1. Why I Think I Was an Easy Target

Before I ever stepped into Christianity, there was my childhood.

I was the firstborn child, born into chaos.
My parents fought constantly, shouting and breaking things.

My mom didn’t really raise me, she leaned on me.
She told me everything about her struggles and fears. I became her little therapist, the one she turned to for comfort.

She was deeply spiritual. She read tarot cards, angel cards, believed in crystals, past lives, and spiritual energies.

By nine years old, I had OCD. I had tics, and I was hearing condemning voices in my head that sounded like my mom’s angry voice.

Outside of home, it wasn’t safer.
I was bullied so badly that school felt like hell.
Every morning when my dad tried to drop me off, I felt like I was going to throw up or faint.

It got so bad that I couldn’t go to school anymore.
I didn’t know it was anxiety or panic attacks.
When I finally tried to go back, I couldn’t stay in a classroom.
The moment I walked in, I felt sick and terrified.

I had no safe space. Not at home, not at school, not anywhere.

And I believe, that that deep longing for safety is what made me vulnerable to church.

2. How We Got Into Church

By the time I was around twelve, my mom was searching for meaning. She let go of tarot, crystals, and past lives, and turned to Christianity.

At first, we went to a small church near our home. It felt harmless and even welcoming. But that didn’t last long.

Soon we were drawn into a much stricter revival movement. It was deeply fundamentalist, preaching purity culture, no homosexuality, and no women in leadership.
Everything was about rules, hierarchy, and control.

My mom believed that if we all found Jesus, it would save our family and maybe even fix my parents’ marriage. I went to Sunday mass and every Friday youth gathering.

It felt like relief. After years of chaos, church felt like the first place I belonged. There were rules, structure, and people who accepted me.

I didn’t see it as dangerous. I thought it was safety. But it would soon take far more than it gave.

The turning point was confirmation camp. Two weeks that felt like heaven on earth. For the first time in my life, I was accepted. I found friends. I finally belonged.

That’s when my faith consumed me. I was all in, fully devoted, and I saw nothing outside of it. Church became my world, my purpose, my identity.

And slowly, everything in my life began to revolve around faith.

3. My Life Inside the Church

After my confirmation camp, I became a tutor for upcoming camps.

I taught the Bible to teenagers, and every night we tutors gathered with the priest to pray that every camper would find Jesus.

I was completely immersed. This was my whole life. My identity. My meaning.

At sixteen, I started dating a boy from inside the church.

At first, it felt perfect. I believed our relationship would be blessed. I saw him as the example of a good Christian man. I had been taught that a woman’s role was to submit to a man, so I stepped into that role without questioning it.

But things changed. He was depressed and became mentally abusive toward me. I will not go into detail, because it still haunts me.

He terrified me and gave me constant anxiety, but I told myself that God could fix him. I thought if I prayed hard enough and loved him enough, he would change.

I was with him for three years. I stayed because I believed it was my role to help him. I wanted to be a good, understanding Christian partner, and I thought God had put me in his life for a reason.

Then we got engaged. That was the expectation in our church. People often married young, at eighteen or nineteen. We had even reserved the church and set our wedding date. From the outside, it may have looked like a perfect Christian relationship. No one knew what was happening behind closed doors, because I never told anyone.

But it was a nightmare. He was cold, distant, and angry. He made me feel worthless, and I believed him.

I felt trapped. I thought leaving him meant losing everything, my future, my identity, my worth in the church. But eventually I had enough. I found the courage to leave.

It was not easy. He told me again and again that he would kill himself if I did not go back to him. But even then, I knew I could not return. I started to see the toxicity of it all with clearer eyes.

That was when I began to doubt. How could someone so devoted to God, be so mean, so unloving?

Weren’t we always told that God changes people for the better? That faith heals broken hearts? But that didn’t happen.

And I had prayed and prayed for him, for us, for help. It only kept getting worse. I never heard or saw any answer from God.

I still have my old diaries from that time. Page after page of me crying out, God, can you not hear me? Why are you not helping me? I feel awful and trapped. Please help me.

4. Cracks in the Foundation

After breaking up with him, I started spending more time with people outside of the church. At first, it felt almost forbidden. We were always taught that those who did not believe were sinful and dangerous, and that we should stay away from them.

But when I actually got to know people outside the church, I discovered something. They were kind, compassionate, and genuine. Many of them treated me better than anyone inside the church ever had.

That made me start to doubt even more. Had I been lied to all this time? Was the church wrong about the world outside?

There was a boy from my school I had been playing video games with for a long time. We started hanging out and were just friends for a whole year.

After that year, we began dating. It was confusing because I was still deeply Christian, but he felt safe. I had never felt that kind of safety from a man before. He was not religious, yet he respected my boundaries and treated me with kindness.

Being with him showed me a completely different kind of relationship. One that was not about control or submission, but about mutual respect.

I still believed in purity culture, and I still felt guilty for questioning. But deep down, I could feel the cracks forming.

The foundation of my faith was starting to shake.

5. The Breaking Point

By the time I was in this new relationship, the cracks in my faith were already showing. I could no longer ignore the questions.

I still went to church, too afraid to tell my friends and family that I had stopped believing.

Then something happened that changed everything. My younger sister came out as gay. She was brave enough to tell the truth about herself to our family, our friends, and publicly online.

The reaction from the church was horrible. People turned on her. She was treated as if she was broken. And our mom was no better. She said homosexuality was a choice and that my sister was choosing to turn away from God.

Watching that broke something in me. Because if this was what God’s love looked like, I wanted no part of it. If this was how the church treated someone I loved, how could it possibly be the truth?

At the same time, I had already started testing the boundaries of what I had been taught.

For the first time, I let myself do things that were considered unforgivable. I thought that if I did these “sins,” I could never go back to church, and deep down, that was what I wanted.

The shocking part was that it didn’t feel sinful or evil. It felt human. It felt freeing.

I began to see that maybe these rules were never divine at all. Maybe they were just control.

That was the breaking point. Between seeing how my sister was treated and realizing that my own “sins” had not destroyed me, I knew I could not stay.

Leaving was not easy. I still felt guilt and fear. But once I saw the truth, I could not unsee it.

I finally understood that what I had been told was love had actually been control.

Once I saw that, I knew I could never go back.

My sister was the only person I knew who had gone through something similar. I love her so deeply. She is the strongest person I know.

After leaving, I had a horrible existential crisis. What was the meaning of life now? Nobody heard my thoughts or prayers anymore. Life felt empty and meaningless. I spiraled.

When I reached a point where I knew I could not handle it alone, I went to therapy.

For three years, I sat in that room and slowly began to untangle everything. My childhood. The indoctrination. The guilt. The shame.

6. Rebuilding and Freedom

Therapy saved me. It gave me tools to rebuild myself piece by piece.

It taught me that my thoughts and my worth did not have to be tied to a belief system.

It showed me that there was life outside of shame.

It was not quick, and it was not easy. But over time, I began to heal. I started to discover who I really was when no one was telling me what to be.

I began to realize that life does not come with an inherent purpose, and instead of that terrifying me, it started to feel freeing.

I began to build a life from scratch, a life where I get to decide what is meaningful.

I started university in a city where I knew no one. I was far away from the church, from family, and from the people who had hurt me.

I met my boyfriend, my absolute soulmate, at university.

We have been together for four years now. We have two dogs and we moved overseas to work. I could not be happier. He reminds me every day that he loves me, and that I am strong and capable of anything.