The "just a daily reminder" trend on TikTok, you've seen it, those videos that open with "just a daily reminder that you are enough / you deserve good things / you are worthy of love" and so on, I've posted a few in that format and I have thoughts about it that go deeper than the format itself. Because there's something about that content that hits differently when you grew up in a tradition that spent twenty years reminding you of the opposite.
Just a daily reminder that you were born broken. That your nature, apart from divine intervention, is corrupt. That you are a sinner from before you drew your first breath, by virtue of an action taken by two people in a garden before history began. That your desires are suspect. That your body is suspect. That your love, depending on who you love, is suspect. That you are incomplete, damaged at the source, in need of repair that only a specific institution, with specific rituals, mediated by specific authority figures, can provide.
That was my "daily reminder" for nineteen years. Every Sunday. Every Wednesday night service. Every youth group meeting. Every summer camp. Every single gathering in which I was the good girl in the front row, the one who knew all the verses, the one who would have died of shame before she let anyone see her doubt. That reminder was the air I breathed. I didn't know it was a thing that could be questioned because I didn't know it was a thing. It was just true, the way gravity is true, the way the sky is blue. You are broken. God fixes broken things, but only if you comply.
This, I have come to believe, is the oldest marketing scam in Western history. And I mean that precisely. It is brilliant, if you're looking at it from a purely structural standpoint: you sell the disease, and then you sell the cure.
The Doctrine of Original Sin as a Business Model
The framework, stripped down: original sin doctrine says every human being is born in a state of fundamental corruption, separation from God, and moral deficit, not because of anything they've done, but because of what Adam and Eve allegedly did in Genesis 3. You inherit the guilt. You come into the world already owing a debt. And the only institution authorized to administer the debt relief is the church.
Think about how powerful that is. The market you've created is literally every human being who has ever existed. The product is relief from a condition you've defined. The condition is inherent and inescapable, you can't logic your way out of it, you can't behave your way out of it, you can't simply decline the diagnosis. The cure is proprietary and administered by people who also control the terms of diagnosis. And the demand for the product is maintained by regular reminders of the disease.
Every week in church, we reminded each other we were sinners. Every week we performed rituals of confession and repentance and recommitment that temporarily relieved the weight of that designation, and then it reset, and we'd be back next Sunday to do it again. The relief was real. I'm not being cynical about that. The emotional release of being told your debt is forgiven, your slate wiped, your brokenness temporarily at bay, that feels good. It's supposed to feel good. The feeling is designed into the product.
What nobody explained to me is that the feeling requires the prior installation of the problem. You can't feel the relief of having your broken nature addressed if you weren't first convinced that your nature is broken. And I wasn't broken. None of us are. We're complicated and imperfect and sometimes unkind and sometimes selfish and sometimes genuinely awful to each other, but that's not the same as being BROKEN IN THE FACTORY. That's just being a human person navigating a difficult existence. The problem existed before the cure existed. And the cure doesn't cure anything. It just manages the symptom of the problem it created.
What I Actually Needed to Hear
When I finally left the church, one of the most disorienting experiences was the absence of that structure. Not the beliefs specifically, losing those was its own process, slower and stranger and not linear, but the STRUCTURAL experience of being told regularly what I was. Broken, forgiven, broken, forgiven. The rhythm of it. The ritual of it.
And look, I see the "just a daily reminder" trend now and I feel something complicated. Part of me is cynical about it because some of that content is genuinely shallow. The wellness-industrial complex has its own version of "sell the disease, sell the cure," and some of the "you are enough" content is produced by people simultaneously selling you the anxiety that made you feel like you weren't. That's real and I don't ignore it.
But I also understand why it lands for so many people. Because there are millions of people who grew up getting their daily reminder and it was the bad one. The one that said they were insufficient. The one that catalogued their failures. The one that tied their inherent worth to compliance with an institution's behavioral requirements. And for those people, for people like me, hearing "you were never broken to begin with" is not empty affirmation. It's a genuine corrective to twenty years of noise in the opposite direction.
The daily reminder I actually needed, the one that would have changed things, was this: you are a whole person. Not a damaged person in need of repair. Not an incomplete person awaiting completion by an outside force. Not a sinner whose every instinct must be suspect and every desire must be filtered through a framework you didn't choose. A whole person. With a whole self. With desires and questions and contradictions that are yours, that belong to you, that don't require management by an institution to be valid.
I'm writing songs about this. I have been for a year. HEATHEN HYMNS is, in a lot of ways, about what it feels like when the "you are broken" narrative finally falls apart and you're left standing there whole in a way you didn't know you were allowed to be. That's terrifying and exhilarating simultaneously, and I tried to capture both in the record.
The Grief That Comes With It
I want to be careful here because I don't want to be glib about this. Leaving the "you are broken" framework isn't just an intellectual liberation. It also involves grief. Real grief. Because for many of us, that framework was also community, belonging, family relationships, a sense of cosmic significance, a story that made the world make sense. You don't walk away from that without losing something that mattered. The fact that what you lost was also hurting you doesn't negate that it mattered.
I've had to grieve the church I thought I was in, the one that at its best is about radical love and care for the marginalized and genuine community across difference. That church exists. I've met people who live in it. My problem was never with those people. My problem is with the institutions that weaponized the "you are broken" premise to consolidate power, enforce conformity, and make human bodies (particularly women's bodies, LGBTQ+ bodies, bodies that didn't comply) into problems to be managed rather than people to be loved. My problem is with the pulpit. Not the pew.
And even knowing what I know, even having done the reading and the deconstruction and the grief work and the furious late-night writing that eventually became this album, I still sometimes feel the old gravity of it. The pull toward "you are not enough." I have to actively counter it. that's what the work costs and that's what I'm honest about. Knowing the scam intellectually doesn't always override twenty years of installation at the emotional level. It takes time. It takes repeating the true thing, which is: you were never broken. You were always whole. The people who told you otherwise had their own reasons, and those reasons were not about your wellbeing.
So Here Is Your Actual Daily Reminder
You do not have a factory defect that requires institutional management. You were not born owing a debt. Your desires are not evidence of corruption. Your doubts are not the enemy's foothold. Your love, whoever you love, is not a malfunction. The questions you have about the story you were handed are not faithlessness. They're intelligence. They're courage. They're the very thing that every honest religious tradition at its best has actually tried to cultivate.
You are a whole person who has been in a world that sometimes really hurts, often for reasons that have nothing to do with your inherent worth. The bad things that happened to you were not a function of your broken nature. The shame you carried was not yours to carry. The list of things about yourself that you were told were flaws might, on closer inspection, just be parts of you that specific powerful people found inconvenient.
I wrote a whole album about this. I put it into songs because I needed to do something with it that was bigger than words, because words kept running out. But today, in this post, in plain language: you were never broken. And if you needed to hear it one more time today, I'm glad you're here. I love you fiercely.