- I grew up in a very religious,
Christian conservative household in Australia,
where I'm originally from.
We were kind of brought up in the same kinds of
American conservative Christian cultural messages,
everything except the politics.
So in 2008, I decided to move to Los Angeles
and just make the leap,
I had no family here, I didn't really have friends.
But one of the things that made that transition easier
was finding a church and that becomes your family.
I was 24, I found this church, very big church,
and I also found this guy who I ended up marrying.
At church, everything was perfect and rosy,
my husband was also a leader in the church
so we kind of had to put on this front.
We're just these perfect happy people,
everything's great.
At home, it was a very different story.
He was battling a lot of his own demons
that he never fully resolved,
he was an ex-drug addict that had never fully recovered,
he had his own family problems
that he brought into our relationship
and it just became a very abusive and toxic environment.
I didn't have any tools to deal with that.
I actually felt embarrassed
that I was going through these things
and thought it would reflect badly on me.
I didn't want to be in a toxic marriage,
I didn't want to be in a toxic environment,
I wanted to live a healthy, prosperous life
and so I made the decision to get a divorce
and it wasn't just leaving that marriage,
it was like divorcing my extended family, my community.
I didn't know who I was, I didn't know where I fit in,
because all the things that I thought were my identity
were all of the sudden stripped away.
Not one person called me,
no one checked up to see where I was, how I was doing,
because I left the church.
But there were a lot of things that I do value
from that church experience, for instance,
when I first moved here,
I didn't know how to get medication or prescriptions,
I didn't know how to go and see a GP,
in Australia it's very different and a lot easier,
and I remember one of my close friends
who is super conservative, still is to this day,
I had told her, look,
I've run out of my birth control prescription,
I don't know what I should do, how expensive is it?
And she said to me, just completely off-hand one day, like,
oh, you can go to Planned Parenthood
and it's pretty affordable,
so I thought, okay, cool.
I don't know what Planned Parenthood is
but I'll go there and I'll get it and I did,
and it was just not a big deal
and there have been so many times over the past few years
in between jobs where I didn't have financial stability.
I've been able to go back there,
I've been able to get great health care and ironically,
I think it's one of the most valuable things
I took away from that church experience,
I'm so thankful she told me.
Being away from that environment,
I was able to decide for myself who I was,
where I wanted to be in the world,
what I wanted to believe.
I still consider myself a person of faith, very deeply so,
I've defined myself politically, socially,
spiritually in a way
that I can genuinely say is authentically me.
I'm remarried again, I have a seven-month-old baby,
and I don't know where my life is heading
but just the idea of being okay
with knowing I'm in control of my body
and my decisions and my life,
it took going through a divorce,
leaving an integral church community
and not knowing who I was, to figure that out.
It feels weird to say I'm thankful for it,
because it made me who I am today
but I like who I am now,
I never used to like who I am before but now I do.