I knew I was born to freak when I decided to be my own damn authority.

This is a radical act for a woman, especially for a woman like me who was raised in a religious environment where ‘authority’ wasn’t a vague concept, it was as literal as hellfire and potlucks.

Growing up, I had many authorities:

My parents, Sunday School teachers, pastors.  If I ever got married, my husband.  The Big Book with the gold edges was the final authority, even when it contradicted itself.

Then there was God.  He–and it was most definitely a He–was the big boss.

I was just a little tiny sprout of a thing, waaaay down at the bottom of the hierarchy.

My only responsibility was to do as I was told.  Simple!

But I had some trouble.

For starters, there was that pesky rage I felt at church: the blurred vision and churning stomach.  This was bothersome, since I went to church forty-two days a week.

Then later during college there was the deathly heaviness that settled over my limbs at Bible Study (on  my liberal feminist campus, just to make it fun) when we spoke solemnly about how the husband’s authority over the wife was truly a beautiful teaching that guaranteed wives peace and orgasms.

Instead of feeling peace (let alone an orgasm), I seemed to have swallowed a gallon of gasoline, and I was either going to be sick or ignite into a fiery plume of exhausted fury.

Tiny little troubles like that.  Hardly worth mentioning.

I believed completely that the problem was me.  Oh, I railed against certain more hard-core aspects of my religion, but I was deeply convinced that I was flawed and didn’t have the right to fight The Truth.  (You simply must believe that to be the kind of Christian I was; it’s fundamental doctrine.)

Two years later I was lying on my bathroom floor.  My confused but devout husband banged on the door, so I finally lifted my cheek from the cheap black and white linoleum.  I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror.  I absolutely loathed the woman I saw there.  I wanted to destroy her.  I hated that I couldn’t control her, that she wanted so many things that were Very Wrong: independence, equality, sensuous beauty and pleasure.

And I understood very clearly at that moment that unless I did something drastic, I was going to kill myself.

I was 23.

To find out what happened next, read the rest of the story at: 
http://followyourfeelgood.com/a-guest-post-by-anna-kunnecke/