Tearing Through Briars
Grappling with God and sexuality at an all-girls therapeutic boarding school.
Article by Kristen Richards, art by Isabella Hageman
Content Warning: Religious indoctrination, homophobia, and mental illness
Savannah drove us in a white Ford Transit back to hell.
I traced my fingers along the windows of the van, savoring every second away from the brambles of the Greenbrier Academy for Girls. We drove past the Greenbrier River and the Pence Springs Flea Market, and finally up a gentle tree-lined driveway into the view of a towering brick building.
I attended Greenbrier the summer before my senior year of high school after living at a wilderness therapy program in Colorado. In an attempt to retrieve my failing mental health, Greenbrier claimed to be my safety and preservation. Instead, I learned that safety meant hiding, disguising. Wrapped in my own leaves beneath a paling sugar maple, I began to consider my identity itself as a false belief.
My therapist’s name was Tanya, and though she did not mention it when I first spoke with her on the phone, Tanya was an unmistakably Christian therapist. As I sat on Greenbrier’s white porch, sobbing into the humid air, Tanya suggested that I find God as a way to heal from my trauma. I howled bitterly for a few moments until she gently, then not so gently, proposed religion for a second, third, fourth time. I barely knew the difference between God and Jesus, even after years of going to church as a child, and I doubted that any god that I didn’t believe in could save me.
When I arrived at Greenbrier, the staff searched my bags and took away anything sharp. A few days later, I noticed that my gay pride T-shirt was missing. When I inquired about this, Tanya noted that any clothing items deemed “inappropriate”—including my love-is-love shirt—would be stored in the basement until I left. In response, I drew rainbows on the sidewalk with chalk.
This began my complicated relationship with Tanya, who tried to “fix” me by means of making me girlish. But I was already permanently misshapen by my deviating sexuality. I told Tanya I was gay. She told me she had a friend who was a lesbian. We did not speak of it again.
I quickly learned that most of the girls at Greenbrier were gay. The staff reluctantly knew this, but while gay was common and tolerated, straight was preferred and favored. Although we all had mental illnesses, only the straight girls could make up for their mental turmoil with their overly accepted heterosexuality.
On the weekends, a handful of us were put in the back of a pickup truck and driven to a place called The Village. There, a man named Paul spoke sermons to us, though he referred to them as “Journeys.” The Village was meant to give patients time to connect with themselves and their spiritual side. One day, during one of Paul’s talks, as we sat around a fire, Paul spoke of what we needed to keep and what we needed to let go. “Keep those good boyfriends,” he said to us. “And others of you may need to reevaluate how your values align with your sexuality.” All of us around the circle were gay, none had boyfriends. Who was he speaking to? What idealized Greenbrier girl had he envisioned as his audience?
This patient, the one that Tanya tried to create in me, was the key to special privileges at Greenbrier. Girls who proved themselves to be straight, the prescribed supernormal, were given passes to visit their families, walks to the gas station to buy candy, access to phones and music, and afternoons to spend on their own. It was possible to get these privileges without the heterosexual advantage, but it was a lot harder. The straight girls flaunted their five-dollar bills as they headed towards the single gas station in Pence Springs, as if to say look how easy it is to be me.
My second day at Greenbrier, I tried to run away. I wondered how far I could get with 32 ounces of lemonade and a body full of want. I was half a mile down the road, sprinting, before two staff members pulled up in the white Ford van and grabbed me by the arms. I cursed the girl who had seen me bolt through the brambles and told the staff. Why not just let me be free? I shook myself loose from their grasp, my shoulders and back burning from running through the briers that surrounded the campus. Were those briers planted intentionally to discourage patients from running away? Or did the briers grow long before Greenbrier got its name? To this day, there are faded lines along my upper arms and shoulders, a symbol of the lasting effects the therapeutic boarding school had on my body and mind.
The months I spent at wilderness therapy prior to Greenbrier were long and hard, but worthy of the work I did to process trauma. Under the ponderosa pines and beneath the smoky San Juan sky, I poured through trauma and emerged from the forest sturdier in my identity than ever before. The transition from wilderness to Greenbrier felt like peeling back the layers of an onion just to find a rotten core. After only a few days in West Virginia, the culture at Greenbrier Academy had me doubting whether the real me was the real me. Within weeks, Greenbrier had turned me from dirt girl to church girl.
In Colorado, I walked through enough forests to gain a dozen bruises and scratches, but none amounted to the spidery scars left by Greenbrier’s thorns. The little white lines ran through nightmares of West Virginia through my mind. Your normal is abnormal, they whispered. Find something to fix you.
After my running away stint, I spent the days making lists of how I could get as far away as possible as quickly as possible. I realized that the quickest way to escape would be to request a pass to join the group of girls who went to church every Sunday. Desperate to spend any time away from campus and unfazed from years of growing up in a church, I doubted that weekly services would do anything but fill my time. But what started as a plan to run away turned to mornings of music that spiked shivers into my soul. I found freedom in the community that surrounded me. This terrified me. Where had I gone? The Kristen that I had grown up to be did not bow her head at any altar. This life is mine. I believed. I created it, I destroyed it, and I will make it new again.
I was, after all, recovering. I was recovering my authenticity, digging myself from the depths that depression had dragged me into. I found myself swept up with the rejects of the tide, knocking on the door of something that the church community called “the Lord.” In a place where I was meant to be learning how to take care of myself, I only learned how to ask some other being to take care of me.
I distanced myself from religion for most of my life, unconvinced that anything about myself would be enhanced by believing in God. But at Greenbrier, when my identity became a broken rule, nothing seemed to cure me more than church.
I grew up going to an Episcopalian church in a town just north of my home in Massachusetts. One of my clearest memories from church was when I served as an acolyte, carrying the candles to the front of the church. During the service, I sat at the front and instead of listening to the sermon, I daydreamed about Monique, a girl with long dark hair and clear green eyes and a name that felt like silk as it slipped off my tongue. Something felt wrong about thinking of a girl and the feelings she evoked while sitting at the front of a church. If it wasn’t Monique, it was somebody else. I knew that the church claimed to be LGBTQ+ affirming, but I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that for the congregation, affirming meant tolerating. I did not want to be tolerated, I wanted to be loved. It was there, in that tiny church in Topsfield, Massachusetts, that I began to believe that if there was a God, he would love me more if I was straight.
One Sunday afternoon, Savannah, one of the day staff at Greenbrier, drove us away from the church and the conversation in the car shifted towards sexuality. It had come about after two girls had been caught having sex in one of the yurts where we played drums on Tuesday evenings. For me, drumming was an odd combination of “I love this” and “I actually just love the feeling of getting my hate for this place out through something concrete and accepted .” Most patients, including myself, identified with the LGBTQ+ community, but sexuality was the unspoken and reluctantly accepted reality of an all-girls boarding school for the mentally ill. In the car, Savannah told us of her wife, Angela, and her little boy, Brayden. Savannah was in her late twenties but held her body as though she had lived many decades more.
“I’m probably going to hell for all these sins,” she said. “Because I know that being gay is a sin, but I can’t help who I am. I was meant to be gay, so I guess I’m going to hell.” Savannah shrugged from the driver’s seat, as if she was indifferently accepting her fate.
“But why would God want you to go to hell?” Amy, another one of the patients, asked.
“Because I was born broken,” Savannah answered.
The van grew uncomfortably quiet. Amy was the only one in the van who was not gay. I wondered who else in the van believed they were going to hell. Amy reached towards the radio to turn up Chris Tomlin’s “Our God.”
This conversation encompassed much of the dichotomy that I lived in for those months. Were the ideas that existed about religion and sexuality preexisting and passively accepted, or had these beliefs been intentionally brought forward to stop anything new from emerging? The way that Tanya pushed religion into my treatment convinced me that Greenbrier intentionally threw us into the church at our most vulnerable state. My identity stood at a crossroads, and I was unsure how to hold myself in the same physical place but vastly different mental place as Savannah.
Quickly, and just as Tanya had alluded to, I began to enjoy church in a terrifying and comforting way. Sometimes, when the preacher said, “raise your hand if you surrender to God!” I was tempted to raise my hand. One day I did. My body raised my hand while my mind was lost running around some unknown mountain that God supposedly built. I often cried at the idea that maybe there was a God, because I feared that meant there was also “a hell” and that I would be sent there. Tanya cried because she was so proud that I had finally found Him.
Something still haunts me about how drawn I was to the church when other parts of my identity were questioned. At the time, it felt so right, and even now I wouldn’t say I was wrong to turn towards religion. The church served me for a time, as I desperately tried to hold onto my identity. Every so often, I find Hillsong United’s “Oceans (where feet may fail),” a song that we listened to on the van ride to church at Greenbrier. In me, a door creaks open. In the sliver of light, I see a shadow. If I were in West Virginia, it would be the shadow of God. Instead, it is the shadow of me.