🚫 What it means to have grown up experiencing religious discrimination
Growing up with religious discrimination meant your family's faith was treated as something to hide, mock, or overcome, making you question whether your deepest beliefs and traditions had a place in the wider world.
You may have learned early that certain places and people weren't welcoming to your faith, creating an invisible map of where you could be authentic and where you needed to hide parts of yourself. Your survival depended on detecting subtle signs of prejudice and reading between the lines of what people really thought about your religion.
You may have developed a protective strategy of gravitating toward alternative spaces where your faith is celebrated rather than tolerated. But this ongoing discrimination means your hypervigilance never fully turns off—you're constantly scanning for signs that even safe people might betray or reject you once they discover your religious identity.