In Portland, Oregon, my family sent me to a women’s small group. Depression’s hooks sank into me then. It accompanied me as a shadow, stalking my steps, grabbing at my ankles as I stumbled down the sidewalk. 

The small group leader’s house sat in the middle of a well-off neighborhood. It sat upon a curve in the road, with bright white paint coating the exterior. I stepped out of the car and headed up with my bag filled with a journal, a pen, and my phone. Uncertain strides brought me through the front door, past the screen, and into the large interior. A living room spread out to my right, and a kitchen in front and to my left. Directly at my side, facing the road with a large, bright window allowing sunlight to cover the carpet, a living room boasted the smells of the home: a floral candle, with hints of rose. The carpet did not extend past the living room, instead hardwood floors took its place, polished well enough that the ceiling reflected off the surface. A few women milled around, chatting by the kitchen island. Beckoned closer, I took off my shoes, closed the door, and moved to join them.

It was not long before prey instinct kicked in, stirred inside my chest by the eyes of those who sat around me. We took up residence outside, in the grass-covered garden with high fences, shrubbery, and a patio. The host owned two outside tables, one on the cement, one on the grass. On my second visit, we sat in the chairs on the grass, with me second to the end. The earth oozed beneath my feet and stained my socks green, spilling juices between my toes, adding to the discomfort from the topic at hand. From the topic always at hand.

I knew I had depression. I had sited it before, mentioned it to my family before it had been dismissed. I was a teenager. Everyone felt like they had depression when they were a teenager. What I was experiencing was normal.

What I was experiencing could be cured.

The women meant no harm. Their lives found them in the heart of religious ideology. They sunk into it, like my toes into the moist dirt, swallowed up and stained. This was all they knew, all they understood, and all the advice they could give me. 

“Don’t worry,” said the woman next to me, perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven in age. “You won’t be single forever. When you get married, your husband will help support you, and make you feel less alone. I know I struggled with a lot of depression myself, but honestly, my husband helps me so much with that.” She smiled. She, too, smelled like roses. She put her hand on my shoulder and I wished, desperately, to abandon that half of me, to pull away from that arm and leave it to rot so I might escape. “Have you given it to the lord?” 

I attended the small group on Tuesdays for a little over a month. I did not speak of my mental health again. I did not speak hardly at all. The saccharine smiles, the cheery dispositions, the easy answers to hard questions–I found myself incapable of being heard, incapable of speaking. Instead, I listened. I listened and I listened and I listened. 

The solution, it seemed, was to get married. To find a husband. Passions need not apply, ideas for your future need not enter the building. Our role as submissives, as arm candy, stood utmost upon all concerns. Over ten years younger than many of the members, I sat quietly in the meetings, shared only when directly asked, and found myself wondering why I was there. Why I attended at all. Why I even wanted to be part of a group like this. 

I stopped attending. I stopped reminding my parents of the date, of the time. When confronted about why I was no longer going, the host asked if it was because everyone was so much older than me. I smiled and nodded, as a liar would.

The disconnect stirred in my soul, but I did not know what it meant. I figured that it was the concern of adults–marriage and dating and men. I figured that because they were older, this, clearly, was the reason I could not engage in this conversation, because I had not yet reached the age of caring for any of these things.

That was not the reason.

It would not come for me until years passed, until I myself reached the age of twenty-seven. Until I stood in the house I built with my own two hands, on the property I purchased with my own funds. With my socks pressed up against the chilled floor as I put on hot chocolate to warm myself up from being outside. Then, the memory would resurface after years of being buried and, with it, an explanation. 

I was not straight. I did not like men. I was scared of religion because of this. I was fearful of my own mind killing me, and they did not think to care. Because religion started to shape up to be the beast I now knew it for, a monster with teeth and fangs and grasping hands that dragged and choked and beat me into the box I was meant to fit inside. The box, as a teenager, I was starting to escape.

Hearing the women speak about how we should be wives, how we should submit, quoting the bible about women being silent and laughing about how they nearly sinned for getting mad at their husbands filled me with such terror of being in their position, filled me with horror of what my future would be. The surface depth of their remarks, of their concern. I could not understand their solution to give depression to the lord, I could not see why they thought that would work. I could not see how they believed a man would solve everything. Not until I grew up. Not until I stepped out of that mindset of submission to find myself realizing that was what I learned all my life. I learned so often that the world was built for men, and I was only the love interest. I did not leave that group because they were all older than me. I left it because I knew I could not belong. I knew that I did not see the world as them, that I did not believe as them, and that the god they believed in would send me to hell for the sin of being alive. 

Posts each and every day this week! Why? I’m gearing up for my second book launch! Check it out!