I was born in 1985 in Philadelphia; my family is from Detroit, and we moved back there in 1990, just before I turned five.

We’re a big Greek-Italian family, crazy loud. I spent most of the time with the Italian side, my mom’s side. 

When my dad was 14, his 18-year-old brother died fighting in Vietnam. It tore my family apart; both my grandparents had nervous breakdowns. My dad was sent to live with an aunt, but he ran away and hitchhiked to California. While he was there he got hooked on heroin.

I wasn’t really aware of my dad’s addiction until I was 13; I think I was in denial. 

My parents fought a lot, it was very chaotic in our house. My mom was the rock that held us together. Because she had taken an oath when they married, she refused to leave my dad.

We were poor. We lived in Roseville; I grew up in a duplex, with apartments across the street. Because my dad wasn’t around much, mom was like a single mom. It made her emotionally distant.

When I was in 6th grade we moved to Warren, Michigan. My mom had moved up from secretary to sales at the steel company where she worked, and she bought her first house in 1996.

Politics really weren’t in our house. I knew my parents were Democrats. Michigan was blue, my parents were working class, and at that time if you were working class you were a Democrat.

We were just surviving; I think there’s a disconnect from politics when you’re working just to get enough food to put on the table, making sure your husband isn’t taking money for drugs.

Throughout my childhood, we attended an Assemblies of God church. Pentecostal best describes it. There was speaking in tongues, gifts of the Spirit. When I was 9 or 10, a scandal broke out: the pastor had embezzled a lot of money. He was so well loved that it tore the church apart. Some still supported him. My mom was heartbroken, and we left the church. 

We church shopped for a while, but we never found a place to land. In my teen years, I was never religious, although I believed in God.

I was the good girl, always a really good student. School was everything to me. I wanted to be the first in my family to go to college. 

When I was a senior in high school, my brother, who was 16 at the time and also struggling with life at home, got into some trouble and was sent to juvenile hall for a year. That created even more tension and animosity in our house.

Meanwhile, I had long battled anxiety, along with ADHD. The problem was that it was not diagnosed until many years later. 

After I graduated from high school, I enrolled at Wayne State University. My undiagnosed ADHD really reared its head when I got there in the fall of 2003. I felt like an imposter. I felt I wasn’t prepared. I started to have daily panic attacks as I drove into the parking garage, even passing out at times.

I never told anybody. I just dropped out of school. I thought the panic attacks and imposter syndrome were evidence I didn’t belong there. 

At 19, I met a guy and got pregnant. I had my first son, Zak, when I had just turned 20. We tried to play happy family: we got an apartment, I got a job at a tanning salon. But when Zak was 2 I discovered his dad was addicted to pills. I had always vowed never to be with an addict, so I left him.

I moved back in with my parents in 2007. In 2008, I enrolled in a respiratory therapy program at Macomb Community College.

I voted for the first time in 2008. I voted for Barack Obama; I even canvassed for him on campus. After all the years of George W. Bush, all the lies about weapons of mass destruction, I was ready for a change. 

I got my Associate Degree in Applied Science in 2010, and started working in the NICU in the University of Michigan’s children’s hospital. I loved it; I was there for about five years.

I met my husband Dan in 2009. He had quite the family history. His dad had been a hit man for the Detroit mafia. One time his father was told to kill a woman, but she survived the attack and he went to prison. Dan’s dad was also a drug addict. After he got out of prison, he found religion, got clean, and started going to prisons to minister to the people behind bars. 

Dan also grew up in an evangelical church, but after his dad died of a heart attack when he was 13, he turned his back on religion.

I was also not religious when we met. I felt I was growing into my identity and finding who I was in terms of politics. Dan smoked marijuana for severe knee pain, and we really got into Ron Paul, who was pro-decriminalization. We also watched Joe Rogan’s early stuff, as he was staunchly pro-decriminalization.

Dan had served three years in the Air Force. He had a few close friends in the Army who deployed to Afghanistan and were never the same. One came home with severe PTSD. That really informed our politics; we just wanted out of these countries. We felt Obama betrayed us because he stayed in Afghanistan.

A Spiritual Awakening

We both voted for Ron Paul in 2012.

That was the year that started my string of having boys every two years: 2012, ‘14, ‘16, and ‘18. We moved to Manchester, a rural town near Ann Arbor. We were struggling financially, and then while I was pregnant with my third son in 2014, I fell and broke my arm. I had to have reconstructive surgery with no anesthesia; the pain was horrific when the nerve block wore off. 

I was extremely depressed. I’m a city girl, and we lived in the country. When I was able to return to work in the summer of 2014 at the NICU, I couldn’t do it. The panic attacks returned, and I ended up quitting. 

We realized we were broke, and we had to leave our house and move into a little apartment. I was beside myself with grief. I started praying. I reached out to God, read the Bible. In September 2014, I had a spiritual awakening. I felt I was saved.

I didn’t realize it, but that was the moment that set me on my journey towards MAGA.

In January 2015, we moved to Clinton Township near Lake St. Clair. We started going to a non-denominational, evangelical, Pentecostal charismatic church. It was an Assemblies of God church; a cousin of mine was pastor. This was like the fundamentalist evangelical church of my youth, where you believe the Bible is inerrant and to be taken literally.

It took me some time to buy into, but I eventually did, wholeheartedly.

I couldn’t have cared less when Trump ran for president the first time in 2016. I didn’t care a whole lot about politics in general. I had just had my fourth son, I was dealing with my most severe postpartum depression, and my dad had just been diagnosed with cancer (he passed away that December). I didn’t like Trump or Hillary Clinton, and I felt my vote didn’t matter. The church community was apathetic, so I didn’t vote in 2016.

A scandal in the church led us to leave in July 2016. A couple months later, a friend told me about a small charismatic church where her father was the pastor: Calvary Chapel. We switched to Calvary. There were fewer than 50 of us in the congregation. It was there I became extremely fundamentalist. The pastor was preaching an interpretation of the Bible that I realized much later was Christian Nationalist. 

By the summer of 2017, I had come to believe the US is a Christian nation, and it was always meant to be. We were taught the world belongs to Satan, so there would always be people trying to make the US less Christian. We were most worked up about Roe v. Wade and gay marriage. We believed we wouldn’t have blessings on our land until we got rid of those things.

It was critical to get a president who would carry out this agenda. It could have been anyone,  as long as they were willing to carry out the Christian Nationalist agenda. It happened to be Trump.

Trump’s persona of the rough spoken outsider really resonated with a lot of the people in our church, especially with those who were less educated. They felt, “he talks like me, he really shoots straight.”

We were thrilled about Trump’s Supreme Court picks, since the plan was to overturn Roe v. Wade. He promised evangelicals this would be the end of legalized abortion. In our church, the women were told to be a Quiverfull Christian. You wanted to point in the direction of the Lord, and your kids were the arrows in your quiver. We were praised when we had lots of kids; it was intoxicating. 

We were happy. Trump was saying what we wanted to hear: America first, bringing jobs back from China. We thought he was amazing, standing for Christian values. We really liked Mike Pence; we thought he balanced Trump out nicely. We would excuse Trump’s behavior, whether it was his making fun of a disabled reporter or the Access Hollywood tape that came out during the campaign. We’d say he was being taken out of context. 

Besides, we were told Trump had been chosen by God, that he was a disheveled man like David, who also was an adulterer. Trump was a “baby Christian,” meaning he had just gotten saved, so we should give him grace because we’re all sinners. Since he was a new creature in Christ, you couldn’t hold anything against him.

We believed Trump’s critics were just blinded by Satan. We saw him as the persecuted white savior, fighting for us. I was MAGA all the way, although to us, MAGA meant Make America Godly Again.

I relied almost entirely on conservative Christian pastors for my information. I read Focus on the Family’s publication. I watched Fox, and I bounced around other news stations to convince myself I was informed. I listened a lot to a local Christian radio station, where Bob Dutko had a show. He was a local Rush Limbaugh type, 100% pro-Trump. 

All the while, I was suppressing major internal turmoil. On the outside, I was this sage Christian, the meek and quiet wife who homeschooled the kids and stood behind her man, never calling attention to myself. But having been a feminist since forever, there was so much cognitive dissonance created by my lifestyle that I was in constant mental anguish. 

I let the pastor’s wife take me under her wing. I put way too much trust in her voice being God’s voice. She was a narcissistic person I shouldn’t have trusted. I emulated her authoritarian homeschooling approach, which included hitting and spanking. It was hurting my relationships with my boys. I was wracked with guilt. 

Covid Hypocrisy

Our religion also generated great stress in our marriage. While the mandate was, the husband works and the wife stays home and stands behind the man, that had never been our gig. We had been best friends, doing everything together. But we became the kind of couple the church told us we had to be. It almost tore our marriage apart. I never discussed any of my internal anguish with Dan.

We moved into a new house in January 2020. Then Covid hit. I was as freaked out as anybody. The first conspiracy theory I believed was that Covid was a left-wing Democrat demonic ploy to shut down churches. We really bought into that.

Our church kept meeting in person, even though we weren’t supposed to. As a medical professional, I realized that because of the insular nature of our community — the moms were all at home and the dads worked with each other — that we had created the kind of “pod” that public health experts said was a safe place for people to congregate. So we were shielded from the initial impacts of Covid, which made us very insensitive to what was happening.

We were convinced the pandemic was the sign of the end times, that it would bring about the second coming of Christ. We were consumed with that, with making sure Trump’s agendas were going through.

I saw when it came to the vaccine, Trump was talking out of both sides of his mouth: he praised it and took credit for it, while at the same time he downplayed the effects of Covid and said, “Don’t get vaccinated.” But you couldn’t criticize him.

Every church in our area was anti-vax; nobody believed in it. There was one woman in our church, a cancer survivor, who left the congregation because the pastor wouldn’t mandate masks.

I have this education and training where I know and understand the devastating effects of upper respiratory illness. It soon became clear to me that masks stopped transmission. While I didn’t wear a mask to church (since we were a pod), I wore one everywhere else. 

I started to see hypocrisy: we were Christians and supposedly loving people, striving to protect those around us. But people were dying. Our church became even more Christian Nationalist. The thinking was, in a Christian nation, you can’t force people to get vaccinated, we have free will. I saw it was a convoluted position that was neither Christian nor patriotic.

Then there was a scandal in our church over a father accused of sexually abusing his three kids. But I was still ignoring the disconnect between my outward life and my inner misery.

In the summer of 2020, we had dinner with a couple who told us Trump was being groomed as the savior of the nation and that JFK, Jr. wasn’t really dead. They were QAnon. 

I did a deep dive into QAnon around the time of the 2020 election. I wholeheartedly believed Trump when he said the election was stolen. It was thrilling to think he was going to single-handedly save the nation. 

We believed Jan. 6 was the day — as Q predicted — that Trump would claim his rightful place as president and expose the evil cabal of child-eating, adrenochrome-taking Democrats operating under a pizza place in Washington. Then it didn’t happen. We watched as the goal posts kept moving. Every time Trump would do something, QAnon people on Parlor would say: this is it, this is the time. They predicted a massive shutdown of the electrical grid. Then nothing. In February or March of 2021, I realized, “You’re getting played again.”

What really brought that whole season of my life to a close was the death in March 2021 of Gary, the father of my oldest son, Zak. He died in a motorcycle accident, and it completely rocked our world. At Gary’s funeral, the pastor’s wife told Zak it was probably a good thing his dad had died, that he was probably better off because Gary wasn’t a Christian and he wasn’t around to influence him. My best friend basically told me the same thing.

These people I considered close family, brothers and sisters in Christ, were telling my son he was better off without his dad. I was reaching the end of my rope. 

Two months later, Dan threw out his back. We missed church, missed it again, and ended up not going for six straight weeks. During that time I discussed everything I hadn’t been telling him, and we never went back. We were called apostates, heretics. They said we were fakes who were never really for them, that it was all an act.

In September 2021, Dan got seriously ill with Covid. He was hospitalized, and almost had to go on a ventilator. He got long Covid, and was so fatigued he couldn’t work for months. It was around this time that I was finally diagnosed with ADHD. I had been getting help with my mental health, and the diagnosis helped bring my time in MAGA into perspective. I finally realized I wasn’t crazy.

We started our deconstruction of the religion at this time. I jumped on TikTok, and learned there was an ex-evangelical movement out there. It helped me a lot, gave me a lot to read.

That was when I left MAGA. 

Learning To Think Critically Again

When the veil dropped, it dropped hard. I started reading books other than the Bible again. I read a lot about psychology and trauma, trying to wrap my head around what had happened to me. I was deeply ashamed I had fallen into that. 

I had been a faithful follower of One America News and NewsMax, but I switched to NPR. I started doing real research. I started to think critically again. In the church and MAGA I was not thinking for myself. My opinions on Covid completely changed as I did actual research. I realized what a fiasco the pandemic had been. So many people focus on Jan. 6 as Trump’s worst moment, but I think his lack of leadership during Covid was one of the most egregious acts of any president.

I had all this internalized misogyny reinforced by Trump and the church. Trying to come back out of that, navigating that dynamic, was a lot. It was another important piece in the deconstruction puzzle. 

Before I got into the church and MAGA, I’d always been pro-choice. My best friend in high school had an abortion when she was 14. I had always viewed it through the lens of, who am I to play God in someone else’s major life decisions? And yet I became vehemently anti-choice. I completely swung to the view that it was murder, the most egregious crime on this earth. It’s amazing the things you will believe to conform to group think.

Because of Dan’s long Covid, he couldn’t return to work. When he was feeling better, he was having trouble finding jobs because the men he had previously worked with at Calvary Chapel cut us off after we left the church. So I had to go back to work. In March 2022, I got a job at Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. 

That really accelerated my political reawakening. Children’s Hospital had been public, then it was privatized in 2012. The owners tried to save money by hiring contingent therapists and traveling therapists rather than replacing the full-time staff lost during the pandemic. That led to constant staffing shortages and burned out nurses and respiratory therapists. It was all about profits; the patients were overlooked. 

I was staffing a 68-bed unit on my own. There was not enough medicine; I witnessed kids dying because of the staff shortage. There were cockroaches all over the hospital. I started doing research; I learned about wealth disparities. I discovered the hospital’s CEO gave himself a $17 million bonus. I quit in May 2023.

I next got a job taking care of a woman with ALS who was at home on a ventilator. It turned out she was a billionaire. She had a day and night nurse manager, a staff nurse, a home health aide, me as her respiratory therapist, a maid, etc. It was a total culture shock. I became overwhelmed with the injustice of where we are as a country, that the wealthy can get what they need while working class people struggle to survive, let alone thrive. 

The more I learned, the more I found myself moving hard left. I considered Democrats to be the new right, and Republicans to just be off the map entirely, fascists who don’t deserve a place in our democracy.

In June of this year Zak was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. We were lucky to catch it when we did; he’s halfway through chemo and doing well. When we learned of the diagnosis, I had moved on to my current job as a remote respiratory therapist for a medical equipment company. Because I had only been on the job for five months when Zak was diagnosed, I didn’t qualify for the federal Family Medical Leave Act (you have to have at least one year on the job). 

I posted on TikTok about my struggle to work through Zak’s disease while being unable to go on medical leave. Shortly after that, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race, and I learned that the new Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, supports paid family medical leave. 

That re-ignited my hope that not all politicians are against the working class, that there are still good people in the Democratic party who want to stand for the rights and freedom of every American and make America great for everyone, not just for white Christians.

I did more research on Harris, and found I agree with her on many issues. I was so pleased; it made me really check my internalized misogyny. I think it’s so ingrained in me. When I was in the church and MAGA, I never considered a woman could be president — a woman couldn’t lead a church, let alone the country. 

Today I feel more spiritually fulfilled than ever. I’m seeing Jesus clearly, and seeing the way fundamentalism has destroyed the good news of the gospel: that God loves us all, understands our suffering, and wants us to love and support one another with empathy and without prideful judgment. 

Now that I’m critically thinking again, I ask myself, what did Jesus do? He was homeless; he sat with the “sinners.” He sat with the suffering woman who committed adultery. He wouldn’t be standing in front of an abortion clinic shaming the woman going in; he’d be sitting with the woman consoling her over her decision.

Looking at Jesus through sober eyes free from the intoxication of the church has led me to be a more authentic Christian, as I seek to love and support others without the bigotry and hate that fundamentalists in MAGA falsely believe is God’s way, and that they use to justify their support of Trump.

                                                                                                                                                                                           —October 2024