Self love in the time of spiritual cholera

I know what America did to me, directly in the school system designed for only a certain kind of brain to succeed, and indirectly in the many ways my mother and her mother were punished by and trapped in their impulsivity, their undiagnosed and exploited ADHD. When I look at my eldest niece, I see 3 generations of unwed mothers, the bastards born of impulsivity and vulnerability in a world that demands the strictest control over our animal instincts. I see my grandmother, born of wealth and privilege, as a pregnant 19 year old girl giving her eldest daughter to wicked nuns before even looking at her child's face. My grandmother was the only one who was successfully Rumpelstiltskin’ed by shame to give up her first born.

I’m not supposed to say these things. There’s a way you’re supposed to say things, a way that makes them palatable, that wraps them in sweetness and conformity. But I’ve spent my life untangling that web of “being a good girl” and frankly, I find it hollow. Instead. I spend my life questioning the stories that were told to me in whispers, from the likes of the unkind nuns who pulled my mother from her mother and left that baby in the hands of a psychopath, the ones who put on a smile but carried the weight of something else behind their eyes. They told me lies, wrapped up in holy words. As if God could fix everything, even the broken soul born outside the bible's unsaid rules: a society built around surmised thoughts within vague texts of a magical book, rules born of the speculations of wicked men. It is not lost on me that most passages in the bible are directed at the men, demand the men to listen. Maybe they were never talking to the women at all.

If there is a God, I hope He’s nothing like the one they told me about.
Not the stern-faced man with a magic book of rules and punishments.
But a God with scars and wildness and stories that make no sense unless you live them.
A God who fidgets and spirals sometimes but still says:
You are holy. Just like this.