I don’t know exactly when I realized that being a preacher’s kid—“a PK”—was shaping me in ways I couldn’t put words to yet. Maybe it was the pressure to be “good” all the time, even when I was hurting. Maybe it was the way people treated our family like we belonged to the church before we belonged to each other. Maybe it was in the quiet moments, when I felt like I couldn’t tell the whole truth about what was happening at home—because too many people were watching, or too few were listening.
Being a PK wasn’t all bad. There were hymns I still find beautiful, Sundays when something felt almost sacred, people who meant well. But woven through it all was a constant tension: who I was allowed to be versus who I actually was.
There’s a kind of performance built into the role—smiling, staying quiet, keeping the faith even when the walls are crumbling. It didn’t leave a lot of space for doubt, for fear, for pain. And for some of us, it didn’t leave space to name the harm done behind closed doors.
I won’t make this about that harm—not fully. But I also won’t pretend it didn’t happen. Childhood trauma doesn’t disappear just because we learned to sing louder. And sometimes the systems that were supposed to protect us instead taught us how to stay silent.
What I’m writing here isn’t about blame. It’s about breaking open a conversation that’s too often closed off by fear, shame, or the pressure to “honor” what we came from. It’s about letting other PKs—and maybe just other human beings—know that if your story doesn’t match the glossy version people expect, you’re not alone. You’re not broken. You don’t have to carry all that silence forever.
I’m still wrestling with a lot of this. Faith, family, identity. But I think that’s okay. Maybe that’s even holy, in its own way.
This isn’t a redemption arc. It’s just my voice, speaking a truth I’ve carried too long in pieces. And if it helps someone else breathe a little deeper, then that’s more than enough.
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