During our last interview, Emma told me she had been dating off and on. She would try to find men who were career-oriented, but nice; who were dominant, but who would respect her boundaries. Some of the men she met made jabs at her Amish background in ways she found uncomfortable—much like making fun of your sibling and having your sibling made fun of are two very different things. “I don’t want somebody who, before you even meet me, you already have this idea of what my life was like, when you don’t,” she explained to me. She is the Amish girl who left…but she is not just the Amish girl who left.

Ultimately, Emma decided to take control of her story. She would be direct about her situation with new men she met, and not let them project their own ideas onto her. She came up with her own redemptive narrative. With one guy she was on a date with recently, she decided to lay everything out right away. “I was raised Amish,” she told him. But then she quickly pivoted to how her background made her who she is. “Today I am very driven,” she told him. “I’m focused on what I want in my life, and I don’t let the past hold me back.”

“And it actually worked,” she told me, a smile sneaking across her serious face.

He wasn’t like the others. He heard her.

Chapter 11

Change Yourself

Curt

You wouldn’t immediately notice Curt’s arm, but if you did, it might prompt a double take. As a result of a birth injury, it’s slightly shortened and slightly pink. It’s not much of a physical limitation: he can cook gourmet dinners, drive, and sail. But our arms are right there; you can’t help but see them. It’s not a major difference, but it’s enough of one. His arm is not the only reason Curt grew up feeling shy and self-conscious, but it contributed.

Curt was raised in Indiana in a conservative, Baptist home—the “earth-is-only-four-thousand-years-old kind,” he says—and he was homeschooled for a few years before being placed into a private Christian school that had thirty kids per grade. When everyone entered the awkward morass of middle school, his was more awkward than most. Suddenly, the easy comity of early childhood morphed into something more fraught and punishing. He remembers his two best friends, who were both named Evan, both inexplicably ending their friendship with him at the same time. Once, when he overheard a girl talking about an upcoming Halloween party, she turned to him and said, “Just in case you heard that, you’re not invited.”