Free Angry Conversations with God by Susan E. Isaacs

tell me who I was? And love who I was
forever
? Yeesh. Talk about a recipe for codependency. How come they never mentioned
that
in Sex Ed?
    Sex aside, I was terrified about college. All my friends got into expensive or out-of-state schools. Julianne was headed to
     USC, Doug to Notre Dame. David got into Yale. My dad wouldn’t pay for me to live in a dorm so after I graduated as valedictorian,
     I watched my friends fly off to the Ivy League, got into my car, and commuted to UC Irvine.
    Eventually David and I broke up. We were two charged particles spinning in different directions. I just wasn’t into sex, and
     David wasn’t into Jesus. I cried. We promised to stay friends. “You’re still the coolest girl I know,” David said as he hugged
     me good-bye. He was off to New Haven. I was off to nowhere.
    That’s what made premarital sex seem wrong. Not because “the Bible told me so” or because of Pastor Norm’s shredded cardboard,
     but because it ran my heart through a blender. If I heard God speak at all, it was a new voice inside saying,
“This isn’t what you’re meant for, Susan. This isn’t your life.”

    Irvine was one of the first planned communities, and everything was planned around the color beige: beige malls, beige houses
     with beige trim, and beige basketball hoops. No, wait. You weren’t allowed to have basketball hoops—they ruined the clean
     lines. Irvine was so clean it was sterile. And UC Irvine was a college in quarantine.
    UCI was a great school if you were studying premed or engineering. It was also good for theater—that is, if you wanted to
     study postmodern deconstructionist bucket-of-blood theater. I did not. In high school, Van Holt loved my facial expressions.
     My college professor said I used my face too much. “Stop mugging. What does anger look like in your fingers?” I wanted to
     flip him off.
    My one bright spot was getting letters from David. He filled them with stories about Ivy League. He couldn’t write a sentence
     without a set-up and a punch line. When he finally wrote me about his new girlfriend, he set it up with “I wanted you to know”
     and buttoned it off with “She’s not as cool as you.” David wasn’t a jerk; he was just a guy. Of course he’d met someone. He
     was a smart, funny, Jewish hottie at Yale. I was a depressed Lutheran WASP commuting to the Beige Circle of Hell.
    Meanwhile, my sister was blossoming at her private Christian college. She got good grades; she made friends; she even got
     a boyfriend who wasn’t afraid of my dad. She had confidence and peace. When she came home on weekends, the contrast between
     our lives was blinding.
    “Susie?” I could hear the lecture coming. “How are you and Jesus doing?”
    “Why, did he say something about me?”
    “I’m just asking. You seem sad. It worries me.”
    I hadn’t forgotten Jesus. But I kept him on the periphery of my thoughts. I kept everything on the periphery. I didn’t want
     to think; otherwise I got depressed imagining my friends’ new exciting lives compared to my beige, decaying one.
    So I put on my Walkman and ran. I listened to Bruce Springsteen’s
Darkness on the Edge of Town
and ran for miles through the winding golf-course streets. I turned the tape over and ran some more. Running kept me out
     of the house and away from Dad’s TV. The Walkman pounded out “Badlands” and I pounded the miles and time and thoughts into
     the pavement under my feet.

    My last exam fell on the evening of December 8, 1980. Psychobiology—questions about the interaction of depression and the
     body. I should have presented myself as the answer. As I was driving home, I flipped on the radio and heard John Lennon asking
     me to imagine there was no heaven. Why? I was already in hell. I shut the radio off.
    When I got home, my father was standing in the living room, face drawn and angry. “So I guess you heard?”
    “Heard what?”
    “Sit down.”
    I knew before the words came