I felt overwhelmed the first week of my sophomore year in college. An RA on the freshman hall, I had spent the week putting up bulletin boards, helping freshmen get settled, dealing with homesickness (in said freshmen, not myself), and trying to fix all the little things that had broken. All with one arm. I’d had surgery on my shoulder the week before RA training. A year after a head on car collision my senior year in high school that shattered my collar bone, the doctor noticed it didn’t heal properly so he re-broke it and put a pin in it. Let me tell you, trying to move in with one arm didn’t happen. My brothers and father carried in all my stuff, but getting it all unpacked and settled took me over a month.

Classes started, and my choral group along with it. I was very excited to be part of the school’s audition only, traveling choral group. I’d tried out the year before, but was still battling injuries from my car accident. (Later, a friend told me that he only accepted people who sang Christian songs. I don’t know if that’s true, but I had tried out with a secular song the year I didn’t get in, and used a hymn the year I did. My voice didn’t really change, so there may have been some truth to that rumor.) Part of the requirements of the auditioned group (called Singers from here on out) was to sing with the community group that met Monday nights. The first Monday night, everyone introduced themselves. One of the girls in the auditioned group introduced her boyfriend. I turned to see who she was talking about, but I couldn’t tell which guy she’d pointed to. I thought I figured it out, though, and my first thought was, “Ew, who’d want to date that?” Charming and kind, I know. It wasn’t that he was ugly, it was his fashion sense. An awful bright red t-shirt clashed with very tanned skin and an odd haircut with bleached blond tips. Men dying their tips was quite popular at the time, but I never found the look attractive myself.

A few days later, the guy popped up in the Singers group. I learned that he actually wasn’t the girl’s boyfriend: I had looked at the wrong guy. He looked better, but I didn’t think much of him.

Meanwhile, my RA duties were taking up much of my time. If there wasn’t one instance of drama in the hall, there was another. Roommates bickering and wanting to change rooms every five minutes, someone  accused of being suicidal for posting notes on everyone’s marker board (hello, Leah, if you or your roommate are reading this!), and girls who hadn’t made friends yet who followed my friend (the one I called Rachel in another post, though I don’t remember exactly which one) everywhere we went. The drama got so bad that at one point, I sat in the resident director’s office with tears streaming down my cheeks at a complete loss for what to do. (The answer was to make everyone stay in their rooms and play peacemaker. That was a fun night!) So on one particularly quiet Sunday when all of the freshmen had gone home for the weekend (I really did like most of them and became pretty good friends with a couple; they were just needy at first, like many freshmen–especially religious freshmen away from mom and dad for the first time.), Rachel and I enjoyed a quiet morning at church followed by a very peaceful lunch in the cafeteria.

Important to note how small my school was. It was a “suitcase college” meaning that a large portion of the 480 students on campus went home for the weekend. So Sunday lunches were very quiet, and often, the entire cafeteria would sit together. This Sunday, Rachel and I didn’t sit with the group. We soaked up the sun from a window and enjoyed the peace.

As I put my tray down, I didn’t know my life was about to change forever. It would be the day that would open the door to misery, theological questioning, and escape from fundamentalism. It would be the day that opened the door to the best part of my life, too: a life outside of patriarchy in its diluted form, loneliness, and misery. A life filled instead with love, meaning, and hope. If you had told me that it would be the day that decided the rest of my life; that it would lead to two paths: one leading to happiness and one to misery, I probably would have believed you. What would have surprised me, however, is who that happiness and who the misery was with.

Rachel and I chatted about the morning’s church service. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned around to see that guy from choir standing in front of me.

“Hey, do you want to come join us?” he asked.

Rachel and I looked at each other and shrugged. Why not?

We didn’t say much to the guy and his loud friend, but after we finished, we all somehow ended up playing pool in one of the student hang outs. We got to know each other. I found out their names were Bob and Steve. Bob was a little strange, but not nearly as strange as Steve. Neither Rachel nor I were particularly impressed with either of them, but we were bored and completely deprived of male companionship and decided to take what we could get. About an hour later, Rachel and I decided to go on the walk we’d planned. We invited them to come with us. They glanced at each other, but said they would come.

We laughed a lot on the way to the park, and talked about God and religion. Steve had some pretty strange ideas. His open liberal Biblical viewpoints and foul language made me uncomfortable, but Bob was pretty nice. “They call him the vile preacher,” Bob said about Steve. Steve laughed. “Yep, that’s me.” Rachel and I exchanged glances.

Eventually, we headed for home. Steve hung out the window and yelled at the top of his lungs, scaring Rachel and me to death. Back in our dorm, Rachel turned to me and said, “I don’t know, Laura. Bob is pretty nice, but that Steve guy is just weird.” I agreed wholeheartedly.

September 14, 2003. That’s how it all began.

Tags: abstinence, Christian, Christian women, de-conversion story, ex Christian, religion

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