Listen above, watch or read below.

The 2x2s took modesty seriously—weaponized it, really. So naturally, denim was suspect. Unwritten dress codes were less about hiding skin than functioning as a system to keep us in line. Our sedate skirts and dresses served as uniforms for an invisible battle and served as declarations of our compliance.

The 2x2s didn’t write the rules down. They didn’t have to.

Because everyone already knew them.

My father joined the 2x2 cult when I was a child. They called themselves true Christians. No, that’s not quite right, they didn’t like that label, although I’ve seen the odd business card indicating that the name we didn’t have was—in fact—Christian Fellowship.

The cult was less religion, more a dress code with severe afterlife implications. Women wore long skirts and long hair. Men were mostly left alone, which seemed doctrinally inconsistent given the beard situation with Jesus.

No jeans. No makeup. No jewelry. No bare shoulders. Nothing fitted, nothing bright. Nothing that might suggest you’d chosen your outfit purposely or thought you looked good.

Modesty wasn’t about covering up. It was about erasing.

I didn’t believe. Or, I didn’t believe easily. I wanted to. I wanted to want to.

I hoped that counted.

So I obeyed. I wore knee covering skirts, one swishy and flower patterned and with 57 buttons that—if I hadn’t been forced to wear it, I’d have loved. It was a confusing flicker of personal taste amid obligation. I covered my shoulders and my new and alarmingly full breasts that, from comments and stares, drew attention. I hated how I looked even more than the baseline of self-hate assigned to all pre- and fully-fledged teens, which meant I was doing it right. The worse you felt, the closer you were to God. That was the theology—unspoken, airtight, and deeply unflattering.One spring, I wore a faded denim number to Meeting. Nineties-long and light-washed. (The redo has been on the racks at Aritzia for a couple years now and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I bought one. Maybe someday I’ll ceremoniously burn it, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to wear it.)

Listen. I knew that particular fabric for a Meeting was risky.

Only the rebels wore denim and everyone knew they were fast tracking themselves to hell. But Wednesday night Bible Study was—in theory—more relaxed than the Sunday meetings. I’d crunched the fashion math, and determined the skirt’s length cancelled its fabric.

Turns out I was just as bad at fashion math as regular math. The Elder scanned the room as he closed with his Testimony. “Sometimes the Enemy disguises comfort as righteousness. The path is narrow, and we must take care we’re not led astray."

On that last beat, he looked directly at me.

That’s how correction worked—never explicitly addressed, never direct. It came in riddles, in warnings, and through carefully calibrated glances. Unless that correction came in the form of a Worker who convinces your high school principal he’s your minister—so it’s cool beans if he takes you out for lunch a few times and then ends up in your bedroom so you can talk privately. But those stories are for another day. They belong to a different rage.

I went to Convention one summer dressed for salvation and—let’s be honest, in hopes I presented well enough at what was, essentially, an approved venue for finding your mate.I had learned by then not to save my best outfit for Sunday.

Technically, Sunday was the most important day, but Convention ended after the second setting of lunch had been served in the Dining Shed. Saturday was better suited for showing off, but truly, Friday made the most sense. That way, the impact of people’s shock and awe on seeing my beautiful outfit wouldn’t be wasted by leaving the next day. I yearned for at least one dusty gravel path walk, with at least one of the boys, and of course, I was hoping it would be one of the shiny born and raised who would choose me for a stroll. Navy dress, stiff white blouse, fabric-wrapped buttons, hair pulled so tight I gave myself a temporary facelift well before I needed one. I was clearly in the game.

Someone’s mother stopped me on my way out of the Sleeping Barn after I’d shellacked my hair in place. I’m confident she told herself she was helping.

“How’s your mother doing?” she asked, her tone less inquiry, more accusation. She knew my mum didn’t attend meetings, and that unspoken failing always hung heavy in the air, a shadow on the piety I tried hard to show.

The hem hit mid-shin. The top’s neckline sat just below my throat. Buttons and hooks pressed my chest into compliance. Every visible inch had been cleared by some internal modesty calculator I didn’t realize I’d built.

Still, it wasn’t enough.

Because it was never enough.

The navy dress under the securely fastened and modest blouse? It was strapless. I knew I’d never wear it that way, but the thrill of seeing myself in the changing room mirror when I’d tried it on had been too much to resist. Maybe it had given me a fire in the eye this boy’s mother caught a glimpse of, maybe she connected it to what she knew was under my sedate top, had seen me when I’d dressed in the Barn. Her words were innocuous, all harm done with tone—a thing I’d become adept at discerning. I hadn’t understood then I was dangerous, I wouldn’t for a while yet. But she did, and she took a moment to let me know.

The system was brilliant. You couldn’t follow the rules. Not all of them. Not completely. And that kept you trying. Kept you quiet.

By the end of my first year of high school, I was changing outfits in the bathroom. Skirt on the bus, jeans for the school day, reversed before going home. Other 2x2s didn’t ask; they weren’t aware of my double life. People at school—including many concerned or simply curious teachers—asked all the time about the dress to jeans swap, and depending on my mood, I answered with short or even shorter explanations. My mood, to be clear, was generally not good, so whatever the length of my explanation, it was delivered with the fury only teenagers can so quickly tap.

It wasn’t the rules (that were of course not rules at all) that broke me.

It was how perfectly they worked.

Every outfit a test. Every gaze an exam. The trick wasn’t to appear modest as much as it was to set yourself apart from the World. Signify different, embody meekness. I was an example, they said. I was, but not of what they implied. I functioned as an exact replica of subjugation, and I became complicit in vanquishing, of vanishing, my self.Once I started dipping out of the compliance charade, once I couldn’t ignore conversations with myself about what made sense and what didn’t, I still only deviated from the rules out of sight. This is a complicated thing to do at that age, and while I didn’t (thank heavens) develop into a prairie Sybil, splitting myself in two for years didn’t do much for my development.

When splitting myself in half wasn’t an option anymore, I left. Another story, for another day. And after that, my first fully and completely defiance? It was wearing jeans in public, a thing I’d by then frequenty done, but my dissidence was found in not changing after I got home. No hidden skirt in my backpack, no mental checklist. No constant scanning for the ones who might catch me out.

Just me, in blue jeans.

No one died, but it sure felt like I might when Dad came home that day. He didn’t say a word, but to use a tired phrase, if looks could kill, I’d have been flat on the floor, laid out in, of course, a demure skirt.

My mutinies stacked on themselves, my external appearance becoming an unsubtle battlefield against 2x2 dictates. Years later, I cut my hair. Not as a statement. Well, maybe it was, or it’s likely I wouldn’t have chosen the pixie cut that made me look like the scissors were nearby and I was feeling some things.

Workers had often warned us about slippery slopes, implying the seemingly benign disguised a quick gateway to hell. Everything Worldly, defined explicitly and implicitly, inevitably led to a life on earth devoid of meaning and worse. They preached an afterlife of regret for being too weak to walk in the world without being of it.

Publicly breaking the rules did not, of course, lead to my ruin. It led, first, to relief, although that lightness was tempered by dragging what I knew was not sin—but felt like it—behind me, a small, heavy thing weighting me down. And it was a long time before I assimilated myself into me, and why I’ve struggled until now to write much more than beyond the surface of these years.

Oh, you know, I found that skirt recently, the one with 57 buttons. Found the strapless blue dress, too (I’d forgotten it had a thin, stiff crinoline, which was why it kept its shape so well) and its white blouse topper. I held it up to myself in the mirror, crumpled and sad looking after nearly forty years in a storage bin.

I saw myself at that moment. Tired and pale, 51 and far from young, but I saw her in the mirror, too.

When last she wore that dress she hadn’t yet inhabited rage—but it was so close. It was so close to her.

My heart ached for her, knowing what was coming, and how hard it would be.

But the tired face looking back at me? There was something important in it, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it. Dark circles, yes. But that face was also free.

For so many years, I’d always been slightly off—too much for the 2x2s, not enough for the rest of the world. I hovered, unbelonging, off balance, and dressed for a heaven I was pretty sure I wasn’t interested in.

That hovering has been hard to shake. Maybe it always will be. Secretly keeping a foot in two worlds messes with your sense of self, wrenches you into parts. And while I do what I can to stitch the fragments of those two selves back together, it’s less Kintsugi—elegant, radiant, touched by gold leaf and wisdom—than it is dollar store tape, unsticking at its edges.

But maybe reassembly itself is an art form. Maybe it starts with cheap tape and shame and ends with something that catches the light, even if it’s just barely.

If you were raised to believe God watches hemlines, you might enjoy what happens next. Modesty might have been next to godliness, but honestly? Comfort is divine. ◡̈

Reply, leave a comment, or forward this to someone who’s still untangling fashion from faith. Or don’t. You’ve survived worse choices.

Get full access to Cultivated at kristenhmcleod.substack.com/subscribe