"I went to boarding school Southern, religious, and straight, and I left boarding school not being at all religious and not being straight"

A compact autobiographical arc is condensed into a single sentence: arrival defined by three pillars, regional identity, religious faith, and heterosexuality, and departure marked by the collapse of two of them. The line captures a coming-of-age moment when distance from home becomes the catalyst for interrogating inherited certainties. Boarding school functions as a crucible: a place where exposure to new ideas, diverse peers, and unmonitored time forces clarity about what was chosen and what was absorbed without consent.

The pairing of “Southern, religious, and straight” evokes a culturally conservative package often treated as inseparable. By emerging “not at all religious and not straight,” the speaker signals a disentangling of identity strands once braided together. The omission of “Southern” in the second clause is telling; it suggests that region remains a durable part of self, less an ideology than a rooted sensibility, while theology and sexuality prove more contingent. Southernness may persist, reinterpreted; piety and heteronormativity fall away.

There is wit in the cadence, but also a subtle record of risk. To abandon religion and heterosexuality can entail loss: family friction, community disapproval, the unmooring that follows when a moral map no longer directs desire or purpose. Yet the sentence radiates relief, even liberation, as if the transformation resulted not from rebellion for its own sake but from alignment between inner life and outer truth.

The arc also critiques the presumed neutrality of institutions. Schools are not merely academic; they are sites of social possibility where alternate scripts become legible. Autonomy, access to language for queerness, and intellectual permission to doubt can reconfigure belief and belonging. What emerges is a portrait of identity as iterative rather than fixed, less a birthright than a practice.

Ultimately, the statement affirms that growing up may require unlearning. One can carry a place within oneself while shedding its prescriptions, keeping the accent and weather of home but choosing different gods and different loves.