I suppose nothing would horrify my mother—or my childhood church—more than seeing who I am now. While they were busy preaching about satanic panic in the ’80s and ’90s, they never imagined that the frightened little girl in their pews—the one they warned so often about demons and damnation—would one day grow up to be a 43-year-old woman, writing her very first blog post about deconstructing Christianity… by talking about Ozzy Osbourne.
Yes, that Ozzy. Prince of Darkness. Alleged bat-biter. The man they warned us about during youth group lock-ins and revival tent meetings, claiming that if you played his songs backward, you’d hear demonic messages—proof that Satan was actively hunting teenage souls through guitar riffs and eyeliner.
My mother is still alive—but she doesn’t know the real me. I’ve spent most of my life hiding who I am to keep the peace, to avoid the heartbreak of disappointing her, and maybe, to avoid the heartbreak of her rejecting me. The version of me she knew—the obedient daughter, the good Christian girl—that person never really had a chance to ask, “Who do I want to be?”
I was born in 1982 to a very Christian mother and a father who liked to drink a little too much and snort even more than he drank. My early life was marked by sharp contradictions—a home filled with both holy fear and domestic chaos. Alongside sermons about sin and salvation, I was exposed to shadows no child should know: addiction, abuse, and graphic images of violence and pornography that shattered the illusion of safety. It was a confusing, fractured world—one that shaped my fears, my questions, and ultimately, my journey away from faith as I knew it.
And now here I sit, well after midnight, clacking away on my keyboard—still processing the tears I shed earlier after confessing to the love of my life that the news of Ozzy’s passing hit me harder than I expected. I’m not trying to make his death about me—my heart aches for his family, for his fans, for those who grew up with his music. But my heart also aches for a different reason.
It aches for the version of me that never got to find out whether I liked his music at all.
I don’t have the nostalgia others speak of. I don’t know what it felt like to blast his records in a bedroom lit by lava lamps and rebellion. I never got the freedom to love—or reject—Ozzy on my own terms. That choice, like so many others, was stolen from me.
I was raised in a world that weaponized fear—fear of hell, of rebellion, of rock music, of anything that didn’t neatly align with their idea of righteousness. Ozzy wasn’t just a musician; he was the devil’s mouthpiece. To even say his name felt like invoking something dangerous. Forbidden.
But the real danger wasn’t Ozzy. It was the way they made me afraid of everything that might have helped me know myself.
This post isn’t really about Ozzy Osbourne—not entirely. It’s about the years I lost to fear. It’s about the life I was denied. It’s about the strange grief of mourning a man I never got to know, whose music I was told would damn me, and realizing that I was robbed of the chance to decide for myself.
Maybe this is what healing looks like—not just reclaiming the things I was denied, but finally permitting myself to be curious. To listen. To wonder what all the fuss was about.
I may never become a diehard fan of Ozzy Osbourne. But that’s not really the point. The point is, I finally get to decide for myself.
They spent decades trying to save me from music, from the world—armed with self-righteous indignation so thick they couldn’t even see the truth.
They didn’t need to save me from Ozzy Osbourne.
I needed to be saved from them.
