Once upon a time, God answered three parents’ prayers by bringing them together, but just for a moment. The first mother relinquished her newborn straight from the hospital into the adoptive parents’ arms. And for all that those two new parents knew, they were well on their way to a happily ever after. But entire lifetimes shouldn’t start with endings.

Sixteen years later, that little girl would sneak away to the chapel she knew was always left unlocked and write out prayers asking for forgiveness from a silent God for the truthfulness with which she lived her life. Those truths were wrong, she thought, and she prayed and prayed to drive them away. Why couldn’t she be thankful? Why couldn’t she forgive what had happened? Why couldn’t she be who they wanted her to be? And so, she wrote letters upon letters to a God who wasn’t listening, letters that somebody in the church kept scooping up between the times she came to sit in that chapel all alone and lay on the floor, crying. She felt safe all alone in that chapel, safe enough, anyway. This was the church that raised her. She knew where the keys were hidden under the cup in the kitchen, she’d touched the bell in the bell tower, she’d climbed on the roof, slept overnight in the basement. Every Sunday, hot chocolate in the morning, mints from the choir room after mass. Every Wednesday, a van to the children’s programming after school, a frenzied dinner then choir and bell practice. She was adopted, baptized, and confirmed as a Methodist. But West Texas churches are a whole other breed of belief. 

Then, somebody wrote her back. A person who said they were God and called her “my child” in ugly cursive writing on the back of a letter she’d left on the altar. Disgusted, she stopped writing letters. She didn’t come back until she was 18 and halfway through her first semester of college. She came home because she was falling apart and wasn’t attending class, she didn’t know why she was in college, what she wanted to do with her life. Everything felt wrong so she drove home and sat in the chapel and cried. But afterwards, they sent her back to try again, to attend classes, to see a career counselor. 

It didn’t work, and in the following spring, she closed her eyes in her car and let Jesus take the wheel. He wouldn’t let her die, though, and she was so mad at him, she stopped praying. On the outside she said, “I survived for a reason. God has plans for me,” but on the inside, the rot of doubt kept growing in, tangled and thorned vines spread. There was no escape. So, she started closing her eyes more and more often which, of course, was easier to do with a drink, with smoke, with pills. 

The next time she wrote a letter to God, she was sitting in the common area of a rehab center where she’d been admitted and sorted into the Substance Abuse group. She wrote for help with figuring out how to make that fairytale come true, the one they’d always told her. Did God place her with her adoptive parents for a reason? Was their love the highest love she’d ever attain in the world and if so, why wasn’t it enough? And with no answers from a God who never wrote back, she quietly decided to be who they wanted her to be, kill off all the parts of her that were wrong, or at the very least, bury them deep. And when she got out, she attended church and swallowed her uneasy feelings about people who only love you when you behave. She would behave. She would try. 

But after four years of trying to squeeze herself into a cookie-cutter life, everything fell apart again. After she stood alone in front of the judge with her signed and stamped divorce papers, she didn’t write a letter to God. Instead, she summoned her rage and determination to build a better life, and she did. Step by step. Brick by brick. 

She realized that all those letters she’d written weren’t to God, they were to the God of Shame that lived inside her, the one her family bred into her from both sides. She would no longer pray to shame. Instead, she would write to herself, for herself, no shame, all truth. 

And when her therapist begged her to find some way to relax on the weekends, she said, “I will schedule my relaxation in times and places where I feel safe, I will breathe easy in moderation,” and it was so. 

And when she spent a night in jail the first year after her divorce for public intoxication after an emotional night of art, she said, “I cannot drink when I’m emotional,” and it was so. 

And as she began to untangle the hurts from her past that she hadn’t previously understood, she said, “this healing is for me and I will not be deterred,” and it was so. 

The people who loved her stayed. And the people who didn’t love her left. She didn’t need to write letters to a hateful God anymore, she wasn’t depending on substances to deal with her disenfranchised grief anymore, she had built a tiny yet strong village of council members who hugged her when she was sad and cheered her on when she was on a mission. And in the silence when she was alone, she began to feel complete. 

Rehab didn’t fix her. Sure, she quit some behaviors, but she didn’t address any of the underlying trauma in that hospital. 

God didn’t fix her. If anything, that God of Shame that she prayed to held her back from achieving clarity and peace. 

And though her life began with loss under a god who veiled a corrupt system of selling infants, and her parents’ love wasn’t ever enough, this girl finally severed herself from that chapel, that god, that shame system, but this time, the separation was her choice.