#and that it was a long time ago and i shouldnt tarnish her reputation

[musingsofadepressedgay]

It is absolutely fucking wild how little accountability church leaders need to have

A while back I was a girls camp

(Intermission for those of you who have never experienced a girl's camp)

Picture this, every young women between 12 - 17 is taken up into the mountains with nothing but clothes toiletries ✨️feminine products✨️ (side note why are we so afraid to call them fucking pads or tampons but whatever it doesn't matter rn) a journal pen and scriptures

Phones were not allowed and even if someone snuck one in most of the time we were out of cellphone range because it is time to 'disconnect with the world to connect with god' and at the end of the week everyone is peer pressured into telling about how they didn't want to go but thier mom made them and now that they went they are so happy and feel so close to God because spending a week doing nothing but team building activities all with metaphors about how it is our devine right to be a stay at home mom and we should be honored to submit to our husbands cause Jesus loves us and God knows what's best, while operating on 5 hours of sleep tops, is so eye opening and all that grand stuff

Sometimes there would be showers, sometimes there would be flushable toilets, sometimes some jackass would hide a life sized cardboard cut out of Justin Bieber inside of the Porta potties

Anyway now that we have established the vibes

I was at girls camp, around 14 or 15 years old, and we were going canoeing, because see girls camp is just like scout camp! They go white water rafting but we get to canoe in a reservoir

Now you could have 3 people in a canoe so me and 2 friends went off to go get sunburnt and paddle around for a bit before heading back into a cramped car to listen to the girls gossip about whoever the guy of the week was, because that's what we were expected to do

One crucial design flaw in said canoes is that they aren't actually buoyant enough to float if they get flipped upside-down, they just slowly sink as the air trapped underneath escapes when you attempt to flip them back over

I know that because we tried to take a sharp turn and capsized

Now after we figured out that not only had we flipped the canoe but now we were at a chance of being the only people to lose a whole fucking canoe to the bottom of the reservoir we begin to panic and tread water while holding onto the canoe and calling for help

Eventually some very nice young adults who were out paddle boarding took pity on us and offered to help flip the canoe so it wouldn't sink

Seeing as the canoe had already sunk enough that flipping it would just make it right side up while still underneath the water they had me sit on the back of their paddleboard and hold the canoe to tug it back to shore while my friends swam along side it to help keep it afloat

There are 3 important factors to this situation that are crucial to note

The first is that it is early spring in the mountains, the reservoir was filled with water from melted snow and some of it was still frozen over in shallower areas, on top of that ot was a chilly, and windy, day that felt decent when the sun was out but when you are in the cold water, it in fact did not feel decent

The second thing to note is that at the time I was incredibly short and built like a stick, not much muscle, not much body fat, just a small prepubecent teen (I know I was 14 or 15 however I was a 'late bloomer')

The third thing to note is that the kind paddle boarders who helped us were men in thier 20s or something, idk I wasn't really paying attention to how old they looked, but they were conventionally attractive

And so it was when we finally hauled the boat to shore and got it flipped right side up that we were told by our camp leader that we were not allowed to canoe back across the entire reservoir that we had paddled out to, but we were expected to swim back

To teach us a lesson about flipping a canoe to get the attention of the conventionally attractive young men

(It is worth noting that they were not even paddle boarding near where we accidentally took too sharp of a turn and we had been treading water and holding onto the boat for a good 8 or so minutes before they showed up)

But clearly we had done it all for the attention from boys because we were spending a week in the woods with no boys and so we flipped the boat for an excuse to talk to them

(Secondary note: I am very gay, I did not even understand what they were accusing us of until someone spelled it out for me because the possibility someone might flip a boat for a chance to talk to guys did not ever cross my mind)

And so it was that we went back into the water to swim the whole way back, now we were not just ignored, at one point some other girls took pity on us and told us we could hold onto thier boat as we swam to make it easier for us, and they were towing our boat (that we weren't allowed to paddle back ourselves) so they didn't mind a little extra weight of us holding on while we swam

We got to do that for all of 5 minutes before our leader yelled at them for showing us sympathy and told us that we needed to swim the whole way back on our own

Everyone had finished canoeing and was getting ready for the group picture by the time we got back, we had been swimming as fast as we could the whole time but we had to go back the entire distance that we had canoed out to

When the other girls helped me out of the water I looked like I was badly sunburnt because of how red I was, but it was just my whole body turning red from how cold the water was

I remember vividly that I was crying when the group photo was taken because my feet were burning with every step I took because they had been in the snow melt for so long that when I stepped onto the sand it felt like hot coals

(Yet another side note, having walked on hot coals bare foot before this was worse, the coals was over with fast and my nerves barely had time to react but with this I was so cold that I felt like going into the air I was burning except when the wind blew I was shivering so hard it felt like I was spasming)

We made it back to camp and shockingly none of us felt any better after changing into dry clothes, maybe being in cold water for 20 minutes isn't just something that goes away by getting out of the church approved swim suits

We were told by the church leader that we were allowed to take a shower to wash off the reservoir water and help us warm up, I had to turn the water to cold just to stop myself from feeling like I was being boiled alive

I got home and went straight to my mom to tell her of the injustice I faced, because whenever I told any other adults at camp they just laughed about how cute we must have thought the boys were

I finished telling her and her response was to tell me she already knew because the camp leader had texted her about it

However it was okay because she gave us her one shower she was allowed for the week (the campsite we were at was working on conserving water so the leaders were allowed one shower each and the girls were told they could just deal with not showering for five days) and that because the camp leader was really looking forward to her shower but she gave it up for us, it was all worked out in the long run and there was no fault or blame

I now have experienced things that hurt worse, but at that age the burning feeling around my entire feet as they sunk into the sand was one of the worst physical sensations I had ever felt I can still feel it if I think back because it was such a strong memory of the way my feet stung and my teeth shivered and I cried in front of all of my peers even as I tried my hardest to stop so that I didn't look like a cry baby infront of them

But she didn't get to have her shower

So it alllll evened out

Nobody remembers it besides me and my friends

I don't think we ever got an apology that wasn't followed by a 'but she was doing what she thought was best' or 'but she made it right by letting you have her one shower for the week'

Because it doesn't matter

Whatever the church leaders decide is right is what is right

It doesn't matter who gets hurt along the way

Let the lords will be done

And whoever speaks the will of God can't ever be wrong, and so any harm they do must be right

#exmo #long post #sorry this one is really fucking long #once i started writing it was cathartic to get it out without other ward member telling me to stop complaining #and that it was a long time ago and i shouldnt tarnish her reputation #every once in a while i remember this and go wait a minute that is pretty fucked up