It was just my testosterone anniversary and I turned 18! It felt like a big milestone, so I asked a former student—one much closer to 18 than I—about the significance of turning 18. Especially since I was completely numb and dissociated during my original teenage years. 18 is of course when we are able to vote, an achievement that feels significant just before perhaps the most important election in the history of the United States. But 18 is apparently also the age at which you can legally get a piercing or tattoo. It is when you can first buy a lottery ticket. And of course it is the age at which you can be drafted into the military. And sure enough, for Halloween I was recruited into the Viking army led by my sweetie’s 13 year old. 😊

One of my big revelations at Sufi Camp, over the anniversary of my mom’s death, was realizing that my relationship with Allah contains a rupture and broken trust. One that arose during my first turn at 18. Unpacking that has been the gift of getting another chance at 18.

At this Sufi Camp, the Saturday night zikr was in silence—which was so powerful! During the zikr, I felt led to carry an intention for a closer relationship with the Divine, in particular in the realm of devotion.

About 15 minutes after setting this intention, I was invited into the circle to turn in the tradition of the whirling dervishes. I initially declined—turning practice is a serious discipline, one that I have not been trained in, and so I wanted to respect the practice. But immediately after declining, I realized that I’d just set an intention to have a closer relationship with the Divine, particularly in the realm of devotion, and at my first opportunity I had said no! So I awkwardly got the attention of the one who had invited me and asked for a redo. This time I said yes and entered the circle, awkward and unpracticed, but full of innocence and open heartedness. I spun in the way that made sense to me, and let myself enter the practice with abandon.

As I rejoined the circle, I had a flash of insight—a true aha moment! I realized that my relationship with God was one of broken trust. And that broken trust was preventing me from truly surrendering my heart. And that broken trust occurred around my first time as an 18 year old.

Though I’d found refuge in nature since I was a kid, my first real stop on my spiritual path was Christianity. It began in high school, when my grandma came to live with us, and I started going to Mass with her to get to know her better. Although I was confirmed my senior year in high school, I quickly became disillusioned with Catholicism when the most popular priest in our local parish was arrested for child molestation, including the young son of my high school English teacher, who was one of my closest friends at the time.

When I entered college, Christianity again found me. The first people I met at UC Santa Cruz belonged to Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship, a fundamentalist student group which is where I unfortunately ended up coming out. After being an outcast in high school, I was thrilled to find people who walked with me to class, invited me to social gatherings, and genuinely seemed to want to be my friend. After the dusty rituals of Catholicism, it was so exciting to find a God who was so relevant to my life as a student! I fell in love with that God. IVCF became my world, I was on fire with passionate devotion, and I set my path to become a missionary.  

Lola was my Bible study leader and through our spiritual collaboration, we fell in love and became lovers—my first time having consensual sex. Lola was wracked with guilt about what we were doing, believing she was compromising her salvation, so she begged us to talk to one of the IVCF leaders. That fateful choice dramatically changed my life.

We were required to go through a humiliating public confession of everything we’d done sexually, we were both removed from IVCF leadership, and we were told we could never speak to one another again, something Lola took quite seriously. “If your right hand causes you to sin, you must cut it off,” is what we were told. I was blamed for our transgression, as I’d had “those feelings” in high school, and was eventually driven out of the fellowship entirely, being told that I was “unteachable” and that my questions undermined the faith of the younger fellowship members. I lost God and I lost Lola at the same time, my 2 first loves.  

I was devastated and my heart was broken in numerous betrayals. The betrayal of Lola who sat there silently during our public confession and allowed me to take all the blame and who never stood up for our relationship. The betrayal of my IVCF friends who rejected me and subjected me to continual scrutiny and surveillance (for instance, telling me I wasn’t allowed to study alone at night with any of the women from the fellowship). And the betrayal of God, who had given me my first love and who had then ripped it away so harshly. The imprint was laid down: Love leads to devastating loss, God is not on my side, and God is not to be trusted. God is a God of hard things who takes away what you most love. Allowing God to know me would only encourage God to use this information to strip me of whatever I loved or wanted.

In response to all of this, I wandered campus aimlessly in a trauma fog, unable to go to class or function. Lola and I had been roommates and were no longer allowed to live together so I had been moved to the apartment of a friend, one of the worship leaders who started changing clothes in the bathroom because she newly felt threatened by me. I would walk the cliffs along the ocean late at night, pondering just stepping off into the abyss. I called my parents late from a nearby pay phone, unable to tell them what was happening when they asked me what was wrong. I began seeing a therapist for the first time, a Christian man who—when I told him I might be suicidal—asked me if I really wanted to lose my salvation over one person. I felt totally alone. 

Not unlike how I’d felt when I’d started college. The summer before college I’d worked at Yosemite National Park, a childhood dream come true until I was raped by a co-worker who’d preyed on my vulnerability being away from home for the first time. Fleeing his cabin in the early morning hours, I called the employee health clinic who—when I asked what I could do—told me that I should’ve thought of that before I went to my co-worker’s cabin. My innocence and trust doubly violated, it happened to be Sunday morning and, not knowing what else to do, I rode my bike to the little chapel on the valley floor and sobbed my way through the service. I felt totally alone.

I started college terrified that I was pregnant, having the only late period ever in my life, no doubt due to the incredible stress that I was carrying in isolation. It was in this numbness and dissociation that I found the Christian fellowship, what I imagined to be a safe and platonic home with other students who were interested in making the world a better place.

So that was 18 my first time through. Finally leaving the unsafety of growing up in my mom’s house only to have back to back to back devastating injuries to my innocence. I was earnestly trying to make God my orienting point, but learned that God was not a safe place to land either. This caused me to wander alone in the wilderness for decades, not coming into my true spiritual awakening until 2000.  

So it was sobering, but also really really helpful and illuminating, to realize that I still carry these traumas in my relationship with the Divine. My spiritual path has always been one of devotion (from Christian “praise” to Sufi zikrs to ecstatic dance to my relationship to the natural world), but I experienced something missing. I couldn’t fully let go because my heart was blocked from the pain of broken trust from long ago. Now, being aware of that, I can attend to and heal that broken trust, and my 18 year old self who has carried that pain over all these years.