My Story

A Piece by Rae Milstead

What is my story?

My story is a whole lot of family death—three grandparents, one parent, two siblings.

- Four of those deaths were suicides.

My story is a childhood where my mom somehow raised four children on 40 thousand dollars a year—WIC and SNAP and a whole lot of community effort raised me.

My story is a childhood left in the hands of an abusive father—physically, sexually, and emotionally.

My story is a childhood spent in the hands of being a ward of the state for a few years because my mother was given pills that made her manic, and my father was imprisoned.

My story is a young adult life filled with working 3 jobs at once to cover my mothers rent, my undergrad housing, and food.

My story is watching my youngest sibling be put in a psych ward 17 times because my mother would choose a horrible boyfriend over her youngest child’s needs and it would inevitably wind up with my youngest sibling crying out for help in ways I wish upon no child.

- My story is also being the one who took my sibling to the hospital, sitting in that triage room for HOURS, and feeling riddled with guilt because what if this hospitalization just makes it worse for my sibling who is already going through way too much?

- My story is also urging them to choose life while not really knowing exactly how I could tell them that it gets better, that these things were only temporary, or that we could do it when it really didn’t feel viable.

- My story is never having the desire to die myself but knowing and seeing my siblings reasons and not blaming them EVER.

My story is a year and a half of not knowing if my youngest sibling was alive or not because they ran away and hid until their birthday so they could get emancipated. I was a freshman in undergrad and I felt like it was my fault because I was their only safety net left in that house and I had left for college.

- Fighting and driving lengths to get a missing persons police report put out for my sibling because my mother just assumed they had run away to do more drugs. Those years after, ironically, ended up being Hailey’s longest lengths of sobriety.

My story is a childhood memory of my oldest brother and I being separated in a grocery store because they were a different skin tone than me and they were singing to me in Spanish.

- My story is also my mother’s mom—my own grandmother—not allowing my siblings and I to all come for the holidays because half of us weren’t white.

My story is a childhood of being moved 9 times in one year because my mom couldn’t afford rent and her friend was a realtor who would let us live in houses she was showing.

- We literally lived out of cardboard boxes during the years you’re supposed to be having your first sleepovers, Halloween parties, and losing your first teeth.

My story is that my birthday falls between my dead brother and my dead sister’s birthdays but being the one birthday we’d all blow out our candles together on so I blow out three candles and cry because I gain one more year of life spent without them.

My story is in the words of Andrea Gibson — “I suppose I love this life despite my clenched fists.”

My story is being raised UU at a young age because the only good father figure in my life who actually stood up for me saw my need for a religious community that answered my questions without judgment and put me in it.

My story is that when I came out, my mother told me “no need to put labels on anything, everyone’s actually bisexual” and my father telling me “I won’t love you anymore if you do this” and that his harm on my younger body was to fix that part of me—with a hint of Catholic guilt that was slowly washed away by the words and consistent showing up of my Catholic youth group leader–despite refusing to go through on my confirmation classes.

- So god didn’t care if I was gay or not, but my dad used god as a pawn to absolve him of the harm he had done to me.

My story is not always feeling like everybody else does when people here talk about who the spirit is or who god is to them.

- And my story is often feeling unwelcome or like I’ve got two heads for bringing a personal experience to the table rather than a heady take on who the Holy Spirit or Jesus is.

- Yet also feeling so incredibly angry that half the work of a seminarian is learning how to create communities where the stories like mine can feel belonging, to try to do the work of dismantling the systematic works that caused stories like mine, and yet I, who am in seminary, don’t feel that belonging.

My story is somehow forgotten to myself when I’m placed in a place where systematically, I don’t know how the fuck I was able to get here—but in reality, it’s student loans, Pell grants, scholarships, people believing that I can do this, and a whole lot of grit. My story is also somehow forgotten to me because you look at any childhood photo of me with my entire family, and over 90% of the people in those photos are dead.

Yet somehow I feel like moving to NYC cut me off from a lot of the people that truly got the grit and honesty of how much I can do this and that is why I feel as if I’ve forgotten my own story or like I had to leave it at the doorsteps of 3041 Broadway to feel like I could be something substantial in this marbled institutional place of worshipped learning.

But deep down I still hear my undergrad mentor’s statement “where there is a will, there is a Rae.”

- Thoughts and response to my undergrad chaplain saying “does anybody at that seminary know your story?”

No—but they do now. And hopefully, that doesn’t get me kicked in the head by the consequences of letting my anger seep out of me.

I say all of this not out of a desire to be seen with pity or for those around me to want me to chime in more so they can learn about my story, like I’m some kind of animal in a zoo cage. I would hope your intro to pastoral listening or classes on the bible would have taught you a thing or two against that.

I say all of this because I have apparently been doing ministry for a really long time and somehow when I walked in here a year and a half ago, I forgot that what I was doing was ministry because I’m now in a place where we’re all doing ministry and I thought I had been doing ministry wrong.

I say all of this as a heil-mary to getting back to knowing why on God’s green earth I dreamt of going to seminary and becoming an ordained minister for so many years—for so many, the calling seems like enlightenment or some kind of token they carry to say they know the spirit more than others and are now tasked of showing others how to find the spirit—because the calling meant they were good. If anything, the calling has not felt enlightening for me… It is something I ran away from for many years *cough cough the bachelor’s degree in biology* and I still think I run away from it in ways but also as of right now, I am very much standing at the giant metaphorical calling and saying “alright Rae, where is the fire you had on the journey to this mountain?”

“One of the reasons why I knew you were called was because you keep saying you don’t want this calling.”

I say all this because I am so done feeling this level of inadequacy in this process. I say all of this because I did not hit the ground running when I got here, which is not my usual M.O. and I feel like that somehow ruined all my chances of going for something I have already run laps around to try to deter myself away from.

Where on earth did I retreat to in the past year and a half, and how did I create such a fragile, penetrable image of myself that is as stable as a tower of playing cards that someone saying I am not trained enough completely shatters me?

This is a heil-mary of getting back to myself. Because good lord do I miss her anger, her passion, her grace, her wisdom, her grit, and her soul.

The Heretic is a student news and media project and a public square for Union students to speak without fear, listen with fondness, and grow together.

About the Author

Rae (they/them/she) is a Unitarian Universalist seeking ordination and a current second year Master of Divinity student on the ministerial track. Rae is also an ornithologist (bird enthusiast) with a Bachelor of Arts in biology.

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