Recently I was fighting for my life to stay awake during the tail end of a late night nanny shift, exhausting all my usual time wasters (Tiktok, Instagram, every single NYT game) when I inexplicably landed on scrolling through all my BeReals from the last year and half that I’ve used it. I still proudly BeReal every day along with a small but steady handful of friends. It’s a nice way to bring some suspense to your day, hoping that the alarm goes off when you’re actually doing something cool with your friends, verses when it normally goes off which is when I’m sitting on my couch watching Vanderpump in between my two cats.
BeReal has become a weird little daily diary and as I sifted through all my BeReals it reminded me of so many moments I would have never remembered again. Moments that never really changed the course of my life, but still moments that temporarily brought me joy. As I made my way through it reminded me of this thought that I’ve been carrying around for a little while now- what are we supposed to do with all our memories? I often will recall a stretch of my life that has nothing to do with my current situation and wonder what was that for? What do I do with that? Where does it go? Does this even make sense?
I think about the 9 months I lived in Alabama as a college freshmen, the summers I spent digging through my grandfather’s house in Pennsylvania, the two years I spent every morning at the Manhattan Beach dog park. All little slices of my life that have no impact on my current life but moments and people and places that happened that were nice and important to me. They all have an end date and they feel like tiny little trophies my brain gets to display every now and again when referencing something at a party. But a lot of memories in general just happen and fade away without any accolade- just a time in your life. Just like BeReal- every so often you get to memorialize something impactful but most of the time what’s documented is the mundane. However there is one big cluster of memories that when I’m reminded I lived through them, I feel like I’m bringing up someone’s else’s life. Memories that at this point in time feel more like I’m recounting a weird Tiktok I saw a few months ago and not my actual lived experience.
A few months ago, like a shot to my system, I remembered that I was a camp counselor for one week. To be a little clearer, I was a Christian camp counselor for one week to a group of high school girls from my church. I was 22, one year younger than the age you were allowed to be a counselor, but since they were understaffed and needed the coolest, funnest, most charismatic counselor to ever camp counsel they made an exception for me. I spent one week being an authority and it pinpointed the first time I was in charge of people who weren't under the age of 5. I don't have a single picture or video of proof from that week, and my memories are also extremely splotchy but it was a week of my life that happened. But its also a week of my life I haven't thought about in over a decade, a week I have not referenced at any gathering, date, work function or in my writing. A week that I had some memories but mostly ones I can’t exactly recall and as a result got lost in the mix of my Christian tenure.
This memory made me realize why I haven’t thought about that week in so long- I’ve never felt more disconnected to the person I was as a Christian than now. The version of me that convinced my youth pastor to let me be a counselor at a church camp doesn’t feel like me at all, so why would I need to remember her? All those times I was in church just don’t exactly feel real anymore. For a while after I left the church, I could still identify the person that went to church. I was still holding her hand, but as the years went on my grip loosened ever so steadily until all contact was gone.
“I grew up religious” is a sentence I’ve said thousands of times. Even last weekend I uttered it several times as I got to know new people during a glorious wedding weekend. I can never truly escape a group setting with new people without that being spoken at least once. It permeates through many points of entry- whether someone is asking about my hometown, what school I went to, what I studied in college or even an obscure music reference of a band that was not a “christian band but had christian members” (very important distinction back in the 2004 Florida pop punk scene). I sometimes just want to shake the phrase, lose it. Turn a corner and find relief that the coast is clear. Talk about anything else because what I am recounting just doesn’t feel real anymore. Even if one of those memories includes walking twenty miles in the hot humidity of Ft. Lauderdale’s streets on Good Friday to showcase the walk Jesus did carrying the cross to his death. (And I did that walk three times. Electively.)
But I mostly feel like a liar these days bringing up my religious past because it’s hard for me to identify with that person. Even the phrase ex-vangelical still elicits some pride in once being evangelical and doesn’t feel authentic to how I actually feel. It’s a battle scar I don’t care to receive a badge over. I don’t want to relate to others with the same experience because I would rather forget the whole thing. There’s a certain spark I see in some people’s eyes when they find out we both belonged to the same religion, and I do admit sometimes it can be comforting knowing you aren’t the only one who made it through to the other side, but that doesn’t take away from wanting it to have never happened in the first place.
It’s a strange feeling not being able to remember the person you were at a certain point in time. I feel so disconnected from myself even though I’m still in the very same skin that raised those hands in church and faked speaking in tongues. I’ve been wondering if this feeling includes other segments of my life- those early LA years, the time I spent as a manager at Victoria’s Secret, being a teenager and seeing every single local hardcore show at a place called PIS (and yes pronounced piss). All those versions of me I still can see me- even the PIS days I can still see my love for live music in a place with adequate parking. But the only version of me that feels inauthentic is the one I have to talk about all the time. I guess it is my karma for at one point trying to convert (and mostly succeeding) my entire high school during a retreat (in fairness, I just wanted the cute boys to start coming to my youth group).
But I will still talk about it, my speech always at the ready to explain my downfall in the church. How taking a religious course at a near cult status Christian university finally gave me an out and the distinction that my brand of Pentecostal was more falling over in church than playing with snakes (important). I think I just want to do so much more with my other memories because those feel like the authentic me. I’m still holding their hands, at various levels of firmness, but we are still connected.
I do need to admit something though, a few weeks ago I came across a Tiktok about Relient K and well, it caused me to spend a lot of time going back through their discography. It ended up finally being a good nostalgia and not one that made me cringe. I do think there were still a lot of good things that happened to me during my time as “Bible Beth” (full body shakes remembering that nickname), but those things are deeply overshadowed by all unsettling thoughts and ideas that were forced into my impressionable young brain. I tried to calculate how much time I spent in church till I was 18 and the number was over 6,000 hours and I can’t tell if that seems too much or too little. But I do remind myself that some of my greatest friendships that are still going strong today came from those 6,000 hours. We can commiserate together and mostly the faction of us that left have stayed gone. I can’t identify with the person that knew all those Bible verses by heart but I can identify with the person that created all those friendships and that does deeply soften the blow.