"You're all fucking crazy."

Frances Farmer wrote this essay in 1931 at the age of 16. She went to high school here in Seattle. This essay won her a prize of $100 and was published by Scholastic.

Frances' Essay
...no one ever came to me and said "You're a fool. There isn't such a thing as God...someone's just been stuffing you." I don't think it was murder. I think God just died of old age and when I realized that He wasn't anymore, it didn't shock me. Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories -- about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful, but I didn't believe them. It was too vague. God was something different though. He was something real. Something I could feel. But there were only certain times I could feel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night, having scrubbed my knuckles and fingernails and teeth, and talk to God. I'm clean now. I've never been this clean. And I'd never been cleaner. And somehow it was God. I wasn't sure that it was. Just something cool and dark and clean. That wasn't religion though. There was too much that was physical about it. After a time, even at night, the feeling of God did not last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said God sees even the smallest sparrow fall and that he watches over all of his children. But if God were a father with children, then that cleanness I had been feeling wasn't God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think I am clean...I am sleepy. And I went to sleep. It didn't keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn't there. Sometimes I found him useful to remember. Especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house breathless and panicky from searching, I could stop in the middle of the room and shut my eyes and say,"Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim." It usually worked. That satisfied me until I began to figure out that if God loved all of his children equally, then why did he bother with my blue hat, and let other people lose their mothers and fathers for always. I began to see that He didn't have much to do about people's hats or dying. They happened whether He wanted them to or not. And He stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. I was proud to have found the truth myself, without help from anyone. It puzzled me that others had not found out too. God was gone. Why couldn't they see it? It still puzzles me.