#priestdaddy

When I was a child, I always hated being used in my father’s sermons, shrunk to a symbol to illustrate some larger lesson, flattened out to give other people comfort or instruction or even a laugh. It did some violence to my third dimension; it made it difficult for me to breathe. “That’s not me,” I would think, listening to some fable where a stick figure of myself moved automatically toward a punishing moral. “That has nothing to do with me at all.” If I had a soul, I thought, it was that resistance, which would never let another human being have the last word on me.

I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.

I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male rage, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am. Before I turned thirteen, I had never been part of a class that my father called empty-headed and addressed as "dollface", that our church seemed to see as just bodies. I was simply myself, unique and irreducible. Suddenly I became female, and it was as if a telescope I had been looking through- with a clear eye, up at an unbounded night of starts- had been viciously turned on me. I went to a pinpoint. Does God exist was never a question for me then; do I exist took up the whole of my mind. I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: we cannot raise our voices. This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put myself. I am no longer whispering through the small skirted shape of a keyhole: the door is knocked down and the roof is blown off and I am aimed once more at the entire wide night.

A trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame or regret, or brokenness behind repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightening, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not in that way. Not in those words.