 Paige, the true believer.
Paige, our heroine, is a true believer. True believers are people who have bought entirely into their belief system. These are the people who make excuses for all of the terrible things that people who are in their belief community do, because all of those terrible things are in service to the greater good. These are the people who believe so much in the greater good that they are willing to die for it. I was that true believer, too. I grew up Baptist in Fresno, California. Fresno is an interesting place, and quite conservative for California. It's a place with lots of local pride, where there's a simultaneous sense of "we're an awesome city in its own right, who needs those big-city jerks" and "let's install world-class cultural institutions so that we're comparable to Los Angeles." It's a relatively large city--500,000 people during the aughts--with tons of insular communities. Fresno is more than 50% Hispanic/Latinx, and my insular community reflected this: my dad's family is Mexican, my mom's family is Spanish and French, and both of them were raised Catholic. I was raised immersed in my dad's family, everyone of whom spoke fluent English, but who had strongly inherited Mexican-Catholic sensibilities. Basically, "Encanto" is my life. Minus the happy ending. That environment did a number on me. I grew up with this idea drilled into me that I was a sinner, and that was just by default, and I had to confess how awful I was to Jesus in order to be saved from being burned for eternity when I died. And more than that, it was up to me to prevent my friends from that same fate, and if I didn't, it would be my fault. I was taught evangelical recruitment techniques: give the gentle sell, use the particular gifts God has given you to show how much you're so happy that you have Jesus and God in your life, that you have been saved from being the scum you were born as, because as soon as you were born you sinned. You sinned with your impure thoughts that Jesus saw on a regular basis on a giant screen in Heaven at the pearly gates, judging you for whenever you got there, and you had to hope that your faith was good enough during your life on Earth, that you had asked to be saved enough times that you wouldn't be rejected right then and there for that one time you masturbated in secret and didn't ask for forgiveness. Because that's what religion was in my community: a lifetime of servitude to the Lord. A lifetime of knowing the right things to say, of giving platitudes for everything, of feeling obligated to share every compulsion I had (when I got my first kiss, I felt like I had to sit both of my parents down separately and admit it to them, guilt and delight warring equally for space in my brain). A lifetime of prioritizing work and family and putting friends and fun at the bottom of your list. And when combined with Latin culture, it meant no space for privacy. Total vulnerability. That was what faith meant. Pleasure wasn't part of that. It was something to hide.
I started writing Paige in 2011, when I was 21 years old. At the time, Mott was a boy. The book was called Ritual Girl, and I published it on FictionPress to much success (133 reviews! 43 users following the story! It was glorious), and you're welcome for that link, because not many people in my current life have seen it. At that time in my life, I thought I was very straight--because that was what I had been trained to believe about myself. That was the narrow frame of existence I had been taught was available to me throughout my childhood. Things were rough at home, and I existed in a constant state of anxiety, knowing that I was a sinner and constantly needed to try to get a clean slate, apologizing over and over for my sins: fighting with my brother, writing fanfiction instead of doing my Latin homework, talking back at things I found unfair. I started to have panic attacks. When I was in high school and I was overwhelmed with my lack of living up to expectations, I started to beat my legs with the heels of my dance shoes, bruises blending in with the bruises I had all over my knees constantly from dance anyway. I was told to not tell my friends about it, because they might tell their parents and it was a "family matter." We could talk about it within our family, with our grandparents, but they did nothing. They prayed for us. And prayed for us the next time it happened. And the next time. And the next time. It did nothing. I was still miserable. If anything, I was even more miserable than before. This clip from the reboot series "One Day at a Time" perfectly illustrates how mental health was treated in my family. Penelope (Justina Machado) says, "I'm Cuban! You know, we don't really do therapy," and her new friend Jill (Haneefah Wood) says, "In my family, the only therapist we're allowed to talk to was Jesus. And he must be booked up because he has not returned my calls." I sneaked into therapy in high school. Sneaked into it again in college. And when I finally started to deconstruct my religion, my family culture, how messed up it wall was, and I wanted to start therapy, I was told that therapy was just a scam, someone who would charge them for me to complain to them. So when you're experiencing anomalies in what you're "supposed" to live like, and you don't, you're not satisfied, and it's your fault that you're not just grateful that you have food and shelter and people who profess to love you, and you ask Jesus over and over again for help and you ask family for help and the only help that comes is hollow and empty, you're alone. Talking about your struggles with other people isn't an available option. In my case, it made my suicidal ideation more intense. For Paige, it makes her feel like the only way out is to die. She feels like she has to make up for her Aunt Felicity, who was labeled a "Theorist" (essentially, an apostate) whose sin was loving another woman--
--and was "cleansed" (burned at the stake, a la Joan of Arc) for it. So when Paige starts feeling these dangerous signs of pleasure when interacting with her best friend, Mott, who is also a girl, the only way out seems to be to die with honor: to be sacrificed before anyone can find her out. This is what it's like to live with the pressure of a religion with a narrow focus on how life should be lived. This is what it's like to live in a community that encourages you to keep quiet with people outside of your community. Eventually, the people who love you--whom you love--train you to believe that the deviation in how you experience life is unacceptable and should be corrected--love the sinner, hate the sin.  Cults aren't always Jonestown or Heaven's Gate: sometimes it's your own family. When you are in a community where the people who love you the most tell you to keep your pain away from your closest friends, that trained professionals are just out to get your money and would never understand, it makes the community ripe for abusive behaviors. This was my experience of what Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife, describes in her memoir: a "cult without walls." In a podcast interview, Levings reflects on her experience of falling deeper and deeper into high-control religion, which isn't so much a single church but rather a continuum of one religion, which is how people find themselves in cultlike (more specifically, high-control) environments. I wanted to tell the story of a true believer in fiction for the modern era. George Orwell's 1984 obviously is a hallmark of cults in fiction, but not a whole lot of that exists for YA readers today. There are plenty of books about dystopian rebellion, but those tend to be about main characters who are already hesitant about the system. Paige is a character who is completely bought into this system, who believes that this will be her salvation, who can't fathom other ways of being. She is willing to stuff parts of herself down so that the system can continue, believing that she and she alone is the thing that is wrong with it. There's a strong element of self-gaslighting when you're in a high-control environment like this, and I hope that readers can relate to Paige's journey and find their own empowerment out of it. Image sources
Paige
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AuthorRie Lee is a recovering true believer. She's a little too obsessed with cults and almost definitely on some kind of FBI watchlist for researching pipe bombs. Archives
November 2024
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