@nharber9837

4 months ago

So, I grew up in an authoritarian, hard right, ultra religious household. Think Duggar family, but I was allowed to wear pants except to church. The whole IBLP bs suite.

I was given a diary with a lock on it for my 9th birthday. When I was 10, I came home one random day and you know when the vibes of a place just kinda feel off and you don’t know why? Well I went in the house and saw my diary on the table along with a notepad, a pen, a sharpie, and a Bible. The lock on the diary had been cut.

That diary was the place I poured all my thoughts. It was a catch all for things I was working out in my head. It was my sounding board. It was the only place outside of my actual brain that unfiltered thoughts went. Angry at a family member and can’t express it out loud? To the diary. Have questions, comments or concerns about whether God is even real that you know will be a HUGE problem if you ask? Diary time! Any thoughts that aren’t safe with the family? Diary ho! So this was BAD.

There was a square in painter’s tape on the ground in front of the table. My grandmother entered the room, told me to go to the bathroom and put my things down, and then come stand in that square. I started to ask a question, and she just repeated herself. I was absolutely screwed. My grandmother was a lot of things, and easy going in her religion and authoritarianism weren’t on that list. When it came to that she was hard as nails and had precisely zero chill, and would have had less if she could have managed it.

So cut to me standing in the square. She sat at the table across from me and went through the diary line by line. The only times I was allowed to speak was when directly asked a question. During an opportunity, I said “I thought diaries were supposed to be private.” And that was a bad thing to say.

She responded with “Privacy is what adults gain when they own a home. You are a child. You have no privacy. I am responsible for you, so I have a right to know everything there is to know about you. It is my responsibility to know everything, so I can keep you out of trouble. I own this home and everything in it, including you and everything that is yours. That makes this diary mine too, and I will do with my things as I wish. And you will stop trying to stop me unless you want to double your consequences. If you want privacy, go buy a home. Until then, my roof, my rules.”

You may ask if there was something that happened to cause this? No. It had been a fine weekend with not so much as a disagreement over what to have for dinner. To date I still don’t know why this happened. It was a month before summer break, and I had all As in school except math, where I had a B.

Like I said before she went line by line. She took pages and pages of notes. Every so often she would stop and flip through the Bible, then go back to it. She would circle things I wrote and answer them with Bible verses for me to study in response to my questions. She wrote notes about anything she didn’t like, or she felt was “disrespectful.” That was her favorite catch all term for anything she didn’t like or any opposition from someone she considered beneath her. If she disliked it enough, she would redact it with the sharpie in addition to answering it with Bible verses and a short note to remind me what it was about.

I was to go through each page and write what my offense was, then write out the Bible verse, explain what the verse meant in biblical context, and explain in my own words why the verse was correct and I was wrong and sinful, then what I should do or think instead, and then write the verse out 25 times for each and every entry. Same verse 45 times? Sounds like that’s a verse you really need to familiarize yourself with huh? Same process every single time. No shortcuts or leniency. I was allowed to ask for help on the biblical context portion only.

The diary and the broken lock were returned to me. I was told I was welcome to buy another lock, but she required a key or the code.

I had to explain what I wrote and then apologize to each family member I wrote about. It didn’t matter if I didn’t feel that way any more - which was the case for most of them. The majority I didn’t even remember writing, as some were over a year old. Didn’t matter, still had to expose the sin and repent.

The worst part, if I’m being honest wasn’t even that. The worst part is I wrote about the boy I had a crush on. I sat next to him in class. Never even spoke to him. I would distract myself with class work. I didn’t write anything bad. It was mostly just a transfer of thoughts and emotions that I didn’t know what to do with.

IBLP encourages courting culture, where the parents essentially arrange a marriage (usually a guy approaches the girl’s father and that initiates it, but there’s usually discussion between the families first), and if they are interested they get married. I had not gone through the proper channels. He had not approached my grandparents and asked to court me. I wasn’t married, so I shouldn’t be thinking about boys at all. I was expected to be “pure” on my wedding day, and they were going to make sure I was. My grandmother decided that some of my thoughts were “inappropriate,” so all of that had to go. The assessment was that my thoughts were vaguely sexual, and that was sin, given that they weren’t about my husband. Every word about him was redacted.

On Monday, she showed my diary to my teacher, and demanded I be moved away from that table to an all female table with my back to him. My teacher, to her credit, did refuse to read it and asked me if I was ok after my grandmother left. She was the only person who gave me any grace or support. I never even spoke to him. I was too shy. I just lived for the moments like when his arm brushed mine or when his hair fell in front of his eyes, and that was taken from me too. My first crush and I don’t even remember his name.

Decades later, I’m not certain if I’m actually gray Ace or if I’m just traumatized to the point where I can’t access my own feelings.

It took me three months to write out all that Bible crap. It ate my entire summer.

Six months later my grandmother had the audacity to ask me why I had stopped writing in my diary. I actually got in trouble for deciding to stop keeping a diary because I don’t tell them everything, so how are they supposed to know what’s going on with me. I was denying them their right to my personal thoughts.

For years my family would make fun of me, repeating my private unvoiced thoughts about him in mocking voices. These people still ask why I don’t show up to family events or attend church as an adult. That’s about as likely as me keeping a diary at this point.

So yeah, you could say I have trust issues.

6 |