Evan Urquhart

Therese of Lisieux embodied this in particular; her memoire, The Story of a Soul, is all about utter and complete self-abandonment into the self of God. These are spiritualities ultimately curated by men.

This isn't to imply overt or deliberate sexism as much as myopia; male spirituality is over and over again the recognition that *others must come before yourself* because men are not taught to act like that. So it's a form of rebellion against self-assertion.

Im not here to knock that kind of spirituality; there's a lot to be valued there. But women, generally and broadly speaking, get a very different message than men do: that we, on a very real level, don't exist the way others do.

So the spirituality of self-denial becomes that of self-immolation and self-destruction; I must give more and more and more and more on top of what I am *already giving* to the point I erupt in flame. I must hate myself, I must be nothing, I must be emptied.

I'm trans and I'm autistic so I feel like I'd always inhabited a middle area there, where I'd been given two conflicting messages my entire life: one, that i was a Future Leader of the Church, and two, that I needed to bend myself to fit the world.

Catholicism taught me that the only way to fulfill the first imperative was to embrace the second; but I was already so wrapped up in self-denial, in self-hatred, in self-abnegation, that the end result was what one friend dismissively called a "theology of wretchedness."

To wit: I was a sinner, utterly corrupt by virtue of my queerness. Salvation for me was only possible in the complete subordination of my entire person -- my will, my spirit, my future, my name -- to Christ and Christ's Church.

I must, in other words, destroy myself if I want to live. I must immolate myself on the pyre of the magisterium to the point of my own death, because what was my misery in comparison to the God of the Universe?