Why I Hate Indiana So Much

An Oddball Hoosier's Lament for a Cruel Culture of Conformity and a Life Derailed By It

Photo by Adam Bouse on Unsplash

So Sally and I have been back visiting family and friends in Indiana for almost a month now. And we’ll be staying for probably another month or so, heading back to our desert hideaway on the edge of the Mojave in early or mid January.

And it really can’t come soon enough for me. I don’t like it here. Since I moved to Los Angeles in 2010 for my first full-time editorial job I’ve only come back a handful of times and fewer and fewer as the years progressed.

There’s a reason for that: the lesson I learned loud and clear from growing up here is that the people and culture of this state simply do not value or respect people like me. I’m not wanted here so I left and have done as much as I can to try and not look back for over a decade, burying in the back of my skull the painful memories of being trapped here for so long. Here’s the story.

I am a native Hoosier, born in 1984 in Bloomington, Indiana, where my parents met while attending Indiana University, the college I long-anticipated going to someday. Then, in 1987, when I was 3 years old, we moved to Sunnyvale, California, in the Bay Area, just South of San Francisco and near Los Altos, where my father had grown up and my grandparents still lived at the time, often popping over for unannounced visits.

That’s where I experienced my childhood. From preschool through the start of fifth grade it was a wonderful time and place to grow up in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. I had plenty of friends, enjoyed school, and didn’t experience much bullying or harassment. West Valley Elementary School was also diverse - there were a lot of Latino, Asian, and East Indian kids - and the school did a pretty good job celebrating their different cultures and holidays. I still remember the Jewish girl in the class teaching us about Hanukkah and the time taken in class to eat latkes, spin the dreidel, and learn about her traditions. I remember Chinese New Year celebrations.

It was also in California when I made the decision early on - 3rd grade - about what I was going to do with my life. I wrote a fantasy short story and my parents and teacher praised me to the stars for it, making me realize that I could learn how to write the sorts of books that by that time I loved to read. In the years that followed my group of friends and I would love to write stories, draw comics, and imagine ourselves on the playground as our favorite superheroes from the Saturday morning cartoons. This was just normal, accepted, and broadly encouraged.

That all changed in the fall of 1994 as I was starting fifth grade, when my dad accepted a new job in Indianapolis and we moved to the wealthy suburb of Carmel on the north side of the city. While we looked for a home to buy in town we lived in an apartment complex on the west side of town and I started attending College Wood Elementary. And right from the start the bullying and ostracizing began. The other kids made abundantly clear that my interests in books, writing, and drawing made me “weird.” That’s not what they did in Indiana. They played football and basketball at recess. I soon came to see how basketball in particular was akin to a religion in the state of legendary coach Bobby Knight. Almost everyone was just obsessed.

I had played soccer in California and would continue to play that sport for a few more seasons in Indiana. But I knew early on that I was not a very competitive athlete. I was a mid-level player in soccer, hardly the worst on the team but never one of the stars. And I figured out real quick that basketball and football were not sports where I could particularly succeed either. I was too short for basketball and likewise not big and tough enough for football, which at fifth grade I’d never even learned how to play. It just didn’t seem fair to me as school progressed: guys bigger and taller than me would get lauded for their athletic prowess and be held up as great when they’d merely hit the genetic lottery in having a body which made them ideal to succeed in the sport.

There was something else different from California about Indiana too that I didn’t pick up on at the time but now I realize was critical: rather than a classroom filled with kids of all colors and cultures, in Carmel almost everyone was white and protestant. (Today in Carmel it’s over 80% white, compared to California today where it’s 35% white, with no ethnic group having a majority.) So how does that translate into practical terms for the kid on the playground? Growing up in California I don’t recall ever being teased about my “funny” last name. Why? Because most of the kids in the class had “funny” last names. It was normal to have a last name that may be difficult to spell and pronounce. But in Indiana being named “Swindle” became a perpetual curse. Almost every day I was being mocked and warned not to open a used car dealership or become a lawyer. As I got older my dad taught me the special value of the last name when we tried out a new dentist and the bastard couldn’t resist making a crack about it upon meeting us. “When someone makes fun of the name as soon as they meet you then that tells you right away that they’re a jerk,” my dad warned.

Well, it would turn out there would be a whole lot of jerks in Indiana. This was the state where Bobby Knight was a god after all. Being a jerk was celebrated as long as you could play ball.

But the pattern that I experienced in fifth grade would largely continue to play out over the course of junior high and then into high school. While the bullying was never as intense and as collective as in fifth grade, it would continue for years, sometimes punctuated by violence. For whatever reason, lodged in my memory today is a birthday party I attended in about 7th grade that I had to leave early because at one point I got pinned underneath a rug in the basement and half a dozen boys proceeded to do body slams on my head, leading to a concussion. I didn’t think too much of the incident at the time but now I wonder if it may have contributed to the mysterious, fairly frequent health problems and depressions I had in the years that followed. I do remember hearing a crack in my skull and being so afraid that I might die.

Because I did not have a strong community of friends through school or a sports team and my identity of “weird writer” kept me marginalized socially, I sought a peer group which could accept me elsewhere. In 6th grade I began attending our new church’s youth group.

Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash

At first youth group was just one activity among many I pursued for acceptance and friendship - I also started playing flute in the band that year too and tried another sport, baseball. But by 7th grade I thought I’d found my home and a new direction for my writing. On one of the many weekend “retreats,” an apologetics-laden case was presented to me that Jesus Christ had most definitely died on the cross for the sins of humanity and been resurrected - it was a supposedly provable historical event - and that everyone needed to believe in it and accept Jesus “as their Lord and Savior and commit themselves to the Kingdom of Mercy.” If you didn’t actively believe Jesus died for your sins then you didn’t get to go to heaven. As the youth minister explained, “there’s a great party going on in heaven but you have to RSVP for it.”

This was my first real exposure to “Evangelicalism.” And it blew my mind for years, making my “writer” identity secondary and setting me instead on the path of “Junior Billy Graham.” While I would continue writing my fantasy and adventure stories, now instead my writings to convert others to Christianity seemed way more important to me. These were the early days of the internet, with AOL CDs as common as coasters, and soon I launched one of my early websites, “A Young Christian’s View” where I sounded off on all sorts of cultural and religious topics with the AOL handle “DMS4Christ,” a formulation which my friends in the “young Christian sub-culture” soon imitated.

From seventh grade through the first half of my sophomore year in high school I thought I’d found my home in Indiana among my fellow “serious” Christians. There was church on Sunday mornings, youth group on Sunday evenings, Bible study on Thursdays, “Fellowship of Christian Athletes” before school, and regular retreats every few months at a nearby campground. There were Christian t-shirts to wear to school, “4 spiritual law” booklets to use for “witnessing” to other students about how they needed to be saved, and of course we had our own super-cool Christian rock music that didn’t have all those sinful ideas about sex.

All this was a particularly Midwestern phenomena of the time and broadly common around Indiana. It still is from what I understand.

But after a few years immersed in this world and its theology, I began to realize just how much I actually didn’t fit in here either, how I was still the “weird writer” who just saw things a bit differently than everyone else. At first my level of zealotry and “intensity” was welcome in the youth group - we were encouraged to be “on fire” for God and to try to be “Just Like Jesus” - as a popular Max Lucado book of the time encouraged - and I was vocal about doing that.

But after a few years I started to look around more and wonder just why it was that so few of my fellow young Christians and so few of the adults in the church and the youth group were as “on fire” as I was. I had embraced the Evangelical theology that in order to go to heaven one must consciously “accept Christ” and pray a special prayer saying so, or else one would spend eternity being tortured in hell. Now for most of the Christians in the youth group this was something to be excited about and sing happy songs about on Sundays. But me, being the writer who reads too much and thinks too much, I saw clearly from that young age the dark, scary side of this belief system: if one must pray that prayer to go to heaven then that meant that most people on earth now and throughout history were going to hell or already in hell. Even among most self-proclaiming Christians, if they didn’t take the theology seriously and pray that prayer, then it would be eternity in hell for them too. I knew full well at that time that the number of Christians who embraced Evangelicalism was not at all a majority of Christians. I knew that most of the kids in my classes might claim to believe in God and go to church every now and then but they hadn’t actually “accepted Christ as their savior” to escape eternity in hell.

Photo by Ybrayym Esenov on Unsplash

I saw it in these stark terms: most of the world was infected with the disease of sin which would cause them to experience an eternity of torture when they died, but we Evangelicals had an infinite supply of the vaccine, we just had to persuade everyone to embrace taking it. So given the global pandemic of sin engulfing the world, how come so few Christians were doing meaningful work to try and convert people? If we all supposedly believed this, how could so many Christians I went to church with every week just ignore it? How could they just go to church each Sunday, drink the coffee, eat the donuts, and then go live their comfortable lives working 9-5 every week?

I read clearly in my Bible - the same one that is now the logo of this Substack - that Jesus called us to “pick up our own cross” and to give away all our wealth to the poor. I was planning to go to seminary after high school and then after that to live a life like Jesus - roving around in poverty preaching the gospel, trying to save as many souls as possible. The great comfort and wealth of Carmel just seemed to be starkly at odds with all the churches that were on every corner of the community. Jesus wasn’t calling us to eat junk food and play basketball in the church gymnasium - he was calling on us to be just like Him and to suffer for Him.

It was in my sophomore year - when I had one of my mysterious illnesses that caused me to have strange balancing problems - when I first started to really question all this. I remember one of my good youth group friends, Jacob, calling and telling me about a question he’d gotten while leading the junior high Bible study that he just couldn’t figure out how to answer. One of the younger girls in the group’s grandmother had just died and she was Jewish. Did that mean she was now in hell forever? My friend had a real hard time telling this girl, “Yes, sorry, granny is being tortured forever in burning fire by demons and when you get to heaven when you die you won’t get to see her again ever.” That planted the seeds of doubt which soon bloomed into deep, uncomfortable questions.

I began to think how strange the idea was that God would throw a party in heaven and then exclude people for not RSVPing for it. The story of the prodigal son certainly seemed to contradict that notion. As did the parable of the lost sheep. “Well,” I began to think, “if Jesus died on the cross for all of humanity’s sins, why is it so important that one ‘accept it’ in order to take advantage of it?” By now I’d come to understand pretty clearly that there were many different ways to interpret scripture, numerous different Christian theologies, and it was overwhelmingly difficult to figure out for sure what the “right” interpretation of anything was. Had I been wasting my time and energy all these years worrying about saving people? Was I wrong to be afraid that if my agnostic feminist mother - who once told me the Bible was just a book written by old men to oppress women - was in a random car accident she’d be tortured forever? Was I wrong to worry about our close Jewish family friends I’d known and loved since childhood being damned? Had I been duped for years?

I began to broach these questions with our youth minister who had been responsible for converting me to Evangelicalism and keeping my “fire for God” burning bright for years. And as one might expect, he was not pleased at all that one of his star youth group leaders was having doubts. To try and get me back in the right place theologically he drafted together a packet of verses drawn from the Gospel of John with bolds and underlines of the important parts which he believed more than proved his idea that only those who accepted Jesus would go to heaven. But it wasn’t the verses which infuriated me, it was the little metaphor he’d crafted on the page introducing his collection. It’s carved into my memory at this point: “Over the summer there were several accidental shootings. In each case the person didn’t think the gun was loaded, but nevertheless, people were shot.” In other words, by me questioning his teachings I was playing with a loaded gun, and my carelessness could end up sending people to hell by leading them astray.

Photo by Arnav Singhal on Unsplash

As one who had spent years trying to save people from hell, now my innocent questioning was inspiring the accusation that it would be my fault if people who listened to me ended up in hell. I was enraged. And it began a series of doubting and questioning about everything - the church, the youth group, the youth minister, and what exactly I was going to do with my life. For months I didn’t engage further with the youth minister about this and started going to youth group less. He could tell I was drifting away but I didn’t want to argue with him again about it.

Eventually I did what I’d learned how to do, what I’m doing right now: I wrote to try and sort out my thoughts and feelings on everything. I drafted an angry teenage essay which I titled “Sick of Christianity, Still in Love with Christ” which aggressively attacked both Evangelical theology and my youth minister personally for indoctrinating me into it. I even *gasp* dared to write the word “fuck” to express my anger. I shared it amongst my youth group friends to get their take but most of them just didn’t want to talk about it or understand why I was so upset.

Eventually, my father encouraged me that I needed to talk with the youth minister about this and that I should send him my essay, which I did, causing controversy to ensue both within the youth group and the larger church. My mom didn’t want to go to church after that, she was so embarrassed by me. And I didn’t want to go to youth group anymore. During my junior year the following fall I started going to the adult Bible study Discipline 1 instead where I came to realize the Bible was way more complex than I’d been led to believe as a young Evangelical. It wasn’t at all some easy package with each piece supporting the other. It was loaded with difficult-to-interpret passages, contradictions, and hard-to-understand ideas which people had argued about for centuries.

But things were never the same with my old youth group friends. I was no longer a welcome member in the group and none of them wanted to talk with me about my controversial essay. None of them were interested in reading the follow-up writings I did trying to explain my evolving thinking. No, they just wanted to keep going to play basketball, eat junk food, and sing their happy songs about being saved.

I see my multi-year experience in the “young Christian subculture” and my exit from the church in the context of Indiana and midwestern culture writ large: people here simply do not want to have difficult conversations or meaningfully confront controversy. If you stick out in any way and fail to conform to the dictates of the herd, you aren’t wanted or valued.

So I was alone again, without a community. I simply threw myself back into my writing, focusing on novels and my stories for the high school newspaper which were mostly movie reviews. By senior year I’d stumbled onto another community where I felt at home finally, one of genuine outsiders. I started working at the 3-screen arthouse movie theater called Castleton Arts on the north side of Indianapolis. Everyone there was an oddball like me and enjoyed quirky movies and strange writings and provocative political ideas. (It’s since been bulldozed and replaced with a storage unit once a larger Landmark art theater opened down the street a few miles.)

But by then the damage had been done. Not long after I started working at the arthouse as my senior year began in the fall of 2001, I fell into a deep depression. I was overwhelmed by suicidal ideation and began carving into my arms with a razor blade. Many school days I’d get to come home early just by saying I was depressed. Of course by senior year it didn’t really matter. I knew in early September that I was already accepted to Ball State University, up the road an hour away in Muncie, where I’d attended journalism workshops the previous summers. School was now an even bigger joke than it had been all these years before.

At the time, my depression was explained to me as a result of me supposedly having Bipolar 2 and the chemicals in my brain just being “imbalanced,” something that could be fixed with the right medication. And we eventually found a combination of drugs which seemed to calm me down, but the suicidal ideation never really went away. I’ve still continued to live with suicidal imagery and feelings - most often a knife stabbing into my chest - for over 20 years.

And as the years went on I gradually started to question if Bipolar 2 was really why I was so suicidal all the time. By 2010, living in California again now and working for a provocative political activist, I had come to the conclusion that I had been misdiagnosed. As I read through all the requirements for Bipolar 2 it was clear to me that I didn’t have all the symptoms, and I came to realize that all sorts of ailments - including being hit really hard in the head - could cause someone to be suicidal. Over the last year and a half I’ve now had two psychiatrists both tell me that Bipolar 2 isn't what was wrong with me. One said that was just a “catch-all diagnosis” popular 20 years ago. The other, my current psychiatrist, said that my lack of prolonged manic episodes confirmed that such a diagnosis didn’t fit me.

So what the hell is the matter with me and what does it have to do with why I hate Indiana so much? The PTSD which I’ve struggled with since the violent assaults I experienced in September 2021 have given me greater clarity about what I was experiencing growing up in Indiana where I was made to feel like an unwanted, unattractive, “weird” outsider. Why did I hate myself so much that I wanted to die? And why have I never fully recovered? Because during my formative years it was beaten into me at every level that I was not good enough, that people didn’t want to hear what I had to say, they didn’t want to understand why I was upset, that I was “weird.”

In this state so obsessed with basketball games, fast indy cars, and stupid college sports rivalries, actual meaningful talk about serious problems just cannot take place. Start to rock the boat too much — or get sick with a potentially lethal mental health problem — and people just block you out, ignore you, and dismiss you as “weird.”

So at this point my position is pretty simple: fuck Indiana, fuck the Midwest, and fuck all the close-minded, bigoted, basketball-obsessed “Hoosiers” who made me miserable for years as I had to grow up in this cornfield-infested hellhole. This place sucks.

I’m ready to get back to my patch of peace out in the desert.