Invisible Chains

Invisible Chains Coming out in a repressive environment is never easy, and can feel suffocating and limiting. Here, the author writes about learning to accept herself despite her religious upbringing. BY AMANDA ROWSELL

ears later I still remember the moment I stopped putting my faith in invisible chains like it was only yesterday.

I was at my desk in grade twelve religion class, with a teacher who told us that being Catholic was not a pick-andchoose deal. He meant that you could either be only all-in religious, or you were all gone (and likely a heathen, too).

I thought that this didn’t make sense because people choose things all the time, like to show skin and to get married outside of churches and to have sex of all kinds regardless of whether they’re married. People even chose who can have rights and who is an outcast based on nothing tangible at all.

With his lesson on choices my teacher had intended to reach us, and he succeeded in doing so, just not in the way he imagined. I was never devout before this, but I had my reasons for believing in something, at least to a degree. But in that moment in that class, I felt like I had been chained to my desk based on

what I had been raised with and what I had done and continue to do in the name of my faith. The fact that I wasn’t, and would never be, the “perfect woman” that this man was describing hit me like a truck full of bricks. Still, it was only the beginning.

At that age I was already positive that my sexual thoughts and feelings towards both men and women were not out of place, but a perfectly natural thing that no one had the right to tell me to control. Nor, in fact, could I control them. My bisexuality had slid into place by the time I turned fifteen, though I wasn’t yet ready to say so out loud or knew to what degree I liked one gender or another. All I knew was this girl —the girl with chopsticks in her hair who carried around a sketch

“I now feel nothing but freedom to love”

book filled with anime style drawings —who didn’t seem to acknowledge my existence, and still I liked her. The knowledge of my feelings ran loud in my head for much longer than they have escaped my lips.

I thought that there was nothing I could do but pretend — just sit at that desk and pretend I agreed with what my teacher had told us. I would let myself be seen with people who countered everything I believed in and would continue pretending to pray to a deity that I wasn’t sure was listening to me. But I had reached a point where I could no longer pretend. I came out as agnostic and now, I believe what I want to what feels right. Miraculously, it doesn’t look like anyone (or anything) has struck me down in spite yet, giving me further proof that organized religion is only a construct. Instead, I now feel nothing but freedom to love that I never would have felt if I had hid my true self, never said that I loved a woman, never had sex or worn what makes me feel good. Don’t get me wrong, I respect your religion. But, I don’t respect the people who like to twist what it stands for just so they can be right whenever there’s something they don’t understand. Fear will never work for me, not again, and I intend to keep it that way as long as I live. I am freed of my invisible chains. MM

AMANDA ROWSELL is a fourth-year English and professional writing major and a member of MacMedia Magazine. Find her on Instagram at @thisamanda14