ParaKajol’s Future, My Abusive Ex-Pastor, and My Revenge?

Readers,

It has been a couple of months since I’ve written on ParaKajol, but I’m here. Truthfully it has been longer than a few months since I’ve written anything substantial. I have not felt the urge to write but also couldn’t imagine the topic of my next piece. While I reflect on the 5 years that I’ve been writing on ParaKajol, I see common themes flowing from post to post: religion, politics, gender, sex, health, family, and racism.

Do I want to write about that now?

Gabrielle in 2022 is far different from Gabrielle in 2017.

What does present-day Gabrielle want to write about? And is it worth reading?

What do I write about if I have no concrete answers about anything anymore?

With religion no longer a part of my life, I find that I sometimes still speak and write of it, almost as if to perform an exorcism of its previous influence on my life. I am no longer a Christian and cannot write about how Jesus has set me free from sexual sin (I can’t believe I used to think like this!) but I can write about how the church has abused people who dare to explore their sexuality on their own terms.

I have stepped back from the political activist world for the sake of my mind and spirit. My Leftist beliefs have not changed one bit, but I recognize (perhaps cynically) that the Far-Right knows they are racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and everything else that is unloving. Nothing I do will change them; they are happy on the Far-Right. I do not want to spend my life screaming to be heard by those who cannot understand me. Life is far too short.

Instead I have surrounded myself with those that are marginalized and different than me so that I may practice learning and loving. I don’t have all the answers; sometimes I have an unkind thought about another because of their outer shell. My time is better spent working on myself than it is telling a Right-wing person that they’re an idiot. This may seem like the easy road, and maybe it is.

I have not withdrawn from the fight, but I’m fighting in another way.

Moving forward, ParaKajol will still feature posts on the above mentioned topics, but with a slight change in intention and attitude. My focus has shifted to how I can heal, grow, and effect change in the world for as many years as I have left. This seems like quite a heavy thought for a 28-year old to hold, but I recognize that my youth does not protect me from serious disease, accidents, or harm against my person. I too have a limited amount of time on Earth and I want to live well, bringing hope and light to myself and then to others.

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My ex-pastor is an abusive monster masquerading as a typical middle-aged white woman who is “woke” and cool. I tell myself this as I reflect on how she consistently and ruthlessly abused me over the course of two years. But, she’s not a monster. Terrifyingly, she is a person, and an average one at that. She knows the power she holds as a pastor and she wields it to bring shame on her parishioners, shouting at them that they are sinful, lost, broken, and operating out of “the spirit of offense.” Christians invented this unbiblical “spirit of offense” to gaslight the complaining church member/goer into believing that they are the problem.

It’s completely genius…and evil.

To detail exactly how she abused me would take far too many pages and I won’t spend more time than is necessary on relaying the facts. They are as follows, quoted from my submission to DoBetterChurch‘s Instagram:

From my first few months at this church, it was clear that I was a problem. Two leaders in the church racially harassed me and when I told the lead pastor about it a while later, she became offended and told me the church wasn’t racist and they had more diversity than others.

I was constantly told that my issues with other church members were me being led by the “spirit of offense.” This never sat right with me, as obviously one is offended when one is hurt. This is normal and right. Otherwise, one would be a pushover…oh wait I see now.

Every time I met with this pastor, I was constantly told that I was making judgments about things and that I needed to say things differently.

When I thought that masturbation was wrong (because of church tradition), I went to the pastor about it. She compared masturbation to a drug addiction and she asked me when I “last had a hit.” She said that through masturbation, Satan was trying to take my mind because I’m very smart.

Regarding the bad teaching on masturbation, my pastor told me (as I lay in a hospital bed with a kidney infection and ovarian cyst) that my issues probably arose out of masturbation. When I brought this up to her later, she said that I heard her wrong. She believes that the body reacts when a person is no longer masturbating and things like my issues can happen as a result.

Various times she played with words in order to manipulate me into feeling as if I were sinning or wrong in some way, and as if I needed to constantly change the way I was living and speaking to others.

When I mentioned to her that I’d love for the worship team to play songs in Spanish (I’m Puerto Rican and there are a couple of other Latinx people there), she told me that people need to understand what they’re singing.

Um…subtitles? I told her it would make us feel welcome and help show other Latinx (who are treated like shit in the south) that they are welcome.

She said that I was just trying to fulfill my desire for social justice. After the church put out a video about the 2020 election where they completely missed the moment and an opportunity for genuine teaching, I left.

She reached out to me last week and I told her I can’t have any relationship with her. I can’t trust her. What this has shown me is even white people like her who call themselves “woke” are still dangerous, ignorant, racist, and always on other white people’s side.

They like people of color silent and submissive. I’m neither.

Here I’d like to include this brief letter to my ex-pastor so you can be inspired to read someone for filth when needed:

My mother said that you asked about me on Tuesday. I do not want you to know anything about me. Do not ask her or anyone how I am or what I’ve been doing. You emotionally and spiritually abused me over a period of two years and I want nothing more to do with you. Ever. I do not need your love and prayers. Understand that I will never be in relationship with you again.

After sending the above letter to my ex-pastor, I still felt furious with her for trying to get information about me from my mother. But I also felt a faint sense of power returning, as if I had begun to reclaim my authority and establish my identity as a woman not to be fucked with. That was the first time I began to lean into my anger and see what it could do for me. Anger is an unbecoming emotion in the evangelical church, especially in women. We are also told it is not biblical and is offensive to god. Therefore anger must be squashed or else the devil will take hold of you and your anger will spin out of control.

For a religion that claims their god has defeated the devil, they are truly terrified of him.

Over the past year I have allowed myself to be angry, to roll my eyes when someone mentioned her name and to say “Oh I can’t stand her” when my mother (then still attending that church) would ask what happened with her. I refrained from using the “H” word regarding my ex-pastor, because I was also taught that hatred was evil and akin to wishing someone dead.

Christians are so damn dramatic!

They’re also the most hateful group in America…

A year after allowing myself to sit in my dislike of my ex-pastor and to proclaim all the things I didn’t like about her, I have allowed myself to hate her. I may have hated her all this time, but I have not permitted myself to admit to myself that there is someone on this planet that I sincerely hate. My hatred of my ex-pastor has given me the strength and intuition needed to sense when someone may try to abuse me again. And because my hatred reminds me of what she did and how long she did it to me, I immediately shut down any attempt to make me feel small. I am empowered by my hatred of her to never be treated like this again.

Do I wish ill on my ex-pastor? Absolutely not. I can’t actively wish ill on another person or my humanity would be compromised. No, I don’t want something bad to happen to her.

I want her to understand what she did, but I admit that this is unlikely to happen. So I don’t hold out hope that she will change.

Yet she has unfortunately changed me.

I came to her church yearning for community and connection. I was in a new part of the country, broke, depressed, confused about my vocation, and without local friends. She, like so many Christians before her, sniffed out my loneliness and vulnerability. She planned her attack and pounced on me, treating me as if we were friends, like she was one of the cool pastors I could really share my heart with. Over time, that cool pastor persona faded and altered to an emotionally volatile, verbally abusive, manipulative, gaslighting, homophobic, fatphobic, ignorant, racist pastor who used her new position with me to tear me down. And I, still believing that she as a pastor knew best, took each verbal beating with grace (another characteristic of a good godly woman – barf!) and tried to change for the better. But I could never be good enough for her. There was always something to criticize and change when it came to me.

She crossed the final boundary with me when she yelled at me in her office and (among other things), screamed, “Isn’t this what you want, Gabby? Don’t you want a dialogue about race and all that stuff? Then let’s do it! This is what you want!” I sat in her chair feeling smaller than I had felt in years. As the tears slid down my face, I fixed my downcast eyes on her hideous carpet, and kept saying “Okay, okay” in a failed effort to calm her. She had reached a broken part of me that few had: her abuse had touched Little Gabby. The little girl in me saw that we were still being mistreated as we were in childhood and she pulled at my pant legs, looking up at me with big brown eyes, asking me to protect her.

Goddamit, I did. I walked away from that “meeting” with the knowledge that I had been deeply hurt, but that she had fucked with the wrong person. I wrote a lengthy letter to her detailing why she was wrong and how she abused her power. Still trying to be a good Christian, I tried reconciling with her and having grace. I knew that bad things had been done to her, too. Surely I could have patience and understanding…

She later offered to help me move into my new apartment. Although I wanted nothing to do with her, I let her move my stuff. Because fuck her, that’s why. Revenge comes in weird ways.

For months I considered how I could get revenge. Could I mail her a letter calling her every horrible name ever written? Is that legal? I was scared. I settled for writing a scathing review of her cult church on Google.

I told everyone what she had done to me, and few were inclined to believe it could have been that bad. That put salt into the wound, and I lost many friends by standing my ground and protecting myself.

I imagined running into her at the coffee shop frequented by her cult members and telling her to fuck off and go to hell. I have yet to run into her, but I hope one day I will.

My best revenge will be continuing with my life, taking the lessons I have learned about my strength and tenacity in the midst of intense religious trauma and applying them to each day. I am now an agnostic atheist. I want nothing to do with god or religion. I hate Christianity. Her attempts to make me into the perfect Christian girl helped turn me into a heathen who doesn’t care about her god. Oops! Fucked that one up, didn’t you?

I hate my ex-pastor.

I hate her more than I’ve ever hated anyone…and that’s okay.

Gabrielle G.