Drafted: Tiny Cracks

This post is part of the “Drafted” series — reflections on how spiritual performance shaped my faith, identity, and sense of purpose.

This post steps out of the timeline.

I had planned to keep things in order.
To walk through the year the way it unfolded: chronologically, event by event.
But revisiting my journals stopped me in my tracks.

Because under the schedule, beneath the sermons,
there was another story being written.
A quieter one.
A slower unraveling.

Now, I’m holding the pages I once wrote in shaking hands—
my 18-year-old self, trying so hard to be good, to be useful, to be holy.
These journals were meant to mark my transformation.
But reading them now, I see something else.

Tiny cracks.

Not dramatic. Not loud.
Just hairline fractures in the armor I thought was faith.
Small splits between who I truly was
and who I believed I had to become to survive.

Back then, I couldn’t see them.
I thought the ache meant I wasn’t trying hard enough.
I thought the exhaustion was part of the refining.
I didn’t know that faith rooted in fear always fractures—
not in a single, shattering moment…
but slowly.
Softly.
One silent splinter at a time.

These journals didn’t capture my breaking.
They captured the beginning of it.
And somehow—
the beginning of my becoming, too.

---

“I can’t go on. I’m weary. I can barely keep my eyes open… I’m fighting a battle to keep my eyes open.”

I remember this night.
The way my pen dragged across the page like my body across the day—
slow, unsteady, barely coherent.
I wasn’t sleeping. I was fasting.
I was working 30+ hours a week in my ministry placement,
crying during worship,
sprinting between surrender and self-loathing.
And still I thought the problem was me.

I didn’t recognize it as burnout.
I called it spiritual warfare.
I thought if I just prayed harder, repented louder, surrendered more fully—
the fog would lift.
The fire would come back.
God would be proud again.

So I journaled my exhaustion like it was sin
and begged God to fix me.

🧠 Fatigue wasn’t a spiritual shortcoming — it was a physiological signal.
But I had been taught to override my body, not to care for it.
In trauma-informed language, I was stuck in sympathetic overdrive—fight mode dressed up in faith language—interpreting dysregulation as divine resistance.

I didn’t know my body was crying out for help.
I only knew the scripture that said,
“the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

So I punished mine into submission.
And I called it devotion.

---

“Lately I’ve been struggling with the desire to live a ‘normal’ life… to be comfortable. But I know there is more.”

I remember writing this like it was a confession.
As if wanting rest made me rebellious.
As if craving softness meant I was slipping.
The thought of a quiet, ordinary life felt almost shameful—
a betrayal of the calling I had pledged myself to.

I had been taught that comfort was the enemy of conviction.
That choosing ease was the beginning of compromise.
That “normal” was for the faithless,
the lukewarm,
the ones who never burned bright enough to be used.

So I convinced myself I was above it.
That I didn’t need softness.
That I was made for sacrifice.

But underneath all that resolve,
there was a voice I couldn’t unhear—
the one that wondered what it might feel like
to belong without burning out.

🧠 High-control religious systems often equate discomfort with growth, and comfort with spiritual danger. But from a trauma-informed lens, this is how our nervous systems learn to normalize dysregulation. Rest feels unsafe. Peace feels suspicious. Longing for relief becomes something we repent for. The result? Chronic spiritual fawning masked as devotion.

I thought I was resisting temptation.
But really, I was resisting tenderness.
And I didn’t know yet
that craving comfort isn’t weak.
It’s human.

---

“I need a breath of refreshing from you… I don’t want to settle for less.”

This line sounds holy.
It even felt holy when I wrote it.
A cry for closeness. For anointing. For something deep and eternal.

But underneath it…
was exhaustion.

I didn’t need a supernatural outpouring.
I needed sleep.
I needed food.
I needed a break from the pressure to keep performing peace when my insides were aching.

I thought I was asking God to fill me.
But what I was really saying was:
I can’t keep going like this.
Please, meet me in my depletion. Make it feel sacred, so I don’t have to admit it’s breaking me.

Even my prayers were dressed in performance.
I only knew how to ask for help in the language I’d been taught:
surrender, sacrifice, more fire.

🧠 This is what it looks like when spiritual bypassing becomes instinct. I spiritualized my depletion because I had no framework for rest. I didn’t know that what I was calling “hunger for more of God” was often a masked cry for regulation, for safety, for my body to exhale. When rest isn’t modeled or allowed, we reach for revival instead.

I didn’t want to settle for less.
But no one ever told me
I was already living with far less than I needed.

---

“I feel distant. My heart longs for you.”

I remember the guilt that followed this line.
Like I had failed God simply by noticing the space between us.
Like longing meant I wasn’t loyal enough.

Back then, I didn’t have language for disconnection.
Only words like complacency, lukewarm, backslidden.
If I couldn’t feel God, I assumed I had moved.
That I had let the fire go out.
That I was the problem.

So I fasted.
Repented.
Cried into my pillow and called it purification.
Tried to worship my way back into worthiness.

But now I read this line and I hear something different.

I wasn’t distant from God.
I was distant from myself.

🧠 In trauma-informed therapy, we understand disconnection as a protective state. When our nervous systems are flooded for too long, we enter hypoarousal—numbness, detachment, dissociation. But in high-control faith systems, this is often interpreted as spiritual failure. The truth is: I wasn’t drifting. I was shutting down. And no amount of striving could reconnect me to myself while I was still denying my needs.

I hadn’t fallen away.
I was just too overwhelmed to feel.

And I didn’t need a breakthrough.
I needed a break.

---

“My chains will increase the Kingdom.”

I remember writing this and feeling proud.
Wrecked, but proud.
As if the pain made it more powerful.
As if the deeper I bled, the more glory it would bring.

The chains weren’t physical.
They were metaphorical—
but they were heavy just the same.

They looked like chronic fatigue wrapped in purpose.
Like always being the one who said yes, no matter the cost.
Like smiling through spiritual exhaustion, because “joy is strength.”
Like silence when something didn’t feel right, because “unity” mattered more.

I had been taught that sacrifice was the highest currency of faith.
That comfort was for the weak.
That to be chosen meant to be poured out, emptied, undone.

So I romanticized my own suffering.
I made my chains sound noble.
I learned to praise the prison.

And in doing so, I became fluent in a language
that made harm feel holy.

🧠 When a person’s identity is fused with performance and pain is spiritualized, suffering becomes a badge of worth. This is a common trauma adaptation in high-demand environments: if I can’t escape the harm, I’ll find meaning in it. I’ll call it devotion. I’ll tell myself it’s God’s will. But just because something happens in a sacred space doesn’t make it sacred. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do… is stop justifying what hurts.

I didn’t know how to name injustice.
So I called it calling.
And I stayed chained—
believing the tighter it squeezed,
the more I mattered.

---

“I was disgusted with the thoughts that ran through my head.”

This one still makes my chest tighten.
Not because the thoughts were dangerous—
but because I believed they made me dangerous.
Like one flicker of fear or desire or doubt
was enough to undo everything I was trying so hard to be.

I had been taught that holiness wasn’t just about what you did—
but what you thought.
What you felt.
What drifted across your mind
when no one else could see.

So when a thought came that didn’t match the script,
I didn’t pause.
I didn’t ask where it came from or what it needed.
I just panicked.
Repented.
Shut it down.

I thought I was guarding my heart.
But really, I was silencing myself.
One reflexive apology at a time.

🧠 What I see now is a girl trying her best to be good in a system that taught her fear was faith. That told her thoughts were moral tests and feelings were spiritual liabilities. These are the roots of scrupulosity—the religious form of obsessive-compulsive thinking—where every inner flicker becomes a threat to your standing with God. But thoughts are not sins. They are part of being human. And she was never bad for having them. She was just scared.

And of course she was.

She just wanted to stay worthy.
She just wanted to feel safe.

If I could sit beside her now, I wouldn’t hand her a verse.
I’d hand her a blanket.
I’d tell her,
There’s nothing wrong with you.
Your mind is not your enemy.
You don’t have to fight yourself to be faithful.

---

"I don’t want a normal life. I would be miserable and restless.”

I meant it.

I wasn’t trying to convince myself.
I wasn’t posturing or performing.
I believed it—with everything in me.

Because how could I want anything else?
How could I go to work and come home and live quietly
when the weight of eternity was pressing down on my soul?

People were suffering.
People were going to hell.
And I had been told that I could do something about it—
that I should.

So I didn’t just reject the idea of a “normal” life—
I grieved it.
I buried it.
I offered it up like Isaac on the altar and called it obedience.

🧠 This wasn’t delusion. It was devotion formed in urgency. What I see now is how spiritual trauma fuses identity with responsibility—how it hands a young heart the weight of the world and says, if you really love God, you’ll carry it. That kind of martyrdom isn’t about ego. It’s about survival. When your belonging depends on your usefulness, you learn to equate exhaustion with holiness. You give everything because the cost of keeping anything feels too high.

And so I meant it.
I didn’t want a normal life—
because normal didn’t feel safe.
Because normal didn’t feel enough.

But what I couldn’t name then
was that restlessness wasn’t just passion.
It was pain.
It was fear.
It was my nervous system locked in a loop of urgency,
and my spirit trying to stay worthy of being seen.

---

“Jesus, your name is exalted… but open the eyes of my understanding…”

Even now, reading that line gives me pause.
Because beneath all the noise—
the fasting, the striving, the submission dressed as strength—
there was still a part of me that was asking.

Still hoping.

Still trying to see clearly
in a system that taught me to keep my eyes closed and just obey.

I didn’t have the words for it then,
but some part of me knew:
there was more to God than what I had been handed.
More to faith than white-knuckled worship and running on empty.

And even when I couldn’t name it,
I kept writing.

Kept whispering into the pages,
open my eyes.

🧠 This is the brilliance of survival. When a person is deeply embedded in a high-control environment, there’s often a quiet part of the self that resists—subtly, instinctively. We call this the “observing ego” or the “wise self.” It’s not loud. It doesn’t fight back with force. It simply remembers. It writes things down. It asks better questions. It keeps a sliver of awareness alive until it’s safe to surface. That sliver is what eventually saves us.

That’s the redemption in all of this.
That even in the dark, I kept asking for light.
That even in the most rigid systems, something soft in me survived.
That even when I believed I had to disappear to be devoted—
some quiet, sacred part of me kept reaching for something real.

---

And now, years later,
I see it all differently.

Not through the lens of failure,
but through the soft light of understanding.

The cracks weren’t flaws in my faith—
they were signals.
Flares in the fog.
Faint tremors in the foundation
saying this version of holiness is hurting you.

I used to think I was falling apart.
Now I know—I was finally starting to come home to myself.

Not all at once.
Not with thunder or clarity or clean lines.

But slowly.
With scribbled prayers.
With journal entries that shook with exhaustion.
With questions I didn’t yet know how to ask.

Breaking doesn’t always look like collapse.
Sometimes, it’s a quiet unraveling.
A sacred undoing.

Sometimes, it’s a girl writing down her pain
because no one ever taught her she could speak it out loud.

And maybe that’s the miracle—
That something in me kept writing.

That even now, I don’t have to erase who I was to honor who I’ve become.

I hold no resentment toward the girl who believed.
She loved big. She gave everything.
She meant every word.

And I don’t hold rage for the systems that shaped her either—
not because they didn’t do harm,
but because healing has taught me to hold nuance.

I can honor the joy and the pain.
The clarity and the confusion.
The belonging and the cost.

It wasn’t all good.
And it wasn’t all bad.

It was real.
And it mattered.
And I get to tell the truth about it now—
with eyes wide open,
and heart still intact.

---

🪑 From the Therapist’s Chair

When I look back at these journal entries now, I don’t see rebellion.
I see brilliance.

I see a young woman navigating a system that spiritualized burnout,
mislabeled regulation as righteousness,
and trained her to override every natural signal her body gave her.

What I once called surrender was, more often, shutdown.
What I called devotion was sometimes a trauma response—
fawning, freezing, over-functioning in the name of being “used by God.”

This is what high-control spiritual environments do:
They collapse identity into obedience.
They elevate exhaustion as evidence of faith.
They teach you to fear the very things that make you whole—
rest, joy, desire, autonomy, grief.

And yet—
this girl kept writing.

She journaled her weariness with trembling hands.
She cried out when she felt numb.
She kept reaching for God,
even when the version she had been handed
was breaking her body and burying her voice.

That’s not weakness.
That’s survival.

That’s the wisdom of a nervous system trying to find safety.
That’s the courage of a soul trying to stay tethered to truth
when everything around her demanded performance.

And that’s what I hold with reverence now—
not just the pain,
but the persistence.

She didn’t need fixing.
She needed gentleness.
And language.
And space to question without fear of being called disobedient.

I can give that to her now.
And in doing so,
I keep healing too.

🔗 This post is part of the Drafted series — a collection of reflections, stories, and soul reckonings from my time in high-control Christianity. If this resonated with you, I invite you to keep reading. There’s more to the story, and you’re not alone in yours.