CW: Religion, suicidal thoughts mention, homophobia

    I dreamt of St. Mary’s Academy again. The hallways twist inside my mind like a virus. I can walk them in my sleep, I can navigate them through my dreams, but I do not know what I’m looking for. Last night I went to a play, and I saw my name on a whiteboard where my performances on that stage lay ranked. My friends cheered with me as we watched the last part of the play performed by young children–children that would not be able to attend the high school for many years. I did not question why they were there, simply thought it sweet of them, cute of them to put on something for the open house the Academy hosted. Why tours were offered for the private school to the entire public made little sense, yet there I was, curled up in the third row with friends, chatting and reminiscing with people that never even attended that school. A girl I met at my next high school sat next to me and laughed about the strictly catholic wording of every greeting and goodbye. A girl I knew from college lingered at my side, amazed by the religious doctrine of it all. A woman I met after getting my Bachelor’s wandered the halls with a notebook, and wrote down the things she saw with such joyous excitement that I wondered what exactly she found so mesmerizing about a place she never once attended. 

    After the play, me and several others wandered out of the auditorium and down the hall to the right. A classroom made into a gift store welcomed us on the left, full of forged depictions of ancient Roman statues, coins, tokens. When I attended school there, I learned Latin for two years. I found myself poor at remembering the language, grasping it loosely and depending on my teacher’s light grading scale to keep me from failing the class. But I remembered one thing for the class: the final project I did for it, in which I made a model of Roman battle tactics, depicted what they meant, how they were important, the different legions and names for it all. Romans used to build bridges over rivers and destroy them after they were crossed to conquer other territories and leave no avenue for escape, did you know that? 

I wonder if Christians stole the same tactic.

    We came across a staircase after the gift store, one that, in reality, only ever led upwards. St. Mary’s has a basement, of course, but in my dream, this staircase led down to the pits of something I never saw before. The school claimed expansion, that because so many students wanted to apply, they were building more facilities, which meant they were digging.

    I went alone. The bricks steps broke off at a certain point, unfinished, meaning I needed to jump into the sand and cement just to make it to the next level. As I descended, a sound echoed up to me. The sound of something shifting, over and over, across a hard surface. The sound of wind, I thought, naively. But no. As I continued to climb further and further down, I could see what this floor comprised of. Dirt and sand and an uncomfortable, eerie red glow. The shifting sound increased in volume. And it was near the bottom of the staircase I saw it for what it was:

    A worker sweeping the steps.

    I woke then, dazed, confused, groggy and unable to pull myself fully out of that dream. Out of the oddness of visiting St. Mary’s yet again during my unwaking hours. It is now that I remember that this is not the second time visiting the school, but the third in the last few months. All uncomfortably familiar. St. Mary’s is expanding, the dreams declare, come to the open house tour and see within these high school walls. I am unable to resist the beckoning, no matter the dream. I always enter the school. I always wake with an uncertain, dazed mind, that spirals in fog and cannot truly separate itself from the fiction concocted in my unconscious. 

    St. Mary’s is one of the few private schools that holds good memories for me. I do not know why. Most of my time there I spent in a suicidal stupor, befriending other young girls in the all girl’s school, stumbling along with them through hormones and the onset of life-long depression. I remember the teenager I befriended first, with a seasonal name, and how she stood as a pillar of friendship even when I could not relate to her, could not understand her, and ultimately, fell away from her. I remember the friend who was kissed first by a boy she met, I remember how she told us it was in the back of a movie theater, how giddy and blushy she was. I remember how she had so much of her life together, and I remember her telling me my parents didn’t seem all that bad. 

    I remember how I stopped talking to her about my depression, my pain, the way my head coiled up at night to strike me with my failures, my sorrows, in a type of poison I had no antidote for. 

    In my high school years, I held no words to describe the feelings that buried me in a shallow grave each time the sun fell below the horizon. I didn’t tell my friends about the time my parents read my diary and then took me to PF Chang’s to bully me into renouncing all homoromantic feelings I experienced. Until I told them they were right, maybe I really wasn’t gay, maybe I really didn’t have a crush on the girl who had a crush on me. I didn’t tell my friends because I was ashamed. I didn’t tell them because it would make me vulnerable. I didn’t tell them because I believed my upbringing wasn’t that bad, and maybe I was alone in this feeling of otherness. Maybe I was the only one in the world who felt like this.

    The girl I had a crush on had an accepting family. Her mother readily accepted her child was bisexual, and her father wearily agreed in a confused, but loving manner. 

    My friend who had her first kiss never had anything to say about her parents, nothing that pertained to any great feelings one way or the other. 

    And there I was at school, each day, reminded that not only did my feelings towards my friend cast me into sin, but that my depression was simply something every teenager went through. That my depression wasn’t really depression, it was hormones. I was being dramatic. And when my parents sent me to therapy for a few sessions, I exited that room more confused and unsure and angry. I wanted answers. And the therapist could give me none. 

    I planned my suicide based off an outside jog the gym class partook in. We crossed a bridge in downtown Portland made of wire that you could see through. I knew the route by heart. I knew how to get there from the school. I knew when it was less crowded. I knew where I could jump off and crash into the freezing waters below. 

    And yet the school holds fond feelings for me. Despite the sprouting roots of trauma that would follow me through life for many years after, St. Mary’s holds this idyllic image in my head. Despite the nuns that terrified us as they wandered the halls, shaming women with curvy bodies, antagonizing those with larger breasts or bigger butts; despite the way the priest tried to tell an auditorium full of women that their place was in the home beneath a man; despite the way they outed me for going to a club where the young women were free to explore their identities and talk about it without shame–this place still holds such a state of purity in my mind regardless of the harm it helped contribute to. 

    My friend invited me to that club I mentioned above. It was called Geography Club, the name meant to hide what it really was. I attended, and the first few meetings were good, and were open, and were accepting. I remember feeling this sense of peace there, feeling excited to attend, eager and happy and lighter than I had ever been before.

    Then the scariest nun from the school, a woman of broad shoulders and tall height, called my parents in to tell them I was attending this club, and I was banned from ever going again. They said it was a club for gay people, and I acted alarmed. Certainly that is not what I meant to join. The club never said anything about that. And I remember the tendrils of suicide once again creeping into my mind.

    And yet, there are teachers that break through that shadow. Our history teacher, who taught us we could be whatever we wanted to. That we didn’t need to be homemakers. We could if we wanted to, but we could be historians, archeologists, politicians–whatever we desired if we put our minds to it. Her class was hard, but I loved it. I loved her. She was inspiring and I remembered her teachings all through the rest of my schooling career. I could be anything.

    My Latin teacher, who preached a kindness that I never knew in any other my other teachers. Latin did not come easily to so many of us, and he knew that. He helped us on tests, he graded kindly on assignments, he made sure his classroom was a safe place for us to explore concepts of all sorts. He opened his classroom up to us to learn more Latin after school should we want, or get his help on assignments if we were struggling. He showed me what school should be: a place of learning that did not chastise you for your struggles. 

    There was my TA, who served as a teacher for our homeroom of sorts, who cared for me and my struggles. It seems that she was the one who told the nun of my attendance to Geography Club. She taught me to be careful of who I trusted.

    And there were my friends, the ones that I lost over the years out of obligation to my religious creed. The one that hugged me and told me she’d be with me, no matter what my parents said. The one that told me there was nothing wrong with being bisexual. The one that taught me the human body did not deserve the shame it received. The ones that normalized divorce and single mothers. The ones that normalized physical affection to me, before even that expression was stolen by religion. 

    The school, the doctrine of its religious testimony, causes my chest to tighten and my hackles to rise. There is an instinctual reaction of my body now, a defensive mechanism to protect myself whenever I read the declaration of cultist behaviors. The foundation St. Mary’s stood upon is one I cannot connect to, cannot feel safe within. And yet those working within it, under its watchful eye, teaching us feminism, teaching us other religions, teaching us what it meant to be treated as human beings–those are the people that saved that school for me. Those are the friends who rescued me from the grips of death. That time held such darkness for me for a number of years, and yet now, I look upon it, and I reclaim it. 

    The harm that happened to me around those years of my life caused wounds that are just now beginning to be tended to. But the people in that school are people that I wish I could meet again, I wish I could appreciate more, I wish I could tell how much they did to save me from a doctrine that sought to push me into motherhood and child-rearing and a straight relationship that would cause me nothing but pain.

    After St. Mary’s, I enrolled in RCS, a religious school I’ve spoken about here already. Because of those few teachers hardening me with feminism and the wild concept of equal rights and equal autonomy, I could resist the indoctrination of RCS a little harder than I might’ve otherwise. That is not to say I was not indoctrinated–I was. I was eye-level with the swamp of toxicity, if not head-deep. But because of St. Mary’s, I became equipped with the tools needed to begin my slow, gradual push back towards the shore. Because of St. Mary’s, I learned how to tilt my head back and gasp for breath above the surface. 

    To my history teacher, to my Latin teacher: Thank you. 

    To the friends at that time that I hurt with my religion: Thank you for planting the seeds that would help me get out. And I’m sorry for the pain I caused. 

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