Grieving God: My Journey with Religious Trauma (Part 4)

Where I Finally Felt Accepted

By the time I was 20 years old, my search for belonging had encountered multiple dead ends. Belonging in my family system meant sacrificing my autonomy. Belonging at school was near impossible without freedom to join sports or extracurriculars, not to mention the incessant bullying due to ratty clothing and an overall lack of parental support. Belonging in church was granted, for the most part, as long as I followed the social construct.

Working in a restaurant was the easiest path to belonging I had ever experienced up until that point. I went in with one expectation: to make enough money to cover my rent. That motivation and my natural bubbly personality made me a pretty damn good server. I was also really great at kissing ass and people pleasing, so I found that the job fit like a glove. Like with anything, there were some lessons to be learned... like send orders back to the kitchen immediately- because forgetting to do that will cause your tables to walk out on you... but it only took one time to figure that out and thankfully my boss had a lot of belief in me and didn't fire me for some reason. I feel pretty lucky about that.

It might sound strange, but working in food service was my first real experience with working on a team. I know it's not super common, but the waitstaff at the restaurant I worked for had almost like a "no server left behind" mentality. We had our own individual sections, our own tables to wait on... and yet... most of us treated the entire dining room like a joint responsibility. We helped each other get drinks to tables; we prepared salads for each other, delivered the food as soon as it was in the window... and it didn't matter if it was a table in our own section or if it was a table in someone else's section. We had the common goals of being excellent, making money, and providing the best experience for our "guests"... and it fucking showed.

We all ended our shifts with beaucoup bucks in our aprons and a shared sense of accomplishment at the end of a three-hour dinner wait.

It was an ecstatic feeling... and oftentimes... relieving when the night was finally over.

I remember the first night I was invited to someone's house after work. It was pretty chill and relaxing, just a handful of servers hanging out around the kitchen table, munching on a prepared frozen pizza. And then we started playing drinking games. It was the first time I ever played "Never have I ever..." and since I was such a "good Christian girl" without a lot of world experience, I was probably pretty boring.

I remember going back to work the next afternoon and the other servers chatting with me and joking about the night before. And then it became more of a regular occurrence. I would meet up with my team after work, at homes for Texas Hold 'em, or at the Barrel Head for appetizers, drinks, and a change of scenery. We would laugh about stupid stuff, support each other through stories of crying in the walk-in freezer (me, lol) and vent about the guests who could not be appeased. Some nights there would be a lot of us... some nights just a handful. Sometimes we would invite our significant others, sometimes not. But through the connections, I found that even work became a place that I looked forward to, because... it felt like... my coworkers saw me as valuable, someone worth sharing laughter with, and someone worth supporting.

So what does any of this have to do with my religious trauma and deconstruction journey?

Celebrating my 21st birthday with my restaurant fam

Very few, if any, of these individuals, were religious. And yet, I felt like I had real friends. Friends who were straight, and friends who were gay. Friends who were white, and friends who were black. Friends who made me feel like I was a part of a community, and that I mattered. I didn't have to change who I was. I could be honest. I could be silly. I could be angry about a table that gave me a hard time... and it was all okay. I was truly accepted.

In the church, I was taught to spend most of my time with other Christians to avoid temptation. I was taught to be "in the world, but not of the world," and that anyone "of the world," would drag me down with them. Yuck. Ew. I feel so disgusted even typing that.

I was bumping up against cognitive dissonance... why was it that I felt so alone while I was away at a college filled with only Christians, yet when I started working at a restaurant with a bunch of people from different backgrounds, I felt connected to something bigger? Why were my coworkers more Christ-like than the so-called religious individuals I encountered at church, youth group, and bible college?

And for a little while, that was enough for me to take a step back. I still felt a connection to God, but I didn't want to keep giving my energy, time and resources to church. I had experienced enough judgment and pain to walk away.

For a little while.