(TW: light mentions of child abuse / neglect, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, and gender dysphoria)

For those who don’t know my story, let me share a brief overview:

After my parents’ divorce when I was around five or six years old, I was primarily raised in a born-again Christian cult by a bipolar woman with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, who homeschooled me and my little brothers until I turned ten, at which point she sent us to a succession of private Christian schools, and forced my dad to pay for them. This woman, whom I refer to as my maternal-gene-donor (MGD), used a combination of isolation and religion to control and indoctrinate me and my little brothers. We were only allowed to watch two tv channels because they were the only Christian channels we could get, and only allowed to read our Bibles or our Christian textbooks. We went to church three days a week, and that was the only socialization we were permitted outside of whatever immediate family she couldn’t keep us away from.

Outside of church, where we spent three evenings every week, my dad and mi abuela were the only other people we consistantly saw. And the only reason we had mi abuela was because MGD didn’t want anything to do with any of us children most of the time. In fact, years later, after she moved into her own apartment, and forbade us from spending any time alone with our abuela, MGD would get into the habit of leaving her three young children at home, alone, for hours every single day, locking us in the house, and forcing us to fend for ourselves without friends or familia, even though mi abuela offered to look after us every day after school. We survived, but lived very sheltered, lonely lives with no social skills and very little daily care or support.

When MGD did take us on her outtings, more often than not, she would get annoyed with one or all of us, and would literally leave one or two of us—her children, none of whom were older than 8 at the time—in the parking lot or in front of a store or outside of a gas station for hours. We would be standing there, not knowing whether she would come back for us or how to even get home. And because we were taught that the outside world was evil (more on that later), we were afraid to ask for help, and would just wait right where she’d left us, terrified. (Still, several decades on from this, I still sometimes have the same recurring dream about being lost in a place too big for me with monsters hiding around every corner.)

She got away with abuses like this for over a decade because courts were very reluctant to take children away from their mothers before the 90’s, despite obvious signs of abuse or neglect. They were, of course, perfectly fine with taking children away from their fathers, even when said fathers were fighting for custody with everything they had. And MGD made, not only our lives miserable, she also made my dad and abuela’s lives hell because they wouldn’t be controlled by her, and because she couldn’t keep us away from them. With us, her children, she used a combination of beatings, guilt, and silence to punish us for wanting to see or spend time with anyone but her. This included church acquaintances (we had few friends), other family members, as well as our dad and abuela.)

At church, our pastor shouted on stage about all the sinners outside and the evil in the world until his face turned red, and veins popped out on his forehead and along his neck. He screamed about Satan and secular wickedness, and how everything outside of that auditorium was infected by demons and wickedness.

After church, MGD told us all about how the pastor’s wife or some other church lady was a vindictive bitch. They were all always out to get her, or to get us. All the other church-goers, according to her, were deceived by these women and took their side against MGD. Like MGD, these women were all heavily involved with the church, and the pastor’s wife led the church choir. So we heard a lot of words attributed to women there: whore, bitch, slut, heratic, witch, liar, etc. Even in church, MGD saw other women as incapable of doing anything right, while their husbands were deceived by their wives, and could do no wrong.

That was how we were conditioned to see the world; how we were taught to think of the rigidly binary genders: everything boys and men did was natural, even when it was evil or wrong. The Bible, after all, might punish a man for raping a woman, but in every single instance, the raped woman is killed for the sins of the man who attacked her. So that’s how we were taught to think. I, unfortunately born AFAB, could do nothing right or good; I was soaked in inescapable sin. No matter how good I tried to be, I could never be perfect enough.

And no matter how horrible my brothers or the males at church behaved, they could do no wrong. (Except my dad. He was ‘of the Devil’ and irredemable, according to her; a contradiction that would eventually be the first in a series of wedges that my AuDHD brain couldn’t square with the supposed rules of the world I was constantly being fed.)

The thing is: this was my example. I was expected to see what she was doing as ‘holy’ and ‘righteous’ and ‘justified’ because she was the born-again Christian, whereas my dad was agnostic and mi abuela a devout Catholic. These, we were told, were not the same as us, no matter that they believed in the same ‘god.’ Somehow, they were likely to go to hell right along with the Hindus and Pagans and Muslims, right beside the gays and lesbians, who were as condemned as the murderers and sinners.

Even as a child being told these things over and over, I struggled to believe that people were fated to go to Hell for simply being who they were and believing in a different version of god, even while I was actively being drowned in the brainwashing.

This church, its pastor, and MGD all wanted me to believe that everything and everyone who wasn’t born-again Christian from our specific church was infected by Satan, period. Every person on the street who didn’t go to our church was a demon in disguise. Every place outside of church and MGD’s home was a den of sin and evil. Every story that couldn’t be found in the pages of the Bible was laced with wickedness and temptation. No one and nothing could be trusted unless it came from the Bible or our specific church or a church-approved channel / station, because the whole world hated us and was out to get us.

In this and many other ways, I was trapped. There were no options for me: I was not LGBTQ+, period. I would be a good little afab, and eventually a good little spouse, married as soon as MGD could find me a good Christian husband, so I could start my life of mindless submission as his private caretaker, cook, housemaid, and (most importantly) baby-factory.

Who I was and what I wanted didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that the very idea of getting pregnant made me sick to my stomach (either because of the various sexual assaults I’d endured before the age of sixteen—and they didn’t stop there—or because of the inexorable understanding that my body didn’t fit me or my actual experiences of who I was; or both).

(The following paragraph carries a sever trigger warning for discussion of suicidal thoughts and ideation. For those affected, read with caution or skip to the next paragraph.) At this point, as I aged into what I’d been taught was my unavoidable future, I started to dream of dying. Death and all the ways I could die became and remained a daily preoccupation until I began transitioning, in fact. I thought about dying more than anything else. I imagined it. I planned it. I stood on the edges of cliffs and imagined what it would feel like to jump, or the edges of lakes / to drown. I counted pills I knew could stop my heart in high enough doses, and wondered if it would hurt or just feel like going to sleep and not having to wake up. I thought about these things every single day, every. single. day… until my outside body started to reflect more of how I felt on the inside. I was 35 when I started my transition. Until then, for several decades, I just sort of survived, I got by. Until then, I shut down everything inside of myself, and bottled up all the bad feelings. Until then, I would occasionally lose control and put myself in dangerous situations doing wreckless things because I felt trapped and miserable in my life, in my very skin.

Until I started HRT, I had no idea that anyone could exist without constantly trying to hold back the near constant desire to break every mirror in the house; and the intense impulse to just… stop everything; to find a permanent end to it all.)

I have been luckier than many. I escaped the cult. I survived the abuse and the assaults. I woke myself up, and sought out a proper education that covered all the things I was never supposed to know anything about. And I did that because I had people in my life that MGD couldn’t control or keep me away from: my dad, mi abuela, and Tía Sharon, MGD’s half-sister. These three people opened my eyes bit-by-bit, introducing me to the outside world and secular media.

Particularly influential for me, my dad got me into Star Trek, Tía Sharon gifted me Journey CDs, and mi abuela introduced me to the library and the magic of reading. All of these were ways to escape the torture of everyday life. I could see a world with a hopeful future, full of equity and acceptance for all. I could immerse myself in beautiful music, that would let me escape the prison of my body, mind, and soul for a few minutes at a time. I could imagine myself in another life, another world; another body. I was a hobbit on a mission to destroy the weapon of pure evil. I’d found another world in the back of a deserted wardrobe, went exploring, and began a great adventure. I reassembled the bones of a magical being, and helped it return home before it became trapped in the wrong universe forever. Through tessering, I explored the universe and rescued my long, lost father.

Stories helped me survive. They kept me out of my body, and in my imagination. In stories, I could be anyone or anywhere the author could imagine, and though these authors rarely imagined characters like me (a queer, transgender, AuDHD, biracial empath), I felt like I could exist in so many of them; that I could be in a place I belonged, where I didn’t have to be afraid, or trapped in every possible way. I read my way out, word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, hungrily clawing for more imagined places and narratives like a starving child shovelling hot cereal from a bowl.

There are more reasons to love stories, of course: the lessons they can teach, the empathy they instill, the windows and mirrors they hold up for us to look through and into, and so many more. And, perhaps, these are all aspects of how I came to be who I am, to see the world the way I do, and to think in my own unique way.

So for those who didn’t previously know the how and the why: this is why I’ve grown up to tell stories; why I’ve delved so deeply into the various storytelling arts. Stories helped me survive, they kept me alive; and I hope one day that mine will reach that person out there who feels alone, out of place, and like the world isn’t a place where they can even exist. Because no one deserves to feel that way, and I know first-hand how fantastical stories set in imagined worlds can save a life.

Now you know the key aspects of my backstory, why I became a writer, and why I can’t stop writing (or reading) stories.