Jennie

“My mother had become a obsession for me, a religion, and the very thought of referring to another woman as Mother seems sacrilegious, a betrayal of the woman who had given up her life for me to live.”
― Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Stay with Me

“He shakes his head, and I think this moment, right here, is when it really hits me that Sebastian's identity isn't queer. It's not gay. It's not even soccer player or boyfriend or son. It’s Mormon.”
― Christina Lauren, Autoboyography

“I sit on the balcony with the phone to my ear and as the sun makes its way slowly across the sky, I tell her everything. Not just about the pregnancy test; I tell her all the things we’re afraid to tell our mothers about our partners in case they tell us what we don’t want to hear that we already know: that we should leave them.”
― Hazel Hayes, Out of Love

“I was just bouncing back and forth all over the place with no sense of groundedness at all. I loved growing up in the church-- that's the thing-- growing up in the church hasn't been this traumatic, horrible experience for me. I hadn't gone to one of those scary churches that was overtly mean or hostile. My church puton this face of "we love everyody and we're all about grace". That was always the message. But when I started conffessing to people in my church that I'm dealing with this right now and it's realy hard for me, I don't know what to do, the only thing they could seem to think to do was how to convert me back to their way of thinking. "Well you're wrong. Because we already know the answer." Nobody was like, "Okay, let's just talk through this because it's you're life, and whatever you decide, we'll still care about you." The only thing they cared about in the conversation was giving me the answer; making sure they got me back on the right path; treating the whole thing like a debate instead of a conversation. I realized this community's ideology is more important to them than anything else. It's more important than people; it's more important than keeping their relationships with one another in tact. The ideology is the only thing that matters here. I guess on some level I knew that they would respond that way. But there was a part of me that was like, "But surely, I had grown up in this church. All these people care about me; surely they're not going to react that way to ~me. When they did, I felt like, other than being a person who comes to their church and believes their right thins, do I have any value to these people? If I stop believing all the right things, then do I stop having value to them?”
― Linda Kay Klein, Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free