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[laurensaysthings]

The Church

I can only speak for myself and the specific sect of Christianity I survived, and I believe wholeheartedly that every human being has the right to decide their own beliefs about existence. But I also believe that there are many others like me who have been traumatized by the weaponization of the unique brand of conservatism that occurs within certain Christian communities. 

Here is my truth.

I grew up attending an Evangelical Free Church in a small, predominantly white farming town. I was a depressed, anxious kid. As a licensed mental health professional, I would probably schedule a kid like me for twice-a-week sessions. But back then, I was praised as an overachiever. Middle school was my time to shine. I was 0.01 points away from being 8th grade valedictorian. I was involved in sports, yearbook, student council, youth group, guitar, piano and voice lessons. But buried under all of that was a mile-thick layer of insecurity and crippling fear of losing a Kim Il-Sung level of control over my existence.

Though I was surrounded by adults who purported to care about my “spiritual well-being,” not once did anyone acknowledge or seemingly even notice my many depressive episodes or extreme anxiety, let alone suggest I receive treatment. Instead, I was pushed to do more within the church. I led worship for the youth group and small-group Bible studies for other teen girls. All the while, I was broken, often suicidal, seeking out external affirmation as a way to subvert my lack of self-knowledge and self-worth. 

Women weren’t allowed to hold higher leadership positions in my church, so the highest achievement I could hope for beyond what I’d already attained was to land a husband. A man’s commitment to a me as a woman was the highest form of validation.   

And in the pursuit of being “chosen” as a wife, the greatest honor, I had to prove myself to be worthy in a very specific way. It was drilled into my head that the highest form of integrity a woman can have is sexual purity. This meant not having sex before marriage but also, not leading men astray in my daily life. Mostly this meant I had to dress conservatively, because I was taught that men having sexual thoughts about me was my own fault only. I was Eve and every man on earth was Adam. He only ate the apple because she suggested it. 

In retrospect, this ideology is obviously why it took me 4 years to share the fact that I’d been raped with my Christian relatives. In fact, I still struggle with the vestiges of this ideology in my romantic relationships. How do you build an equal partnership when you are responsible for your partner’s actions and even their private thoughts in addition to your own? What an impossibly heavy burden to carry. 

Meanwhile, I was never taught about consent and bodily autonomy. The focus was only on sexual purity, not on what it means to have agency over your body and your sexuality. “True love waits” was the mantra indoctrinated into us as teens. Just don’t have sex, then get married, then have sex. That was the limit of the education about sexuality. Men have the right to your body because men, after all, are the head of the church and the household. The pain of this still lingers in my bones. I am still grieving over what I’ve let men get away with and what I’ve blamed myself for, even recently. 

The first example I can recall happened when I was 16. I had dropped out of high school after freshmen year because my depression had become untenable. The excuse I used was that I was spiritually vulnerable to being led astray by my classmates’ drug use and sexual escapades. But ultimately it was as simple as this: I was mentally ill and not receiving treatment. 

I was in so much pain, and I couldn’t share this struggle with my fellow Christians, my community and support system, because even at age 14, I “understood” that being in emotional pain was merely a result of personal moral failings. I just had to be a better Christian, pray harder, be more involved in church activities. Then I would feel better. 

I was homeschooled my sophomore year, and then I enrolled in courses at a local community college for my junior year. I tried to hide my age from my classmates (which in retrospect was incredibly silly, considering I looked like a child). There was a man (age 19 or 20) with whom I had a few classes in common that first year, and he took an interest in me. You will recall that my entire education about relationships up until that point was limited to the church’s overtures about the importance of my purity and my responsibility for men’s purity, so I was deeply confused by this man’s behavior toward me. 

He sexually harassed me for months. It was so bad that at one point, a professor noticed and called me in to his office to ask me if I wanted to report the man to the school’s administration. But of course I didn’t because it was my fault. If I could just be more conservative, it would stop. I started dressing in baggier clothing, trying to talk to this man about Jesus so he too could be saved. I spent MORE, not less, time with him in this pursuit. He offered me a ride home one night, and I would have accepted had it not been for the intervention of my parents and a good friend I had at the college. Who knows what would have happened had I gotten into his car that night. 

A few days after I refused the ride home, he changed completely. He started mocking me, telling me how worthless, ugly, disgusting I was. I will never forget one night at the end of class as we were leaving, he turned around and, in front of all of our classmates, said to me, “No one will ever touch you.”

Thinking back, I am so deeply sad for how much I internalized that sentiment. Being desired by a man, no matter how awful his behavior, was the ultimate compliment. And even though the church sought to curb sexuality as a means of control over women, it ironically had the opposite effect. Suddenly, as a result of this man’s harassment, I understood that the easiest way to get attention from men was through my sexuality. 

The church taught me that it is irrelevant for a woman to be intelligent and compassionate and successful, because what matters most is marriage and children. Sure, you can have a career, as long as you have a family first. College was a means to an end: attend a good Christian school to find a good Christian husband.

Here is the impossible paradox inherent in the church’s lessons: attracting attention from men means you are impure and unworthy of committed love BUT your worth is determined by a man paying you attention and choosing to commit to you. And so we have the classic conundrum of the “innocent slut.” Of course I know this impossible standard exists outside of the church, but the church certainly does a good job of reinforcing the mixed messages women receive all day every day in a constant barrage of advertising. 

Imagine if we let women's integrity be defined in the complex, holistic ways we calculate men’s integrity. Of course that would require women to have power and bodily autonomy. It would require women’s worth to be defined outside of the context of men’s approval. In fact it would have nothing to do with men at all. But in the church, I learned that men are the center of everything. I can support them and play a role in their agendas, but they hold the power.

Fortunately here is where my own beliefs started to diverge from those I was steeped in. When I left home at 18, I moved to a new city and surrounded myself with incredibly strong women. They were funny, creative, brilliant. Some of them were even Christian, which actually helped during this transition period. Quite frankly, these women saved me. 

Through their relentless friendship, I learned that even though I was broken, I was still worthy of unconditional love exactly as I was. I didn’t need to change or hide my truth. On endless road trips across the country and all-nighters studying and just sharing the mundane parts of life with people who loved me so thoroughly, I started to heal. 

With these women in my life as my safe harbor, I could be weird and take risks and explore my talents and interests unhindered. It was a revelation. I started to understand the power of women and not fear it. I started to understand my own power, and it had nothing to do with men.

Of course, it’s a journey. During this same time, I let men take all kinds of liberties with my time and my body. To this day, I’m still recovering from the harm the church has done in my life, but my recovery started there with those brilliant women. 

In the decade and change since that time, I have gotten treatment for my mental illness. I still have depressive episodes every now and then, and on a scale of 1-10, my daily anxiety level is an 8. But part of who I am is that I run a little neurotic. I still want to have a Kim Il-Sung level control over my life, but I can cope when I don’t, which is most of the time. And I still seek out brilliant women as my daily support system. 

I hold a leadership position at work now. I have a team that relies on my integrity, which I define by my compassion, strength, commitment to social justice and unconditional support of my team members. 

I survived that Evangelical Free Church in a small, predominantly white farming town. I don’t look back with hatred or bitterness but rather with grief. I am grieving what I missed out on during those years and also the harm I may have done to others as part of that structure. 

To my family members who continue to try to reel me back into the church, this essay is for you. 

This is so you can better understand why I left and why I won’t return. I don’t begrudge you your beliefs at all but I do take issue with the institution. 

I believe that we all have to continue to examine the systems within which we operate. What I've learned in the years since leaving the church is that we often miss the forest for the trees. You can be so steeped in something that you miss the harm it’s doing. 

Another way to claim our power is to keep learning. Surround yourself with people who are different from you, listen to their experiences, believe them. Support others in claiming power that was stolen from them. 

As with those women who helped me heal, I want to be a safe harbor for others to heal. The work begins within ourselves and the institutions we uphold. We are responsible. 

Love, Lauren

[laurensaysthings]

The Myth of the Perfect Victim

A few days ago a family member told me that “people need to stop making George Floyd into a martyr because he was a criminal.” And the grief that flooded over me in that moment brought me back to a day a few years ago when I was still working in the criminal justice system. 

Here’s what happened.

I first met 15-year-old Jess (not her real name), a petite Latinx girl, in a holding cell on the 4th floor of a Manhattan courthouse. As I introduced myself, she twirled around in the beat up office chair that was the only piece of furniture in the cell apart from the plastic lawn chair the corrections officers had brought in for me to sit in. I told her about the program I worked for, explaining that we provided services and legal advocacy for girls who experienced commercial sexual exploitation, and I could feel her rage building with each word I spoke. She retorted that she was not involved in “any of that” in a tone that conveyed how utterly offensive she found the suggestion. I quickly shifted gears to small talk to ease the tension, but she was having none of it. She told me to get the fuck out and being very much of the belief that young people have the right to self-determination, I complied. 

A few weeks later, I received an email from a foster care caseworker at a group home upstate stating that she wanted me to come to court that week to meet with a new referral before her hearing. It was Jess. 

I went again to the holding cells in the Manhattan courthouse, and the second Jess saw my face through the window, she lost it. She was up and out of the chair in seconds and yelling that in no way was she going to talk with me again. I complied with her wishes again.

Another couple weeks passed, and I received a call from the clerk in a juvenile Part of the same courthouse saying the judge had requested my presence at an upcoming hearing for one of his defendants, a young girl he suspected was a trafficking victim. Guess whose case it was.

I sat in my usual place in the courtroom, on the bench in the back behind the table where defendants sat with their counsel. As two officers brought Jess in through the backdoor in handcuffs, we made eye contact and she laughed a little. Progress! 

During the hearing the judge, a man who I appeared in front of multiple times a week, explained to Jess that if she started receiving services from the program I worked for, he would reduce her potential sentence. She agreed to meet with me again in the holding cells after the hearing. 

Back in the cell, she sat across from me with her arms folded and a bored look on her face. She let me say my piece again and when I finished, she nonchalantly said she’d work with me but only because she wanted a shorter sentence in lower-level placement. I assured her I would do everything I could to help her with that. That seemed to lower her defenses a little. I conducted an informal intake, not pushing too hard when I could tell a question made her bristle. 

I started regular counseling sessions with her in her group home. It was very quickly clear that she was smart, funny, resourceful, and compassionate. It was also clear she had been exploited. Even though she had gotten by on being tough and doing what needed to be done to survive, she was still a kid trying to find her place in the world.

The problem, however, was that almost every adult in her life treated her like a burden, a problem to be dealt with, an inevitable failure. She frequently cursed out her teachers at the group home school, when she actually chose to attend class. She went AWOL from her placement as often as she could finagle a clever way out. She refused the services her caseworker offered. She got into regular physical fights with other residents of the home. 

The first positive report that the judge had ever received on her case was mine at her next hearing. I highlighted her many strengths and her goals for her future. Her caseworker was livid with me. At the following court date, the worker was waiting outside the Part. As I walked up, she loudly and sarcastically said to the agency attorney, “Here comes GEMS with their good reports.” 

Over the next year, Jess and I became increasingly close. We continued with our weekly counseling sessions, and I watched as she worked hard to meet the goals she had chosen for herself: get her grades up, stay in placement, learn new ways to manage conflict. She was fiercely protective of her friends and found that helping others was a way to channel her frustrations with an unjust world. 

She completed her sentence successfully and made honor roll that semester. She was moved from the juvenile justice group home to a regular non-restrictive placement. 

At the first check-in hearing (and one of her last hearings altogether) after she was moved, the judge praised her accomplishments and Jess sat upright in her chair (no handcuffs this time) and beamed with pride. She told him about the new goals she was working toward, including finding a part-time job. 

The judge then collected the report from her caseworker and read it aloud on the record. The worker was recommending she be moved back to a more restrictive setting. He paused after reading the line: “She displays hyper-sexualized behavior toward male staff and peers.” He looked up from the paper at the caseworker with such fury in his expression, I thought for a moment he might actually jump over the bench and tackle her. Jess collapsed into herself, tears welling up in her eyes. The judge turned to me, “Ms. Geiser, please take Jess out to the waiting area.” Jess and I walked out together, and she starting sobbing the moment we sat down. We could hear the judge’s yelling, even through both sets of solid wood doors.

I was furious as well. What could possibly motivate this woman to describe a trafficking victim as displaying “hyper-sexualized behavior?” After all of the work she had put in over the past year, Jess was still just one thing to this woman: a problem, a burden she wanted to shift to someone else. To her Jess wasn’t a victim of unspeakable sexual violence; she was a criminal to be locked away.

Because her “behaviors” didn’t conform to whatever this sadly misguided woman (and so many others in this country, including myself on many occasions) expects from a victim, she couldn’t possibly be a victim. Yes, she had committed a crime that led to this case in the first place. But she is ALSO a victim. 

No human being is just one thing. George Floyd had committed crimes in his lifetime. So have I. I went through a pretty intense shoplifting phase in middle school, but fortunately for me, I was a middle class white girl. Even if I had been caught, the worst that would have happened would have been a call to my parents. I once had a client, a teen girl of color, who was in year 3 of juvenile detention for stealing nail polish from CVS.

George Floyd did not deserve to die, regardless of his past “behaviors.” The officers surrounding him that day as their colleague knelt on his neck for 9 minutes saw him as only one thing: a criminal. We cannot make that same mistake as we reckon with his death. He was also a father, a brother, a friend, a cherished member of his community, a human being. 

When I left my last job, Jess was one of my hardest goodbyes. At that hearing, the judge did not move Jess to a restrictive setting. He closed her case shortly after. I still think about her almost daily, and I have a note she wrote me on my last day hanging in my office. Her note reminds me to stop myself in my tracks when I start to see people in two-dimensional terms. The first time we met, she cursed me out. But she became one of my favorite people to see each week. 

When we see a person as the complex, multifaceted being they are, when we take the time to understand the context of their lives and the environment they’re navigating, we are making space for both of us to become the best versions of ourselves. 

Let’s learn from this painful time. There’s so much more work to do, and to my white family members: that work starts within ourselves.

Love, LRG

[laurensaysthings]

Just like, snakes everywhere.

This has been a hard week to be a political news junkie. Here’s the thing: I have a hard time explaining to men what it’s like to be a sexual assault survivor. Here is the best metaphor I can think of:

Imagine you were attacked by a poisonous snake. You were always careful around snakes and kept your guard up. But this one time, despite your best efforts at self-preservation, you were attacked. It was painful and terrifying and you barely got through it alive. Your body and mind are kind of... different now. 

Of course you know that not all snakes are poisonous but you also know from experience that some are. 

Also now imagine that half of everyone you have to interact with on a daily basis is a snake. You can’t really be sure which ones are poisonous so you just have to suck it up and try to navigate the world as if half of the population might not attack you unexpectedly at any moment. 

That’s sort of what it’s like to have been sexually assaulted by a man and then still have to navigate a world that is half men.

But here’s the other thing:

The world is half men AND is also designed for men, by men. 

So basically being a sexual assault survivor is like being a snake attack survivor in a snake pit ruled by a snake president overseeing a snake-ocracy.

And so reading the news has been hard this week because after an accomplished, credible woman has come forward with attempted rape allegations against a powerful man, I’ve watched as other powerful men came forward to defend not the victim but the accused. 

I don’t know Christine Blasey Ford personally but I feel so deeply connected to her (and so many other survivors) at this moment in history. As a victim, it isn’t her responsibility to hold accountable the person who attempted to rape her. But the other man in the room didn’t hold him accountable. Nor did any of his friends and classmates who knew what happened. She suffered quietly for 36 years while Brett Kavanaugh moved up through the judicial ranks unhindered. 

As women, we are constantly reminded in very small, seemingly innocuous ways that we are not allowed to have any personal boundaries. A boob grab on a crowded subway, an order to smile while walking down the sidewalk, an unwanted hug from a man in a position of power over us. 

When I was in undergrad, I worked part time as a housekeeper at a bed and breakfast between classes. The owner, my boss, was a single middle-aged man who lived in a private suite in the bed and breakfast. He would have me clean his suite occasionally and when I did so, he would make a point to be there in the room, standing too close to me (sometimes even touching), cracking sexual jokes about messing up the sheets on the bed I was making and telling me about women he slept with recently. 

I was 19 and thought this was perfectly normal because this is just how men are, especially when they have authority over you in some way. If there is a liberty to take, it will be taken. No one had to tell me expressly that this is what it’s like to be a woman in the world. I had already learned it by then, the cumulative lesson on the other side of hundreds of small reminders that I don’t get to have boundaries. 

We don’t get to have expectations about our bodily autonomy but men get to expect that they are allowed to “slip up” at our expense when they are still young and immature. Brett Kavanaugh was just a high school boy who partied too much. We can’t expect much at that time in a boy’s life, right? 

The expectation is that women will be understanding. We will be quiet and compliant. We will be forgiving. We will forgo bodily autonomy and personal boundaries so that men can make mistakes without accountability and still grow up to get appointed to the Supreme Court. 

Why did Christine Blasey Ford wait so long to come forward? Look up the statements coming out of mouths of male lawmakers this week. Here are a couple:

Orrin Hatch: “The judge who I know very, very well, is an honest man, said this didn’t happen.”

Lindsey Graham: “If Ms. Ford really did not want to come forward, never intended to come forward, never planned to come forward, why did she pay for a polygraph in August and why did she hire a lawyer in August if she never intended to do what she is doing? And who paid for it?”

In other words, we should stop being so afraid of snakes. Snakes are great guys, not poisonous at all. Anyone accusing a snake of being poisonous probably has ulterior motives. The democrats paid off the fake victim to make all snakes look poisonous! 

Ms. Ford has received numerous death threats, had to move her family out of their home and pay for a private security detail. What did she have to gain by coming forward? Her life is being torn apart in a public forum.

In a snake-ocracy, we all relate better to the snakes than to the attack victims because snakes will be snakes, amirite?