Hawai'i Memories

The sun beat down, bright and warm. The salty sea air enveloped me in stagnant humidity. Little waves lapped against the vaguely sandy lava rock several yards away from me, and palm trees crowned every surface that could be interpreted as a horizontal line. When people describe the spring in Hawaii as paradise on earth, they’re not lying. It definitely is. It’s also really hot. However, if you saw the subdued form of a 13-year-old me on the beach that day, you’d think I was in a miserable place on a cold day. There’s a photo somewhere, probably buried in a photo album in my parents’ house, of me sitting on that beach in Kona, Hawaii, with my knees pulled against my chest, one towel wrapped around my legs like a skirt, and another wrapped around my shoulders like a blanket, and with my arms crossed over my stomach, covering as much of me as possible. I look cold, maybe ill. Either way, I look miserable. But I wasn’t cold or sick. Aside from a minor cut on my foot that I got from tripping on a lava rock while trying to take a photo of a sea turtle earlier that day, I was in great health.

I was afraid. Afraid that if I leaned too far to one side, my hip would jut out too far. Afraid that if I sat up, my stomach would roll and ripple under my swimsuit. Afraid that if I moved my legs too much, my almost-knee-length swim skirt would ride up and show too much of my leg. Afraid that if I stretched my legs out, people would see them. Afraid that if I leaned forward, the high neckline of my wide-strapped swimsuit would gape open revealing my chest to passers-by. Afraid that if I leaned back, I would take up too much space. I was afraid of my body, so I hid from it, wearing the custom-made swimsuit that my mom bought from an online company whose tagline was something cheeky about Christian girls who wanted to swim but also save their bodies for their future husbands. When I wasn’t swimming, I hid myself in floral skirts that fell to my ankles and baggy unisex T-shirts several sizes too big for me.

When I think back to that Hawaii trip - a dream vacation for most thirteen year olds - I don’t immediately remember the blue skies, sandy beaches, lava caves, palm trees, floral fragrances, fresh tropical fruit, or any of the things most people talk about and remember about trips to the Big Island. Those memories come after some thinking; they aren’t the prevalent memory. My initial memories are those of my fear of my own body.

It took years of growing, unlearning, relearning, and braving therapy for me to truly vocalize the toll that the religious community I was raised in took on me. Many of us who grew up in conservative or evangelical American churches know all too well the words “purity culture,” and many of us have strong emotional reactions to those words. Many of us will spend the rest of our lives battling the messages we were raised on that stand in direct conflict with the messages we now claim and hold for ourselves.

It’s difficult, though, for us to remember that we’re never to blame for others’ choices to harm us, when we were raised on lies that we are responsible for covering our bodies to prevent boys and men from abusing us. It’s hard to feel comfortable expressing our gender fluidity when we were raised on lies that gender is determined entirely by a single body part, and if we don’t want to appear and act in ways prescribed by that body part, there’s something wrong with us. It’s hard to fully realize our own bodily autonomy when we grew up on lies that everything we wore and did needed to be approved by our fathers and by the men in power in our churches. That dissonance between what we know now and what we grew up accepting is tiring. It’s exhausting to justify every thought and decision to the voices of the past still shouting that we’re doing something wrong.

I don’t have full answers or solutions for how to squelch these voices, but I do know that the more I surround myself with those who create safety, who support my autonomy, and who love and accept me unconditionally, the quieter the past becomes. The more I am able to share the burden of my own story with those who walk beside me and listen without judgement, the less exhausted I feel. And that’s part of how we heal from trauma; we find other humans who hold us and support us and remind us that we’re valuable and worth respecting even when we have a hard time believing that about ourselves. That hurt might never fully go away, but maybe we can find people who make it bearable.