Alana Settle

god’s heaven on earth

Manifestation is a word I became obsessed with during my churchgoing years. I miss the adrenaline of manifestation—the mystical idea of an ethereal being possessing my body—the hope that something beyond my reality could be possible—something that could take me away into bliss.

So much changed in my life the year after Trump was elected. My ex and I were in our second year of co-parenting. I was in the final year of my MFA.

Disillusioned by our friends, we left the church and our home of seven years to move in with my in-laws, who, after a short while of living together, told us off for, essentially, bringing the devil into their home.

So, we left, and I plunged headlong into full-time work for my dad, who encouraged me to return to school to get my Master’s in Education.

Six months after graduating with my MFA, in the summer of 2018, I watched Carol for the first time alone in a college dorm, which I shared with my teaching cohort for a week, and experienced a moment of final comprehension—I wasn’t living the life I wanted to live.

To be able to want a life—a particular way of life—and to be able to choose it, to take hold of it, to just grasp at it—that’s the most privileged type of opportunity.

I left my ex a year and a half after Trump’s first inauguration, and with the help of a new friend, I found a tiny, one-bedroom apartment in an ancient four-plex in one of the smallest, most remote towns in Kansas, near the largest wetlands in the Midwest, where I watched the birds.

This was the first time I’d ever lived alone.

Today, Trump was re-elected. I am in my fourth year of marriage to a woman I met five years ago. I live in the South, where I teach at a historically Black high school that serves a nearly 65% Latino student body.

When I started talking to my new therapist about being non-binary, I cried with her for the first time because a new friend started using my preferred pronouns.

I dreamed of a woman who breathed fire.

How does one create a life that no one wants them to live?

I told someone recently that I graduated from Oral Roberts University with my bachelor’s degree, and they asked me how I escaped.

Because I asked questions, and people were there to talk to me and challenge me. I kept an open mind. I bought into the truest aspects of Christianity—the non-binary god who refused to stone the prostitutes but died in their place—and threw the rest away.