A Sink of Blood and Crushed Veneer

This post was originally published on Medium

My tears slide into steady streams, my words melt into sobs, and my hands grasp ferociously onto the steering wheel as if the car would drive away without me. As I watch him walk away, my throat aches and a sob breaks through. When I start to drive, my heart starts to scatter behind the car like emotional breadcrumbs leading right back to him.

My misty eyes look through a blanket of tears and yesterday’s mascara toward the skinny rearview mirror rimmed in black plastic just in time to spot him walking away on the sidewalk. His burnt orange hair shines in the early morning sun as the dawn forms an orange and purple outline around his 6’1 athletic figure. His multi-colored Stance socks cuff around his mid calf that flexes with each step. I cry harder.

Somewhere between Green River and Temecula, my heart got tossed from the car and scattered its remains throughout the deserts of Utah, Nevada and the tip of Arizona. It was lost under the stars of an expansive sky.

Yes, I had fallen in love in four months, summer lovin’ as Sandy and Danny sang in the classic movie Grease. Yet as the car took off into the clouds that crisp, autumn morning in August, I was the only one in the car and my Danny stayed on the ground waving as I flew away. And all I had was 13 hour journey in front of me and a four month long love story behind me.

Flash forward a year and a half and I am still searching for those missing pieces of who I was that summer when I was full of faith and full of love. As I have been reflecting on my journey to where I sit now, I’m continuously brought back to an old yet powerful demon of mine: my own sexuality.

I keep wrestling with the secret I carry around with me that I am no longer a virgin though I am supposedly a “good Christian”. And I keep trying to understand why I don’t fully understand the two most important parts of myself, my faith and my sexuality, and how they fit together, or rather, if they fit together.

From a young age, I grew up in the church seeing my sexual feelings as lustful and sinful, which means acting upon them would get me sent to hell where I would be eternally punished in the fiery flames of the Devil’s home. So yeah, I was pretty scared of sex and my own vagina. I mean according to the church, it had the power to send me to hell.

Rob Bell, author of the book, Sex God, says connection is at the core of sexuality. He writes, “Our sexuality is all of the ways we strive to reconnect with our world, with each other, and with God.” The summer before sophomore year of college, I gave myself completely to someone else, someone who I loved and still do love deeply. Through this relationship, I saw sex not as a scary monster, but as a beautiful act of connecting to someone I cared for so profoundly. And I was able to connect to my own self and love myself on a deeper level in the process.

Still, I was heartbroken when I had to leave him and I was hurt by the church which I thought would accept me but instead turned me away and made me feel like a unholy, unclean whore. So I started researching sexuality so I could see the natural beauty that lies beneath the word and throughout my extensive reading and interviewing and talking with peers, I saw a lot of how sexuality connects to God and to many other things in the world around me.

Bell says in his book that “Music is powerful because it is sexual. It connects us.” When I was with the boy I loved for the summer of 2017, we listened to music all the time. He was obsessed with all kinds of music and would play a new song when we would get into the car, or when we were sprawled out on his bed chatting, or when I would place my head on his chest and just listen to his heartbeat align with the bass of the song. I hear a certain song and I’m brought right back to him.

One song in particular is especially strong: the Vanic remix of the song “Skinny Love” by Birdy. The first bass drop brings me back to rolling down the old 1972 windows of his blue, rusted Volkswagen bug named Betsy. My right forearm stretches out the side of the car floating up and down with the changing air currents. My freshly dyed, softly curled hair blows in the warm, August wind.

It was our last dinner together so we got all dressed up. I was wearing my floor length, light pink dress that fell off my shoulders. And it’s weird but I can’t remember what he were wearing but I remember us blasting this song, the bass dropping me deeper into the moment and deeper into the feeling that this was the end to something extraordinary. Birdy’s voice softly sing the words, “I tell my love to wreck it all, Cut out all the ropes and let me fall,” against the harsh, electronic sounds that the DJ has concocted.

And as we pull into the Wild Plum parking lot, I feel the hot tears piercing through my bottom lash line and sliding down my powdered cheeks. I am crying because I fell, and I realize that he will have to cut the ropes because I won’t be able to do it. I am in love with him. So I quickly wipe the tears away blaming the wind for my watery eyes and flash him a wide grin.

We were beautiful and free and a force to be reckoned with but just as quickly as he came into my life, he was gone, walking away on that August morning leaving me with flashbacks of nights spent under the stars making vague promises into a vague future.

But Bell says in his book that there is a difference between people who act solely on physical urges, almost animal like, and the people who are ignorant and just try to act like those urges don’t exist, like angels with no physical presence. Both extreme sides of that spectrum are dangerous and lead to poorly made decisions. On the animal side of the spectrum, Bell writes, “When it’s just sex, then that’s all it is. It leaves the person deeply unconnected”.

But my experience in the church has been more of the angel approach where they don’t talk about sexuality and those natural, physical urges. Instead, I was taught to suppress them and let them eat away at me in a silent, painful feast. And in Bell’s book, he says, “You can’t talk about sexuality without talking about how we were made. And that will inevitably lead you to who made us. At some point you have to talk about God.”

This ignorance of the topic I’ve seen in the church causes young singles, especially women and myself included, to feel a lot of pressure to keep their virginity and to stay pure. So sex can be scary and can be a topic not really talked about especially in Christian communities.

Yet according to Madeline Cooper, a licensed clinical social worker who is working toward being a licensed sex therapist, “how are we supposed to know if we’ve never had a conversation about it?” She mentions the need for this conversation especially within church communities in order to get rid of the pressure placed on young women to be this “sexpert” on their wedding night even though they’ve never had the chance to ask their questions and seek out answers.

I have experienced both the harmful effects and the beautiful effects that sex can have on a person which led me to want to have an open conversation about it with my peers and with other Christian to grasp what is healthy and what is not. Yet I found that to be an easier thing said than done and like Cooper says, “Sexual health is one of those things that isn’t talked about much.”

I’ve seen in my own experience and in my own research that talking about sex often leads right back to what we’ve learned in Sex Ed class. So what do we talk about in Sex Ed class? We talk about how guys have penises and those penises are used for sex. We learned that guys experience desire and girls experience pregnancy when it comes to sex.

Yet Sarah Barmak, author of Closer: Notes From the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality expressed how she wants to change the sexual education system from focusing on sex as a reproductive act to an act of pleasure for both the man and the woman.

Barmak writes in her book about Quodoushka, a spiritual sex practice that uses an idea of diverse genital sizes and shapes as part of its teaching. This practice is a strange yet helpful tool that could have the ability to mend the hurtful relationship many women have with their bodies. “Hearing you’re normal is powerful,” Barmak writes.

There were so many times when I wanted to hear in church this feeling was normal and that it was okay to acknowledge it. But instead, I felt like I wasn’t trying hard enough to be a good Christian girl. So I tried to pray more which only led to me beating down on myself and hating myself for being confused about this. It was a sin. Deal with it.

That feeling brings me back to a night early this October where I had what some people call an “emotional breakdown”. A light was strobing through our open bedroom door preventing me from sleeping and a light sound of thunder rumbled just outside the walls of our apartment.

I slowly climbed down from my bed situated on the top bunk, shifting and squeaking with each step down. I walked out into the living room and the storm softly lit up the caramel-colored hardwood turning them white with each flash of lightning. I sat down at my desk facing a window that overlooks the north end of Battery Park and onto Washington Street.

The light from the storm and from the buildings outside act as a lamp while my black pen scribbles messy, handwritten letters and words and sentences onto the blank, white sheets of paper inside my mauve, Mishmash journal. With each bolt of lightning, my hard exterior cracks deeper until the rawness of my lost, confused self bleeds onto pages in the form of tear-smudged, black ink.

I write, “I try to let people in but I constantly lie in order to keep my distance and to keep them at a safe distance from me. A distance where they can’t fully get to know me and they can’t fully hurt me. Where I can’t hurt them.”

I prayed to be shown a way of clarity and of beauty once again. I prayed to find my old self again because I didn’t recognize this sad, defeated girl that was silently sobbing into the storm that night. I prayed to be set free from my new self in order to find who I once was.

I increasingly got more frustrated when I wasn’t fitting into this perfect mold placed in front of me by the church of a girl who was pure, beautiful, Christlike and a virgin.

But Barmak says that virginity is ideological concept, not scientifically proven. She says that in older times, virginity was based on the idea of the hymen rupturing resulting in the woman bleeding in her wedding bed. So if she didn’t bleed on her wedding night, her virginity and purity was in question.

But they didn’t know at the time that there are so many ways to rupture a woman’s hymen that didn’t involve sexual intercourse. So this idea of virginity is highly sexist and outdated in my opinion and puts a lot of pressure on a young woman to stay pure and it produces a lot of guilt and shame when it’s gone.

Barmak saw through her research that sex in the Christian tradition was this “big, magic line” that once you crossed it, you were unclean, and Christian women have to walk this line of looking sexy but not have sex.

Still to Barmak, she said that “we don’t have to choose between the faith in our heart and the desires we feel.” And this gave me hope to finding a new path within my own faith and sent me down a path of forgiveness I was so desperately seeking for myself, a forgiveness that starts with myself.