|
KristenQuesadaFirstEssay 5 - 21 May 2025 - Main.KristenQuesada
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | God, Gays, and Gaga: Between Flesh and Faith | >
> | Notes from Amsterdam Ave. | | | | |
<
< | -- By KristenQuesada - 19 Feb 2025 | >
> | -- By KristenQuesada - 20 May 2025 | | | | |
<
< | Introduction
Over the last four years, I’ve learned to live with and love my identity, while my parents remain steadfast in a religious worldview that refuses to see me. This essay isn’t about reconciling with them, but rather how I’ve reconciled with myself. | >
> | Undone, Remade, Unmoored Again
I’ve survived the collapse of my reality before. My God, my politics, and my belief system I’d carried since the womb all gave way as I was becoming a young adult. That first collapse taught me that losing your identity can be a gift. I cast aside the meaning I inherited in exchange for one I forged myself. | | | | |
<
< | My Garden of Eden: The Beginning of Knowing
In hindsight, I don’t feel like I was a real person until I turned 18. It’s as if one night I underwent a Big Bang and gained consciousness, waking up to layers of complexity and previously unthought questions stacked on top of my daily existence. So, I have a lot of mercy for my past self; after all, my brain is only four years old. | >
> | I thought I’d already done the hard part. But now, in law school, my reality is breaking again. And this time, it’s not just internal. It’s a reckoning with the world itself. So, what happens when every anchor—God, country, and law—turns out to be myth? | | | | |
<
< | Seeking clarity into my confusion, I took memoir writing my freshman spring. That class became a turning point, helping me confront the tension between my religion and sexuality in a seven-page reflection of the six-month journey that ended with me abandoning God for Lady Gaga (is this why Fox News hates the Ivy League?). In that memoir, I wrote about hiding “my newfound identity from family for the foreseeable future. I cannot imagine a scenario in which they accept me for who I am.” Those words proved prescient. Four years later, I’m still doing damage control: “because we will never agree about same sex attraction” (my mother’s text, 2/17/2025). | >
> | The Halls Are Quiet
When I started Lawyerland, I assumed it was fiction. The conversations dripped with too much honest recognition of the legal system’s darkest edges for real lawyers to face so directly the horror of what they do every day. So imagine my shock and fear for my future as a lawyer when I learned it was all real: something had split in Jack, and Robinson had gone through a metamorphosis, maybe for the worse. | | | | |
<
< | Ironically, that very memoir revealed my secret when my parents searched my phone. Professor Moglen criticizes the surveillance state, and considering I was raised in a panopticon of my own, I get it. Their invasion felt like a betrayal wrapped in concern—a love so conditional it needed surveillance to confirm its fears. | >
> | Tharaud speaks of the dimwits who “wake up in a ‘what-is-life-really-about?’ stupor” and realize too late that they missed the beauty of life. In 2025, that stupor has metastasized through a dying ego raging against time itself, screaming into the void not to be forgotten with every fascist pantomime. Tharaud’s advice? “Protect yourself, protect what you believe in, those whom you love.” But is that really enough, when your country is on a runaway spiral into authoritarianism, and you’re preparing to enter a profession that’s beginning to legitimize it? | | | | |
<
< | Even now, I get calls accusing me of selfishness for refusing to date men and lacking self-control over my sinful desires. Sometimes, I feel like that terrified teenager again, pleading for this part of me to disappear. Then I remember: I’m 1,300 miles away, free from divine scrutiny, building a bright future, and loving my life in the greatest city in the world. That reality dulls the sting of their disappointment that my gayness hasn’t dissolved despite their daily “war room” prayers. | >
> | A former constitutionalist, I used to believe in America’s slow arc of progress; that even through its flaws, it was devised to get better. Law school in the Trump Era, however, brought this pretense of our system into full relief. Our “law” firms bow to capital, our universities to state intrusion. We study the Constitution while that piece of paper is mocked in real time. Due process becomes theoretical when students are snatched in the night. The halls of justice I once romanticized do not, in fact, echo with righteousness. Instead, they are quiet. “Neutral.” Shameful. | | | | |
<
< | Since that freshman-year memoir, I’ve learned being gay was merely the catalyst for my story; it’s not really about coming out—it’s about what happens when you grow, and the people you love refuse to meet you there. | >
> | The Nun I Never Was
Back when I was a Christian, I read the Gospels alongside Dostoevsky’s devout characters and didn’t understand why every believer didn’t forsake everything and become a monk, like Alyosha Karamazov. If you truly believed Christ’s teachings, how could you live any other way? I feel the same way now, looking at the law. If it’s not in service of justice, why practice it at all? | | | | |
<
< | Meeting Myself
The summer my parents found out about my identity, they sent me to our pastor to talk me out of these “demonic confusions,” flooded me with biblical readings, and (briefly) convinced me I was just straight and confused. That was, until I returned to campus, surrounded by people who saw me for who I was—friends who didn’t pray away my reality but embraced it. Denial crumbled under the weight of that affirmation. Plus, it’s kind of hard to deny yourself when you have to live with her every day. | >
> | And yet, you’ll notice that I didn’t become a nun. “I am, after all, a lawyer. I am never far from evil.” To be a lawyer is to share the office, the courtroom, the deal sheet with evil. My father once asked why I read fiction—it wasn’t “real.” But fiction gave me something the law seems designed to erase: empathy. The chance to see through another’s eyes. | | | | |
<
< | My struggle with being gay began within. I was a devout Christian, so this struggle had to have a purpose: if I gave in, would I fail God’s test? As a lifelong evangelical, nothing was scarier than realizing I had no choice but to decide whether I would be a child of God—denying myself—or give into my flesh—denying God. Non-Christians often question this binary: “Why did it have to be one or the other?” I get their point. Shattering my entire belief system seems drastic, but evangelism doesn’t allow for middle ground. | >
> | This profession asks me to live in someone’s shoes in a very different way: to be their mouthpiece, even when that client is destroying our planet or creating new domestic crises for one penny more. But my empathy lies with the people they harm. And that empathy—quiet, inconvenient, critical—is still the root of my notion of justice. I may have forsaken God as a concept, but I refuse to forsake the Gospel’s moral clarity. | | | | |
<
< | In our house, no one counted as a true Christian unless they matched our theology: the Bible was infallible, historically accurate, and divinely inspired. Accordingly, no mental gymnastics could get me out of the bind of Romans 1:26-27 (the only verse in the Bible explicitly condemning lesbianism). Later in college, I wrote a research paper contextualizing that verse as the distinct progeny of Paul’s Roman world, shaped more by cultural influence than divine mandate. But even that softened interpretation doesn’t coexist with evangelical infallibility. | >
> | The irony is, after all this reckoning, I’ll probably still go into Big Law, at least temporarily. The very system I’ve questioned, I’m poised to enter. The same institutions I’ve dismantled in theory still write the checks in practice. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite. Maybe it just makes me another soon-to-be lawyer trying to stay human in a machine built for something else. Or maybe I was never meant to be a nun. | | | | |
<
< | Now, safely outside that framework, I see religion differently. Not every faith is as mentally invasive and self-oppressive as Christianity, but after witnessing what it did to my psyche, I find it hard to see any as entirely harmless. I’m not anti-religion, but I absolutely recognize how tightly it still grips my family. | >
> | When I chose law over Classics, I believed I was choosing action over passion. But in retrospect, that academic path was its own kind of monastery, a space where I could think deeply but remain untouched. Both Classics and Christianity once offered me purity through removal, a way to stay ethically clean by standing apart from the fray. But I’ve come to understand that integrity doesn’t only live in distance. It might live, too, in staying present, amid contradiction, compromise, and even complicity, without giving up the capacity to feel, to imagine, and to resist forgetting what justice feels like. | | | | |
<
< | No Divine Answers Needed
What once was a rigid rulebook I obeyed is now a moral compass I consult. I have no problem admitting that I fuck with Jesus; just as a philosopher. He is no longer the glue binding together my existence, motivating my daily actions, and invading my thoughts. Instead, his gospel sits alongside Seneca, Buddha, and Camus as a “WWJD” when I feel a bit lost in this world. Where faith once dictated my choices, philosophy now offers options. It’s less “OBEY OR BE DAMNED,” and more “consider! reflect… decide :)” No longer agonizing about the morality of every show, curse word, or crop top has shown me that I never had an anxiety disorder—just religious trauma. What once shattered my world now grounds me. I’ve made peace with what I lost, and, more importantly, with what I found. | >
> | To Witness, Even Here
It was a lot easier to be a cynic as a Christian. When the world went wrong, God was still right. When a dictator won an election, this earth was only temporary. But now, under my current belief system, all we have is this. Institutions fail. Nations fall. And still, the sky is blue. | | | | |
<
< | When my parents call my queerness a lack of self-control, I’ve learned it’s the opposite. Both Christianity and Stoicism preach surrender to what you cannot control, but to different ends. Stoicism offers peace through acceptance; meanwhile, Christianity had me praying for change that never came, waiting on a God who never acted, trapping me in needless suffering. Dostoevsky saw suffering as a path to salvation, but I’ve realized some suffering—like begging God to change who you are—is pointless. | >
> | Maybe Tharaud is right, and all we can do with our short time on earth is witness others, help our neighbors, and follow the truths that stir in us. Or maybe Tharaud is just another lawyer, a “conscientious schizoid” who has learned to live divided, comfortably distant from consequence. | | | | |
<
< | Gone are the nights I spent in tears, asking God why I was burdened with this intrinsic sin. Sartre says we are our decisions—so whether my identity is nature, nurture, or choice, it doesn’t matter. As long as I choose to live authentically, that’s who I am. I no longer pray, “Why me?” Some questions don’t need divine answers––just the courage to accept them. | >
> | My greatest lesson from my original metamorphosis was that meaning isn’t handed down; it’s forged, piece by piece, through how we live (thank you, Sartre). I don’t need broken institutions to tell me who I am or what to do. For now, yes, I will likely enter Big Law, where meaning can be elusive and justice even more so: "I am, after all, a lawyer. I am never far from evil.” But I still believe it matters to see clearly, to choose consciously, and to hold onto a self that questions everything—even when it signs the contract. | | | | |
<
< |
Perhaps this essay needs to be primarily historical, a recollection of personal development, rather than itself an effort at a new departure. That's certainly the tenor of this draft, which has the quality of retelling, of previous writings rewritten, and arguments long since hashed out. That may be what you needed to write here, or it might be accumulated habit. | >
> | My reality of law has broken, and I expect it will break again. I welcome that. Change is not collapse; it’s transformation. If my experience has taught me anything, it’s that no future is certain and no reality is fixed. Going forward, that truth is my foundation. Because freedom begins by knowing that another future is possible. And I’m willing to create the one I want to see. | | | | |
<
< | But maybe new questions can now enter. All of us have some relationship to sex, some history of our affections, the people we loved and the things we did with them. Over the course of our lives, the priorities we gave to those impulses, needs, and feelings shifted, maybe wildly, perhaps sedately. Maybe they were always close to the most important of out concerns, maybe (even for decades at a time) they were displaced by other, intenser attitudes and needs.
It was, after all, a religious aversion it turned out you didn't feel that turned the issue of your sexual attractions into a matter of the first priority. If it hadn't been so unhealthily resisted in the place you grew up, if you had been left to find your way sexually, to fall in or out of love as occasions suited you, like any young human being finding her way, how relatively important would these matters have been as against the other grand topics of life, the other works, the other loves? You see, of course, that the selfishness and lack of self-control are projected from the center of other peoples' needs for their children to be what they expected, rather than what they are. But what if we imagine a draft about your life in which this, while important, is not so very important? What if we tried to organize thought on the basis of this baing the second or third most important aspect your life, rather than the cardinal fact that all else has been re-steered by? What would then be at the center of your thinking? You were owed normal, after all. Suppose you'd gotten it?
| | |
| |
<
< | You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. | | | To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
|
|
|
KristenQuesadaFirstEssay 4 - 20 Apr 2025 - Main.EbenMoglen
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | |
God, Gays, and Gaga: Between Flesh and Faith | | | Gone are the nights I spent in tears, asking God why I was burdened with this intrinsic sin. Sartre says we are our decisions—so whether my identity is nature, nurture, or choice, it doesn’t matter. As long as I choose to live authentically, that’s who I am. I no longer pray, “Why me?” Some questions don’t need divine answers––just the courage to accept them. | |
>
> |
Perhaps this essay needs to be primarily historical, a recollection of personal development, rather than itself an effort at a new departure. That's certainly the tenor of this draft, which has the quality of retelling, of previous writings rewritten, and arguments long since hashed out. That may be what you needed to write here, or it might be accumulated habit.
But maybe new questions can now enter. All of us have some relationship to sex, some history of our affections, the people we loved and the things we did with them. Over the course of our lives, the priorities we gave to those impulses, needs, and feelings shifted, maybe wildly, perhaps sedately. Maybe they were always close to the most important of out concerns, maybe (even for decades at a time) they were displaced by other, intenser attitudes and needs.
It was, after all, a religious aversion it turned out you didn't feel that turned the issue of your sexual attractions into a matter of the first priority. If it hadn't been so unhealthily resisted in the place you grew up, if you had been left to find your way sexually, to fall in or out of love as occasions suited you, like any young human being finding her way, how relatively important would these matters have been as against the other grand topics of life, the other works, the other loves? You see, of course, that the selfishness and lack of self-control are projected from the center of other peoples' needs for their children to be what they expected, rather than what they are. But what if we imagine a draft about your life in which this, while important, is not so very important? What if we tried to organize thought on the basis of this baing the second or third most important aspect your life, rather than the cardinal fact that all else has been re-steered by? What would then be at the center of your thinking? You were owed normal, after all. Suppose you'd gotten it?
| | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines: |
|
|
KristenQuesadaFirstEssay 3 - 19 Feb 2025 - Main.KristenQuesada
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | |
<
< | Title | | | | |
<
< | -- By KristenQuesada - 16 Feb 2025 | >
> | God, Gays, and Gaga: Between Flesh and Faith | | | | |
>
> | -- By KristenQuesada - 19 Feb 2025 | | | | |
<
< | Section I | >
> | Introduction
Over the last four years, I’ve learned to live with and love my identity, while my parents remain steadfast in a religious worldview that refuses to see me. This essay isn’t about reconciling with them, but rather how I’ve reconciled with myself. | | | | |
<
< | Subsection A | >
> | My Garden of Eden: The Beginning of Knowing
In hindsight, I don’t feel like I was a real person until I turned 18. It’s as if one night I underwent a Big Bang and gained consciousness, waking up to layers of complexity and previously unthought questions stacked on top of my daily existence. So, I have a lot of mercy for my past self; after all, my brain is only four years old. | | | | |
>
> | Seeking clarity into my confusion, I took memoir writing my freshman spring. That class became a turning point, helping me confront the tension between my religion and sexuality in a seven-page reflection of the six-month journey that ended with me abandoning God for Lady Gaga (is this why Fox News hates the Ivy League?). In that memoir, I wrote about hiding “my newfound identity from family for the foreseeable future. I cannot imagine a scenario in which they accept me for who I am.” Those words proved prescient. Four years later, I’m still doing damage control: “because we will never agree about same sex attraction” (my mother’s text, 2/17/2025). | | | | |
<
< | Subsub 1 | >
> | Ironically, that very memoir revealed my secret when my parents searched my phone. Professor Moglen criticizes the surveillance state, and considering I was raised in a panopticon of my own, I get it. Their invasion felt like a betrayal wrapped in concern—a love so conditional it needed surveillance to confirm its fears. | | | | |
<
< | Subsection B | >
> | Even now, I get calls accusing me of selfishness for refusing to date men and lacking self-control over my sinful desires. Sometimes, I feel like that terrified teenager again, pleading for this part of me to disappear. Then I remember: I’m 1,300 miles away, free from divine scrutiny, building a bright future, and loving my life in the greatest city in the world. That reality dulls the sting of their disappointment that my gayness hasn’t dissolved despite their daily “war room” prayers. | | | | |
>
> | Since that freshman-year memoir, I’ve learned being gay was merely the catalyst for my story; it’s not really about coming out—it’s about what happens when you grow, and the people you love refuse to meet you there. | | | | |
<
< | Subsub 1 | >
> | Meeting Myself
The summer my parents found out about my identity, they sent me to our pastor to talk me out of these “demonic confusions,” flooded me with biblical readings, and (briefly) convinced me I was just straight and confused. That was, until I returned to campus, surrounded by people who saw me for who I was—friends who didn’t pray away my reality but embraced it. Denial crumbled under the weight of that affirmation. Plus, it’s kind of hard to deny yourself when you have to live with her every day. | | | | |
>
> | My struggle with being gay began within. I was a devout Christian, so this struggle had to have a purpose: if I gave in, would I fail God’s test? As a lifelong evangelical, nothing was scarier than realizing I had no choice but to decide whether I would be a child of God—denying myself—or give into my flesh—denying God. Non-Christians often question this binary: “Why did it have to be one or the other?” I get their point. Shattering my entire belief system seems drastic, but evangelism doesn’t allow for middle ground. | | | | |
<
< | Subsub 2 | >
> | In our house, no one counted as a true Christian unless they matched our theology: the Bible was infallible, historically accurate, and divinely inspired. Accordingly, no mental gymnastics could get me out of the bind of Romans 1:26-27 (the only verse in the Bible explicitly condemning lesbianism). Later in college, I wrote a research paper contextualizing that verse as the distinct progeny of Paul’s Roman world, shaped more by cultural influence than divine mandate. But even that softened interpretation doesn’t coexist with evangelical infallibility. | | | | |
>
> | Now, safely outside that framework, I see religion differently. Not every faith is as mentally invasive and self-oppressive as Christianity, but after witnessing what it did to my psyche, I find it hard to see any as entirely harmless. I’m not anti-religion, but I absolutely recognize how tightly it still grips my family. | | | | |
>
> | No Divine Answers Needed
What once was a rigid rulebook I obeyed is now a moral compass I consult. I have no problem admitting that I fuck with Jesus; just as a philosopher. He is no longer the glue binding together my existence, motivating my daily actions, and invading my thoughts. Instead, his gospel sits alongside Seneca, Buddha, and Camus as a “WWJD” when I feel a bit lost in this world. Where faith once dictated my choices, philosophy now offers options. It’s less “OBEY OR BE DAMNED,” and more “consider! reflect… decide :)” No longer agonizing about the morality of every show, curse word, or crop top has shown me that I never had an anxiety disorder—just religious trauma. What once shattered my world now grounds me. I’ve made peace with what I lost, and, more importantly, with what I found. | | | | |
<
< | Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B | >
> | When my parents call my queerness a lack of self-control, I’ve learned it’s the opposite. Both Christianity and Stoicism preach surrender to what you cannot control, but to different ends. Stoicism offers peace through acceptance; meanwhile, Christianity had me praying for change that never came, waiting on a God who never acted, trapping me in needless suffering. Dostoevsky saw suffering as a path to salvation, but I’ve realized some suffering—like begging God to change who you are—is pointless. | | | | |
>
> | Gone are the nights I spent in tears, asking God why I was burdened with this intrinsic sin. Sartre says we are our decisions—so whether my identity is nature, nurture, or choice, it doesn’t matter. As long as I choose to live authentically, that’s who I am. I no longer pray, “Why me?” Some questions don’t need divine answers––just the courage to accept them. | | |
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |
|
|
KristenQuesadaFirstEssay 2 - 16 Feb 2025 - Main.KristenQuesada
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
| |
<
< | | | | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | | | It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | |
<
< | Paper Title | >
> | Title | | | -- By KristenQuesada - 16 Feb 2025 |
|
|
KristenQuesadaFirstEssay 1 - 16 Feb 2025 - Main.KristenQuesada
|
|
>
> |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
|---|
It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted.
Paper Title
-- By KristenQuesada - 16 Feb 2025
Section I
Subsection A
Subsub 1
Subsection B
Subsub 1
Subsub 2
Section II
Subsection A
Subsection B
You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable.
To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list. |
|
|