I grew up believing that the world had been created in a week and that Jonah had spent three days inside a whale’s belly, munching on plankton between prayers. It wasn’t metaphorical—it was literal. It was truth. It was history. When applied to Apostle John’s claim that, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” this was harder to explain. In the deepest darkness of a pre-formed universe soup, had one word emerged, spindly letters beacons of existence? Was that what we called God?  

The Evangelical church I attended taught that girls and women were meant to keep silent—that our opinions didn’t matter. We couldn’t have leadership positions or ever hope to become pastor. We were meant to listen.

Yet, words gnawed at me from within (maybe in a way similar to Jonah’s attempts to escape from that whale). They bounced inside me and made me curious. They made me question. And since I couldn’t say those words—dangerous since they channeled both hopes and doubts, dreams and disappointments—I wrote them down. First in prayer journals, then in stories.  

Those prayer journals are now artifacts that testify to the gaslighting I endured because of my religious upbringing. They expose self-hatred, shame, depression. Feelings of being perpetually out of place, grappling to reconcile the 5-million-dollar homes of some of the televangelists, and the simple ways of Jesus in the Bible.

Some friends have burned their prayer journals. Maybe they thought that, if they destroyed them, they would be rid of those reminders of how they’d suffered. But I don’t want to be rid of them. I’ve carved out storage in my drawers, because I value that little girl’s voice, even when it reflects such ugly things. Because she wasn’t ugly or responsible for such thoughts. They were taught to her.

For the longest time, I thought what I wrote was awful. Granted, a lot of it was. I’d start stories, only to stop them mid-way through because I couldn’t imagine what would happen next. Most of the time, though, I stopped because of the voice in my head that told me what I did would never be good enough. It was a voice I used to call Satan. Now, I understand it to be something more complex—potentially more insidious.

In 2018, I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. So much of it resounded with me: feeling like a “shadow artist,” jealous of others’ successes, yet unable to find the confidence to do anything about it. That was the turning point for me—the moment when my determination crystallized into its own being. That was when I decided I would do whatever it took to find the time to write, and to see stories through to the end.

Since then, I have written two manuscripts, some short stories and essays. I’ve tried to be rigorous about sending them out, even when rejections can feel like another confirmation that I’m not worthy. I push that feeling aside and keep going. Most of the time, like in “The Diet,” which was given an honorable mention for the New2theScene 2025 Flash Fiction contest, my writing is about taking societal issues and cracking them open so we can examine all the squiggly lines in their brains and try to understand why things are like this, and where to go from here.

Writing has become my religion. Yet instead of taking away my voice, it has given me one.