I walked into the convent thinking I was walking into a life that would sand down everything noisy in me until only God was left.
I was twenty when the idea stopped being a pious daydream and started feeling like gravity. I didn’t have some dramatic “light-through-the-clouds” moment. It was quieter than that—an increasing certainty that my life wasn’t meant to be arranged around romance, plans, or the normal landmarks other people measured adulthood by. I’d barely dated. I was insecure in that specific way young women can be insecure—like you’re always one wrong facial expression away from being judged and discarded. Religious life felt like an answer to that fear. Not an escape hatch from the world, exactly, but a doorway into a different kind of world where the rules were clear: pray, serve, obey, belong.
The first thing people imagine about convent life is silence. The second thing they imagine is holiness.
The reality is more ordinary and, at times, more brutal.
There was silence, yes. There were hours where the building seemed to breathe slowly, where the corridors held the quiet like water in a bowl. There were chapels with their steady dimness, candles that did not care what kind of day you’d had, and prayers that arrived on schedule whether you felt prayerful or not. That schedule is a kind of privilege—people don’t understand that until they’ve lived without it. The world outside the convent asks you to fight for your attention every second. Inside, prayer is built into the walls. You don’t have to remember to turn toward God; the bell tells you.
And at first, it was intoxicating. The set times. The rhythm. The feeling that time itself had been repurposed. I learned quickly that “free time” is a funny phrase in a convent. Rest mattered, yes, but so did community: being present, being available, being part of a “we.” In the early stages, my free time wasn’t really mine. It was moderated, guided. I watched movies with the sisters. I learned to knit. I read. I laughed more than people would expect.
That’s another thing: I was fun-loving. I like people. I get on well with people. In a normal workplace that’s either neutral or it’s a plus. In a convent, it can be complicated. Connection can look like a threat. Joy can look like a lack of seriousness. Having friends can look like building a “faction.” I didn’t know any of that when I arrived. I thought love would be the default setting.
What I didn’t expect was the competitiveness.
Not from teenagers. From grown women.
I had been at an all-girls school before. I thought I knew what cattiness looked like. But the convent had its own ecosystem—women from different cultures, different countries, different generations, living in close quarters with no romantic lives and very little privacy, under a structure where permission is currency and attention is power. There were sisters twenty, thirty, forty years older than me. Many were good. Many were tired. Some were kind in a way that felt like sunlight. And some… some were sharp.
I learned quickly what conditional love feels like.
If you do the “right thing,” you belong. If you say the “right thing,” you’re safe. If you make a mistake, it isn’t just a mistake. It becomes your identity.
I was criticized publicly. Sometimes it was small—my appearance, my mannerisms, how I spoke. Sometimes it was big—mistakes I made, decisions I questioned, rules I didn’t understand. I was forbidden from doing things, going places, interacting with certain people. I was made to feel like an inconvenience. And it wasn’t always the same person. Often it came from those in authority—superiors, or women who acted as if they had authority because of age, culture, status, or sheer confidence.
There was also the strange, constant hum of comparison. Who got praised. Who got acknowledged. Who got permission to go out. Who got sent to interesting ministries. Who got an education opportunity. If one sister received something another hadn’t, it could set off a quiet storm: whispers, side comments, icy politeness. Jealousy in a convent is a particular kind of madness because it has to wear a holy face. Nobody says, “I’m jealous.” They say, “I’m concerned about her spirit.” They say, “We need to watch her.” They say, “That’s not appropriate.”
I was young enough to believe the problem was me.
When you’re in that environment, you start narrating your own life as a moral failure. You tell yourself, Maybe I’m too sensitive. You tell yourself, This is forming me. You tell yourself, Every sister goes through this—tough it out. You tell yourself that if it hurts, it must be sanctifying.
I stayed a long time under that logic.
Ten years.
And in those ten years, the best parts were not the tidy aesthetic people imagine. The best parts were ministry—the actual work of loving people who were suffering.
I worked in hospitals for several years, in pastoral ministry. That was the place I felt most alive. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been there: when you sit with someone at the edge of death, or you stand in a hospital corridor while a family tries to understand what “nothing more we can do” really means, the usual social games fall away. People don’t need you to be impressive. They need you to be present.
I was very young and I hadn’t experienced much death. The first time I ministered to someone actively dying, I felt like my whole body was learning a new language. There’s a kind of sacred awkwardness in it—your hands don’t know where to go, your voice doesn’t know what tone to use, your prayers feel too small. But then you realize the point isn’t to be eloquent. The point is to be there.
I also worked in aged care. I saw loneliness up close—the way it clings to people even when they’re surrounded by staff and routines. I did other things too—journalism, of all things. That’s another surprise people don’t expect: religious life can give you opportunities to discover your skills and passions. In a strange way, it can be expansive. You’re sent where you’re needed. You learn quickly. You become useful. You find out what you’re made of.
There’s one moment I carry like a stone in my pocket.
I supported an inmate while she was in hospital. You could tell she hadn’t received much kindness in her life—not the ordinary, unremarkable kindness that says, You’re a person. You matter. When her hospitalization ended, she gave me a card. It said: “Thank you for being you.”
That sentence did something to me. It landed differently because at home—inside the convent—I didn’t feel accepted for who I was. I felt measured. Managed. Corrected. But here was someone with every reason to distrust the world, offering me a clean, uncomplicated kindness.
I kept that card. I still have it.
And then—slowly, quietly—the inside of me started to collapse.
People like to imagine anorexia as vanity or control. For me, it was more like my body trying to speak when my mouth had learned it was dangerous to speak. I was weight-shamed even when I wasn’t overweight. My appearance was policed. My mistakes were displayed. My social connections were scrutinized. Over time, food became one of the few places I could exert discipline without asking permission.
At the time, I didn’t call it what it was. I just told myself I was being “disciplined.” I told myself it was spiritual. I told myself I needed to be smaller—less trouble, less visible, less… me.
By the time I understood I was unwell, I was already deep in it.
Leaving wasn’t a simple decision like quitting a job. When you profess vows, there are structures. Permissions. Authority. You don’t just walk out with a suitcase and a dramatic speech. There’s a process. The permission to leave had to come from the head of my order. And the strange thing is, the administrative part wasn’t the hardest.
The hardest part was the human part.
Backlash.
Nastiness.
Hostility.
I had expected sadness. I had even expected disappointment. I did not expect vitriol. But when someone leaves, it can feel to the community like betrayal. And if the community is already older, already dwindling, already anxious about the future, a young person leaving can trigger something ugly: resentment, fear, contempt. You become a symbol of their insecurity.
Only two sisters knew I was leaving when the permission came through.
So I packed in a kind of quiet panic, like someone planning an escape from a place that had taught her not to trust the reaction of the people she lived with. I donated what I didn’t want. I tried to make my belongings look unchanged. I did a lot of crying. And I had to keep acting like everything was normal because it wasn’t announced until the day before I actually left.
That final day was surreal.
Imagine being officially released from your vows—released from a life you believed was forever—and still waking up in the same bed, walking the same halls, sitting at the same table, hearing the same sounds. You’re free and not free. You’re leaving and still there. Your body doesn’t know which reality to inhabit.
When I finally left, my family caught me like a net.
My parents had always been supportive. They hadn’t pushed me into religious life; they just wanted me to be happy. But before I left, they could see I was seriously unwell. I remember calling my father and crying—really crying—because of how hurt I had been by sisters’ behavior. I remember asking my parents if I could come home and stay with them. They showed me care in a way that felt almost shocking after years of living under conditional acceptance. They helped me while I battled that eating disorder. I will always be grateful for them.
And then, outside the convent, I learned something that surprised me: prayer is harder when nobody rings a bell.
Inside, prayer is woven into the day. Outside, prayer competes with dishes and fatigue and health and the ordinary mess of being human. I left wanting to keep up my prayer practices. I truly did. But my health and my new lifestyle made it difficult. There were days where I could barely do anything, let alone sustain the kind of structured devotion I’d once taken for granted.
I also spent time questioning God.
Not in a performative way. In the raw way you question someone you love when you don’t understand why they let you be hurt. I don’t regret my choices, but I have asked God what it all means. What was I doing there? What was the point? Why did I have to go through that? Why did the place that was supposed to form love end up teaching me what lovelessness looks like?
Somewhere in that questioning, I realized something I wish I could have told my younger self: God does not need my suffering as proof of my devotion.
I had guilt, too. A lot of it. I had been given educational opportunities in the convent. I felt like I “owed” something. I felt like I was going back on my promise to God. Catholic guilt has an imagination like a novelist—it will write entire chapters about your failure and then make you reread them at night.
But I also had to return to the core of what I believed about God. I do not believe God wants me to stay somewhere that is killing me. I do not believe God wants me to live in a place where I cannot be fully alive. I do not believe love is proved by endurance of harm.
Leaving didn’t magically fix me.
Afterward, I realized I had PTSD. I still have dreams. Nightmares. Triggers that arrive without warning. A smell, a tone of voice, the feeling of being watched, the idea of authority—things that can pull me back into that old interior landscape. Recovery is not a straight line. It is, painfully, one day at a time.
And yet—here’s the part people don’t expect—I still consider myself Catholic.
I still pray daily. I still attend church.
But my faith is different now. It’s less naïve. Less shiny. Less dependent on institutions doing the right thing. It’s more like a thread I hold onto in the dark. It is quieter. Sometimes it is angry. Sometimes it is grateful. It’s not “privileged” the way it was in the convent, where resources and schedules did a lot of the work for you. Now it’s mine to choose. Mine to make time for. Mine to rebuild.
And then, I met my husband.
I didn’t leave for love. Not initially. I left because I was unwell. But after I was out—after I’d begun the slow, humiliating process of learning how to be a person again—I met someone who loved me in a way that did not feel like a test.
The love I experienced in the convent was often conditional: do the right thing, be accepted. Make a mistake, be punished. With my husband, love was not a reward. It was a stance. It was steady. It was kind. It made me realize, with a grief I still can’t fully describe, what I should have received all along from the people who spoke most often about God.
My husband is the greatest gift. He shows me the kind of love that does not shrink me into compliance. He makes room for me. He does not require me to become smaller to be safe.
Sometimes people ask me if I miss the convent.
The answer is complicated.
I miss the rhythm of prayer. I miss the sense of shared purpose. I miss ministry—the work that made me feel like my life mattered beyond myself. I miss the purity of certain moments: chanting psalms when it’s still dark outside, sitting with someone dying, seeing a lonely person soften because you stayed.
And I grieve it. I truly do. You can love a life and still have to leave it.
But I do not miss the way I was treated.
I do not miss being publicly diminished.
I do not miss living in a community where some people confuse control with holiness.
I do not miss the quiet fear of making a mistake.
I do not miss the conditional belonging.
Now I am learning a new and wonderful life while still grieving parts of my former life. I’m learning how to walk this life with God and with other people. Some days I feel strong. Some days I feel like a beginner at being human. Some days my past feels far away. Some days it’s right there in my nervous system.
But I have joy.
And I have the astonishing, healing experience of being loved without having to earn it.