Honestly, Sandie

There is something incredibly humbling about realizing you accidentally joined a family business you thought was a community.

And before anybody gets defensive, relax. I’m not saying every church is fake. I’m saying that sometimes you spend so many years serving inside something that you stop noticing when your entire personality slowly becomes unpaid emotional labor for the kingdom. Which sounds dramatic until you realize half the women in church leadership are surviving on caffeine, Canva graphics, nervous system suppression, and the belief that if they just love people hard enough maybe they’ll finally feel safe too.

I say that with love. And unfortunately, experience.

I found notes recently from a leader meeting in May of 2023, and honestly, it felt like reading the diary of a woman quietly beginning to disappear in real time. One line in my notes simply says:

“Why do we need to be preached at? This isn’t a meeting… This is a message.”

That was my note. Not the sermon.

And rereading it made my stomach drop because I could actually see the exact moment my instincts started trying to get my attention. Not loudly. Quietly. Like my body whispering, “Hey… I don’t think we’re okay in here anymore.”

But when belonging is attached to spirituality, purpose, friendship, identity, routine, and eternal significance, you become very skilled at ignoring yourself. Especially as a woman. Especially in church.

Because for years I convinced myself this was all about loving people. Helping people. Serving people. Being the hands and feet of Jesus. And parts of it genuinely were beautiful. That’s what makes writing about this so difficult. Grief becomes incredibly confusing when the thing that hurt you also helped shape you.

I sat in those meetings underlining phrases like they were oxygen.

“Don’t bring your own fire.”
“We don’t give opinions, we give truth.”
“There is nothing like prayer to bring the right people in and the wrong people out.”
“When people leave, that’s good.”

At the time, I wrote them down like wisdom. Now I read them and realize how slowly humanity can become categorized inside systems that believe they’re protecting truth. Aligned or rebellious. Spirit-led or emotional. Biblical or worldly. In or out.

And somewhere in the middle of all that language, I started noticing how little room there was for actual humanity. Especially complicated humanity. Especially hurting humanity. Especially women asking questions humanity.

That’s the strange thing about leaving spaces like this. The people who stay often simplify the story into something clean and digestible. “She walked away.” As if grief and survival cannot exist inside the same decision.

But leaving didn’t feel freeing at first. It felt like divorce.

Not from God. From a family.

From routines. From identity. From people I saw multiple days every week for years. People I prayed with, served beside, cried with, built life beside. And afterward, the silence was deafening.

Because once you leave, people rarely ask what happened. Rarely do they sit down and genuinely ask, “What hurt you? What changed? What happened inside of you?”

And I think that’s because systems built around certainty tend to protect themselves before they protect curiosity. Once someone leaves, the narrative becomes cleaner if they are simply labeled offended, deceived, emotional, worldly, misled. It’s much harder to admit someone may have left heartbroken. Or exhausted. Or because they could no longer locate themselves inside the performance.

Right after we left church, we remodeled our kitchen. Looking back now, I think I just needed something I could physically rebuild with my own hands. Cabinets torn apart. Dust everywhere. Missing counters. Half-painted walls. Tools scattered across the floor like evidence that destruction and hope can somehow occupy the same room.

And almost every night after everyone went to bed, I would stand alone in that unfinished kitchen listening to Eyes Closed by Ed Sheeran, dancing with my eyes closed and trying not to feel everything all at once.

Because that song understood something I couldn’t explain yet: how disorienting it feels when your entire inner world collapses while everyone around you keeps moving normally. The services continue. The meetings continue. The group chats continue. The building still stands. The people are all still alive.

You just become a ghost outside of something that once convinced you it was home.

And maybe the real heartbreak wasn’t even theological. Maybe it was relational.

I remember sitting across a table during a meeting that was supposed to resolve conflict. I asked why communication had become so difficult and why he wouldn’t simply call or text me when something was unclear.

His response, paired with a shrug so casual it almost missed me entirely, was:

“I don’t talk to chicks.”

That was it.

Not because it was the cruelest thing anyone had ever said to me, but because suddenly years of dynamics snapped into focus all at once. The hierarchy. The dismissal. The emotional labor women carried while somehow remaining spiritually suspect the moment they became too observant, too vocal, too human.

And maybe that’s the real mindfuck about healing. At first, it feels like your entire life burned down. The people. The routines. The certainty. The version of you everybody applauded because she was always available, always serving, always giving more of herself away in the name of purpose.

And then one day, somewhere between repainting cabinets and dancing alone in an unfinished kitchen with your eyes closed, you realize something horrifying and beautiful at the same time:

You were never actually grieving God.

You were grieving the collapse of a system that taught you serving it was the same thing as serving Him.

And those are not the same thing.

Because when you spend enough years inside environments built around loyalty, sacrifice, obedience, and “dying to self,” eventually you stop asking one very important question:

Who exactly is benefiting from all this surrender?

The kingdom? Or the people building kingdoms for themselves inside it?

That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. Especially when the entire structure survives by convincing good-hearted people that exhaustion is holiness and availability is virtue. And the second you step away, suddenly you become the cautionary tale. The one who “lost the fire.” The one who “walked away.” The one who “stopped serving God.”

But what if some of us didn’t abandon God at all?

What if we just finally realized we had spent years being trained by charismatic family-business builders who needed loyal workers more than emotionally healthy humans? Workers who stayed tired. Workers who stayed obedient. Workers too spiritually guilty to ask where all their humanity went.

Turns out the “wrong people” they warned us about are often just the people who finally noticed the machine was running on the backs of exhausted believers calling burnout devotion.

And maybe that’s why I don’t regret leaving anymore.

Because I would rather be called difficult, emotional, rebellious, deceived, worldly, or “a chick who asks too many questions” than spend one more decade performing peace while my nervous system quietly begged me to run.

That’s not freedom.

That’s spiritual hostage negotiation with a worship playlist underneath it.

And if you’ve ever stood in your own metaphorical unfinished kitchen trying to rebuild yourself while everyone else moved on like nothing happened, I hope you know this:

You are not weak for leaving. You are not evil for questioning. And losing the version of yourself that survived something is sometimes the first step toward finally meeting the version that no longer has to.

This piece was written under the emotional influence of Eyes Closed. Some songs do not soundtrack healing. They sit on the floor beside you while you quietly reconstruct your entire identity one broken cabinet at a time.

Subscribe if you enjoy emotionally exhausted women rebuilding themselves through home renovation projects, existential crises, and the slow realization that maybe the “wrong people” were simply the first people brave enough to leave the room.