The Relief of Surrender

My head is a jumble of thoughts right now. Now, more than ever, I feel resolute in my insistence on creating art that resonates with young people. I want my art to create refuge for those who are seeking answers and comfort, and I want it to bring them hope. 

But I also want it to serve as a warning for young readers who haven't been exposed yet to things like The Handmaid's Tale: the way that high-control environments are direct consequences of widespread fear and destruction. I want it to speak to the promises these communities make about delivering us from pain and powerlessness, offering us comfort when no one else can, and also serve as a warning as to the steep price of that comfort.

In times like these, when we feel battered and bruised and exhausted and fucking shit, not this again, I feel like surrendering. I want the comfort that religion used to bring to me, like I describe in my experiences as a young person below. And I think there is something valuable in allowing myself to surrender, but only to a certain extent. 

Right now, I surrender to the reality that this is the dystopic world in which we live, and that our country has chosen to live in this world on purpose. That is inherently, objectively true, and I won't resist it. 

But that's the extent of my surrender. For the rest of it, I will continue to resist. I will continue to make art, to build community, to be the intersectional minority I am, because that experience is a real human experience and cannot be erased. I will continue to be complicated, to exist. 

I will continue to be. 

Surrender means letting go. Sometimes, of everything.

The Matriarch stood tall and quiet, providing a calming presence that Paige echoed while she clutched onto the Pandora. Paige half expected it to burn when she touched it: she was sure that something as sacred as the Pandora could sense her inadequacy, both as a human and the supposed spiritual emblem of her people. She waited for the fiery crawl of sinful guilt she remembered from when she was younger, but the Pandora only felt like a box. 

Maybe the guilt wouldn’t come. Now that she’d made the right choice—to surrender herself to the community—maybe she was vindicated. 

Surrender. A delicious, seductive word that always made Paige feel like she was flying. Surrender was relief; it was the acknowledgment that someone else was in charge, not her. She didn’t have to be the one making the decisions or calling the shots, because the Ancestors had already decided that long ago. New Standard was protected land, home to protected people. The Ancestors, then, were their protectors, gatekeepers of the Afterlands, and all the New Standardites had to do to show worthiness of the gift of neverending life in perfect peace and comfort was follow the rules that the Spared had used to find favor with the Ancestors back during the war. 

She was doing that, she reminded herself. She was following the rules. Keeping the covenant. Earning her place. 

Deep breath in. 

“Are we ready?” said the administrator. 

Deep breath out. 

The administrator didn’t wait for anyone to respond. He wiped his glasses with his shirt and glanced passively at the Procession before waving them along. All Paige had to do was walk straight. Hold the Pandora, not drop it, and walk straight.

And the rising sun and cooler, dewy morning air with the cheering crowd, the energy frantically relieved in the wake of having a new Ritualist who promised to be more dedicated than the one who abandoned them, washed over her a familiar comfort. Paige marched next to the Matriarch in the middle of the Procession, guarded by CSes all around them. The student band led the group, playing the lively patriotic song “Come Light, Healing Light”; the current sitting Council of Elders trailed in a phalanx behind Paige and the Matriarch; bringing up the rear, a group of dancers performed a traveling square dance in time with the music. 

The band played the same song year after year, the audience watching on the sidelines joining in singing. Each year prior to this one, it was the one song that put Paige entirely in her happy place. 

Now, she tried to resist the pleasure flooding her brain that insisted on making her feel like her normal self again. It wanted to make her happy, but she didn’t deserve it. She had doubted. She hadn’t fallen prey to temptation, but it wasn’t because of her own resilience. It was luck that she’d been in the right circumstances. 

But the Statutes were forgiving; they guided you, if you let them. The music, too, was relentless. It washed over her like a shower, the spray of comfort raining a homey heat over her hair and down her face, behind her ears and around her neck. Singing was a hot bubble bath on a cool January night; it was the blissful surrender of anxiety, the security of knowledge of the Truth. Paige sang as they marched down the citizen lined street, one voice melding among the thousands:

“Come light, healing light, come light eternal, 
Shake, shake out of me all that is carnal 
I’ll be a pure light, I’ll lead the way 
I’ll show the Theorists how we behave.”

The dancers marched in step and shook their hands like they were trying to get off something sticky. Like sin. And as if the universe was peering into Paige’s brain, she spotted Mott in the crowd. Her dark mane of tight curls spread out from her head like a delicate brown halo; she watched Paige quietly, a rarity for Mott, but what else was there to do?

Nothing.

Paige tried to avoid Mott’s gaze. Hell, she tried to avoid anyone’s gaze.

She caught sight of Adam toward the front of the crowd, his lips wrinkled in what seemed like disappointment. Paige kept the polite smile on her face, unwavering. At least that was the good thing that had come from al the stressors of her childhood environment: al the times she’d had to go to Meditation after Mama had cleaned her mouth out with soap when Paige had talked back, when Paige had tried to defend unorthodox punishments—she’d had to pretend, to play the part of the obedient, devout daughter then. She’d been expected to keep her mouth shut about the soap thing, just smile and greet their neighbors. Smile and keep sweet. Smile and be polite. And smile.

Excerpt from Vessel, forthcoming Spring 2025

​When I was in youth group service at church in high school, I raised my hands during songs, moved by the power of what I thought was god. I surrendered myself to jesus’s love. I surrendered myself to the will of a legendary being who allegedly created the existence of everything, and whose existence I can’t prove but I must trust at risk of losing my faith, a fate worse than death. Or abuse. Abuse is worth it—valuable, even—in the process of faith, because faith can get you anywhere. Faith can set you free.

Except for me, faith was the thing that chained me. I was accountable to it. Everything I did was in service of a faith I inherited from other people. It was a faith not just given to me, not offered, but mandated to me.

As Paris Paloma so succinctly put it, “it’s not an act of love if you make her.”

This teaching of surrender in Christianity may seem like a relief to some. It did for me, when I was younger. I wanted someone to take control over my life and give me peace, because I was fucking tired. I wanted to surrender to something, anything, that could make my pain better, whether that was Jesus or death or, hell, both.

Eventually I realised that Jesus wasn’t going to do shit, because it was all a setup. Some dude in the sky made a world I didn’t ask for, made me suffer in ways I didn’t ask for, and then had some ego trip telling me that he was the only one I should believe in, then made my ancestors provide blood atonement, then made it so I had to surrender my life to him? And he would somehow make it better? I was surrendering. I was surrendering as hard as I could, and I was still having panic attacks on a regular basis. I still wanted to die to escape it all, because I hadn’t signed up for any of it.

The thing about growing up that way—about being taught the importance of surrender as a means of survival, of being “saved,” rescued from a fate you were destined for without your consent—is that you learn to surrender yourself to other authorities in your life. Church leaders, teachers. Parents. And the surrender doesn’t actually save you. It just gives people control over you.

So I walked away. And it was terrifying, because with relinquishing my faith, I was then alone and without any coping mechanisms. To let go of faith is in itself an act of sheer faith—that you're going to survive without the safety net you've been able to know is there your whole life. It's trust in what you know: that that safety net has had holes in it this whole time, and that no matter how many times people tell you it'll catch you, you know it won't catch you. And when you have a new faith, and don't have a community reinforcing it around you, it's lonely and terrifying. 

But in my case, it was also incredibly worth it. 

I have found so much healing over the years from walking away from my religion. I have recreated the foundation of my sense of belief, of how I see my existence in the world, and I am constantly learning more and shifting. But now I've built in the ability to shift into my foundation, and my sense of self is malleable to be able to handle when I'm unsure or wrong. What I've built on top of it is also a sense of surrender: to the knowledge that I don't have all the answers yet, and that I likely never will, and that I will be wrong many, many times. I've found peace in knowing that there's no such thing as purity, though I'm still trying to unlearn the impulse to clean all of my mistakes in a way that will render me blameless. Peace is now something that I have created for myself, and it isn't something that someone else has created for me. 
​
It's mine. 

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​And with that, I am extremely pleased to reveal the cover of this new book!

​Drumroll, please . . .