. God, I felt relief.
Dragged from black water for one stuttering, shattering breath.
Resuscitation.
Divine validation - permission - that I did not have to be what I had been raised to.
I did not have to be a weapon.
I could be kind. I could be good. I could be soft.
I could care.
I could care.
Even now there’s some spiritual resonance in it for me; One of only a handful of Angels I’ve met in my life. I don’t remember her face.
But I remember that breath.
It’s never left.
~
It’s 2009. It’s 2010.
I am learning to feed the growing ocean of Anger forming as the church’s message grates against my soul.
As the ideal begins to twist into a reality I don’t recognize.
As our call to feed the hungry, and care for the sick, and protect the most vulnerable goes largely ignored, while the most “Christ-like” virtues are somehow spat on, treated with scorn and disdain. Hollowed out into something toothless, feckless, anemic.
I am taught to view those outside the congregation as both emotionally inept children in need of salvation, and maliciously cunning spiritual predators. Lost lambs and wolves in sheep's clothing.
Told over and over that those outside our following are “vile, deceitful and unclean.” That it is our place to tell them so. Our place to be ready to save them, or someday fight them.
Even as those I am told to hate become my people. Far more than those I was raised with.
So much, and so heavy.
And Anger the only company to be found.
Whispers in my veins.
I never quite know what to do with it. It’s so much bigger than I am.
Then, as now, forever holding an ocean back with sugarglass.
~
It’s 2011.
Something is wrong. Something is wrong.
Like Pale eyes flickering at a dusky tree line. Like footsteps behind me on an empty street.
Trustworthy smiles and eyes that hold no warmth.
Something is moving at the corners of my sight and I can never catch it.
I am a child and I don’t have the words but something is wrong and my skin is crawling.
I was brought up in this House of God and something doesn’t add up.
Forbidden knowledge glimpsed in stolen moments, a violence glossed over, an earnest, innocent question that prompts too much ire.
Everyone feels the same, and acts the same, and believes the same.
There are no opinions, there are no feelings, there are no beliefs. There is an opinion, there is a feeling, there is a belief.
The reverent repetition of a sermon across a dozen congregations that feels too…too…
I am a child and something is wrong.
I was brought up in this House of God. And in this house I have never been permitted to touch the walls. To open doors. To push boundaries. To question.
I am punished if I do.
Anger flickers restlessly in all directions.
Something is wrong.
Eventually the dissonance proves too much, and I press my palm into this immovable, omnipotent object.
My hand punches clean through it.
The walls collapse, the foundations crumble, the floor gives way beneath me. My world tears apart like a thousand sheets of paper.
My world is not real.
My world is not real.
Horror. I am drowning in real, actual, eldritch horror.
Lies.
I am blind, freefalling in a hurricane.
All of it, lies.
Betrayal and blasphemy.
They lied to us.
A knife between my ribs, my parents’ hands on the hilt.
Desecration. Filth. Sacrilege. Murderers.
Whispers in my veins boiling and blistering and there is no curse - no slur - no violation foul enough to describe the feeling.
Spiritual rape.
Murderers.
Anger coils protectively around me, spines out toward a world too big to be safe.
Cast down from a Paper Heaven.
Falling for lifetimes through an endless grey scream.
Hurtling toward a world so impossibly vast it blasts my skin raw.
I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know what to feel, and neither does She.
We were never meant to live.
We’ve never been taught to be anything at all.
We were never meant to live.
Murderers.
~
It’s 2012. It’s 2014. It’s 2016.
We survive, somehow. Soldiering on.
Anger still lives, stronger than ever. She spends her days tearing through the cages and crypts and hollow places of my heart; enlisting, releasing, imprisoning, hunting.
She is not kind to me, and I am not kind to her. We find little about ourselves worthy of love.
But we are united in our spite. We will not be what we were raised to.
We will not be a weapon.
We would sooner die.
So She tears through us, hunting for pieces of me to kill.
Pieces we did not choose, but are responsible for.
Somehow - amid the spiral of self-hate and self-harm and self-slaughter - by some mercy, She finds a survivor of our fall from grace. Empathy; bloodied, subdued, and never quite broken.
Little lost beat of our heart. An unexpected kindred spirit.
And the two of them would grow close as twins, finding much in common, and much to talk about.
Anger, born into a world that will not let Her speak; and Empathy, into a world ready to tear Her apart. She shelters beneath Anger’s great, dark wings.
Soon it becomes impossible to feel one without the other.
By choice or by necessity, it’s often instinctive to feel nothing at all.
I am exiting my teens and approaching my twenties, nursing a wound that will take another decade to heal.
It does not come intuitively, as one would hope — meeting new people, and trying to love the world, as terrifying as it can be.
Instead, pushing out into life, the briar of my upbringing carves ribbons from my heartflesh.
It’s hard.
It’s so hard I would cry, if I could.
Trying to love, having been raised without it.
Butchering a language your soul knows, but your mouth was never taught to speak.
~
It’s 2015. 2017.
So many years since I abandoned the faith, and somehow never enough to feel clean.
Taking years - and ready to take many more - to heal from the hate they bled into me. Soiled the fabric of my soul.
Shell-shocked, in hindsight, by how easily it seems to come to them. Marveling, in rapt horror, at the effortless abandonment of conscience.
Never finding someone to speak to who “gets it.” Someone healed enough to call a mentor.
Crushingly alone, wandering the irradiated crater of my spirituality.
Searching desperately - impotently - for a redeeming quality in the life I was brought up in.
I still think, often, about the woman who took my hands – called me a healer.
Once, it was a somber relief to find one small, shimmering shard of kindness to take from that hell. Divine permission, delivered by an Angel whose face I cannot remember.
Now I’m not so sure. Now it feels like one more slap to the face.
Next year I’ll be a senior. I’m preparing for my thesis. I’ve spent three and a half years researching mental health and its systems. Searching for a place to make a difference, a ripple.
I speak with the unhoused and case workers: With people who have lived in the system, and been failed by it: With Peer support coordinators: Law enforcement, both active and retired: Professors and government officials.
I read of a Lakota-Kiowa-Apache man - Zachary Bearheels - confronted by four officers while stranded at a gas station. Held by both arms and both legs. Dragged by the hair. Beaten and choked. Tazed until he died.
He was resisting, you see.
I listen to a police chief patronizingly explain the slippery slope of various forms of police accountability.
I devour 1900’s news clippings and modern articles and books and research and documentaries and a crippling amount of pain entombed in the systems I am shackled to – with the desperate hope of a rescue dog at a bomb site.
Broken beyond repair. Broken by design.
Anger collapses. She has nothing left to burn.
Empathy, glassy-eyed and near-catatonic. There is no place for her in this world.
Blight.
Wither and rot.
A poisoned well.
Murderers.
How do you heal what must be excised.
How to excise what no one wants to release.
How to live when a nation’s dream is your perfect nightmare.
Whispers in my veins.
Grieving. Waning. Dying.
I attempt to take my life, twice.
~
It’s 2018.
I graduate, and can barely find the point in celebrating. I’ve long since become shattered by the pain in the world; the scale of the lie. The detestable sins of my global once-congregation. The complicity of many who claim to champion change.
Inflicting wounds to peddle snake oil.
Everyone in the world seems to communicate in a language I speak, but don’t understand.
Year after year after year, I pretend to believe - to care - about The Formula:
The college grad, the carefully chosen career, married at 20-something.
9-to-5: 401K: Investments: networking. I will live to see the ocean retake entire land masses.
The white picket fence, the two and a half kids. There were so many animals when I was a child. Where have they all gone?
First house second house third house. My job applications are deleted by algorithms, never seen.
Retire at 60, coasting on savings. I have watched tens of thousands die before the age of 30.
Grandkids at 62, travel when you’re too old to enjoy it. I can feel my body eroding, plastics and vanishing nutrition consuming me.
Die with pride and the knowledge that you accomplished nothing, contributed nothing, changed nothing.
You maintained the status quo and left “A Legacy.”
~
2019.
The story of your life dolled up in a neat, tidy, unbearably, saccharine bow.
“Your choices have all been made for you, aren’t you glad? Follow the plan and paint inside the lines and everything will work out just right.”
~
I am crawling and clawing up the walls of my own throat.
It is 2020 and I am desperate to force fingers between my own teeth.
To crack open my jaws and thrash free.
Whispers in my veins.
Hissing. Slithering. Scratching. Roiling.
It is 2020 and 21 and 23 and I am restless, always.
Shaking. Trapped.
Mass graves in New York.
Two hundred job applications over the last two years.
My therapist tells me religion isn’t inherently bad.
My partner tells me I need to grow up.
A week ago her likeness was murdered on the train.
Throats slashed.
Hate crimes in public transit.
Liberals, conservatives, centrists; all putting on the same show. Playing with the same shadow puppets. Holding up the same systems.
How.
How have I escaped one indoctrination for another, and all the while drowning in pain.
Pain like frigid water pouring down my throat and into my lungs and into my nose and plugging my ears, and thin, cold wires of panic wrapping, tightening around my heart.
The problem must be me. I must be broken. I am too soft for this world, too idealistic.
But the World is in pain. Her children are in pain. Why isn’t anybody doing anything?
Why weren’t we allowed to do anything?
Why couldn’t we stop to do anything?
What are they all doing, playing make-believe in this nauseating dollhouse.
What were they doing during Sandy hook and what were they doing allowing children — children — to be called “crisis actors” and con artists.
I worry I am going mad. These years blur like watercolor and my mind feels both frantic and sluggish. Time feels like sand, swirling with a lifetime of names and deaths.
Michael Brown.
A badged creature driving its knee into George Floyd’s throat.
Breonna Taylor murdered in her bedroom.
Trevon Martin murdered near his home.
Nex Benedict murdered in a bathroom.
Dead children.
Dead children - god, so many dead children.
Children in schools.
And children in factories.
Children in their homes. Children in their parents’ beds, children in their parents’ arms.
Children dead for oil. Children dead for metal. Children dead for creed. Children dead from white men’s schemes and from white men’s missiles.
I am working at a wine bar.
On my break, I pull up Instagram. Pennsylvania’s democratic governor autographs a bomb destined for the Ukrainian front. The reel after, a Palestinian family holds the body of their son.
His face is covered in concrete ash, streaked with blood.
He is not the first lifeless boy I’ve seen, and he will not be the last.
The way a dead child falls limp is something uniquely haunting. A bloodless prickle twists in my bowels.
As the nights and drinks wind on, patrons swap opinions on how much empathy is too much, and my heart creaks – I cannot understand the logic of artificially restricting our shared humanity.
Children dead under the strings of people who they could never know — people oceans away. Children dead under guns held by other children; weapons pressed into hands too small to hold them by greedy men - no, not monsters, men.
Children spoken of with callous disregard around the dinner table, under the watchful, painted eyes of White Jesus on the wall. Children who are “unfortunate but acceptable losses.” Children who are “not in my backyard.”
Children with big brown eyes and children who loved to finger paint. Children with patchy goatees and squeaky voices. Children who chased butterflies and children born without legs.
Children who blasted breakup songs and children who never got to have crushes.
Children who babysat to scrounge money for movie tickets. Children who babysat because their neighbors’ parents died to bombs.
Children who tore crusts off their sandwiches and children who hopped fences to skip school; who danced like newborn colts and who helped their parents drop cut onions into soup.
Children who wanted to be doctors and children who wanted to be beach bums.
Children who had dreams and love and fears and wants.
Children who huddled together in classrooms in their last moments; children who jumped in front of friends to be shields.
Children from a thousand different nations and children from my own city.
Children that had everything to live for and starlight in their eyes and they are dying, dying, dying and I cannot fucking take it anymore, and who the hell are you to dismiss their lives so thoughtlessly—
and then there it is.
I feel Hate. Hate that swallows me like a grey sandstorm.
A widow’s anguish; a mother’s grief.
A cloud of claws and teeth and a lungless wail that never ends.
Whispers in my veins blistering beneath my skin like crude oil.
Whispers calling for justice.
For vengeance.
For petty spite and burnt bridges.
That blood spilled calls for blood spilled, and an eye for an eye is not a steep enough price.
Brimstone.
Old Testament.
With a rage that flashes hot and cold and somehow feels far older than I am, I feel the siren call of biblical Wrath.
My fleshly heart pumping molten lead.
And I curse God for confining the frenzy of my soul within this flimsy meat.
Year after year after gut-churning year it burns me to my marrow and I am told that’s just how it is.
That there’s only so much to be done.
That my Anger is childish. My Empathy trivial. My time misused.
That if I just “grow up” the math will inform me that there’s only so many hours in the day, and so many dollars that must be made.
Rent stops for no one. Don't you want a career? Don’t you want to retire early?
But
they are dying,
and I cannot take it anymore.
~
It’s March of 2025.
I am listening to an elderly gentleman confide to our community group the pains of learning his neighbor’s voting habits. Again.
A line was drawn. He and his wife tell their neighbors they are no longer friends.
“It’s so upsetting. How can you talk to someone again after that.”
A well-intentioned man chimes in that it has to be done with empathy. From a place of compassion. A place of sympathy.
Another, that these are good people. Good people who have been misled. Good people in need of outreach.
Whispers in my veins.
Scratching. Probing. Chattering. Testing.
My mouth is full of blood and it takes everything I have, and everything I am, to not spit that we have talked.
We have talked.
We have talked and talked and cried and begged and pleaded and bent over backwards trying to find the perfect combination of words to convince these people that we are flesh and blood and bone and human.
They know.
They just don’t care.
I grew up with these people.
And whether named, or hidden in subtext, I know that the truest form of the Freedom they covet is the freedom to hurt others.
Freedom of indoctrination.
Freedom of stagnation.
Freedom of cruelty.
Freedom of violence.
Freedom of apathy.
Freedom from consequences. From conscience. From “the sin of empathy.”
Freedom from responsibility.
Freedom from any challenge to their rigid idea of what a life or self “should” look like.
I grew up with these people; I have watched them build their idols — a culture around an unthinking readiness to commit violence against the endlessly shifting goalpost of “The Other.”
They will start at the margins.
They will start with the least familiar, the least fortunate, the least visible, the least considered, the least glamorous.
The indigenous, our immigrants, our sick, our homeless.
Forcing the hands of millions to posit the consequences as moral failings.
But then, they already have, haven’t they.
Then they will come for the Freaks.
They will label us deviants, perverts, predators.
First the ones who don’t quite fit into neat boxes. But eventually those criteria will limber up.
A certain taste in clothing, a certain taste in music, a certain taste in partners, a certain color of skin – anything is fair game to be lumped in with the freaks.
Then they will come for the women.
They will come for the teachers.
They will come for the doctors.
They will come for your neighbors.
They will come for your friends.
They will come for your family.
They will come for your children.
They will start at the margins and work their way in — and by the time they get to you, dear well-intentioned white man, you will not have enough allies left to turn the tide.
And then they will come for you.
I grew up with these people.
I have seen the vile heart that beats within us as a species, and it terrifies me nearly beyond reason.
The World is in pain. Her children are in pain.
Why have so many needed to die?
How many more, before we say “ENOUGH.”
How many more before we stop them from behaving like animals.
How many more will we call good, who steadfastly refuse to listen or learn or care what hurts us. Kills us.
Playing make-believe in this nauseating dollhouse.
In answer to your theory of how to talk to them;
You don’t.
You grieve, you cry, you resent that we have been dragged down to their level. That you have been conscripted to play out this Us vs.Them paradigm. If it helps, you pray that someday will be the time for words.
And then you close ranks with your allies, and get to work.
You mourn that you must leave those who have willfully stayed asleep to dream their dollhouse dreams. Liberals, conservatives, centrists — any still playing their roles in the status quo.
Because they will do nothing, because they have done nothing.
Because their inaction is their answer and allegiance.
Because in their apathy, they are complicit.
They know.
They just don’t care.
~~~
It’s today.
And, after so many years, I once again find myself here.
Empathy and Anger; close as twins. My inner children, all grown up.
Inextricable and inseparable.
Stitched and spliced and forged together.
Through pain, and fire, and death, and damnation, and scalding holy light.
A coin.
A moon.
A scale.
A shield, a sword.
Whispers in my veins.
Trying to heal with one hand while the other prepares for war.
Accepting that I cannot be one without a readiness to embody the other.
A war is coming.
The armies of Evil preparing descend on everything we hold dear, and wipe out as many of us as they can.
A war that would end in fire,
and death,
and the blood of innocents overflowing the gutters.
Our brothers, sisters, siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, family, friends – they are dying.
My children are dying and in the dark corner sits a truth.
It stares into me and does not blink.
A truth I’ve hated all my life.
I was raised to be a weapon.
And - I'm so proud, and so sorry my dear - so were you.
Nico is a journalist by trade working toward becoming a therapist, inspired by John Green’s talent for soul-baring personal memoir to share their own life experience for anyone it might resonate with. They write for others like them, who may not feel seen, and for people seeking to understand experiences not their own.
You can usually find them around local queer spaces, or vanishing into the woods for ambiguous lengths of time — with very little middle ground.
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