I still remember that summer, when I was 16, just a kid really, stuck in that stifling community and reading Spinoza for a school thing — the *Ethics* of all things — and something just… clicked, you know? Like a cognitive dissonance, realizing all those pronouncements about a woman’s place, the prescribed domesticity, were just arbitrary social constructs and not, as I'd been led to believe, divine mandate. The whole edifice just imploded then, a sudden anomie that never quite healed, and I often wonder what my life would have been like if I’d just stuck to approved texts, if I’d never felt that intellectual rebellion, that quiet, internal schism.