Girl Brainwashed

Just a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, I was baptized in a rectangular vat of water in the basement of a church building on Central Park West. I had no idea this event would become the great fault line in my life, but I did have a sense of foreboding.

“I don’t want to be brainwashed,” I told my best friend Kristy just days earlier.

“But don’t you want your brain to be washed?” she replied.

It was powerful rhetoric for someone seeking to make the right choice.

Now, inside that dark, cavernous sanctuary, I was surrounded by about fifty spectators there to witness the miracle. I felt nervous, awkward, like a bug caught in a spider web, with everyone staring. What should have felt like a quiet reunion with God felt like a spectacle. I didn’t want to be in that water, before these joyful strangers.

It was a disconnect more profound than I could name at the time, an evacuation of my will that no words could describe. From that day on, even the smallest decisions—who would be my friends, where I would go to college, whom I’d live with—would no longer belong to me. Not even my body, which would soon begin to cry out for help, was safe from their control.