#edit: im reading back on those posts about my religion class I made

[determinedowl23]

im about to have the hypest theology class of my life im actually super excited

[melforbes]

seaglass blue annotations

hello! i just posted the last chapter and thought i’d put together some ~fun context~ for that fic. it got way way more attention than i ever expected and for something i feel i didn’t put that much effort into i think i did in the end put a lot of effort into it so i might as well talk about it and answer some potential questions.

my favorite book of all time is the sunlit night by rebecca dinerstein (yes, that one) and something i find really compelling about that book is how sparing the prose is, forcing the reader to fill in certain gaps, and i think having to fill in those gaps makes the book a really acquired taste with which either you love it or hate it and there’s not really an in-between

i also really adore how in that book the natural world backdrop comes to life, something i find really challenging to write. recently i even read into thin air, the book about the 1996 mount everest disaster, and even though the writing was superb, i still had to google what the hillary step was because i couldn’t picture it on my own. i don’t know how people write nature because to me it feels damn near impossible, but this sparing approach really worked, so i thought i might try it out. i tend to be longwinded (gestures vaguely at this post) and wanted to have certain parts of this be a lot smaller and more contained without negating impact. whether or not i made it work is anyone’s guess. definitely not my normal style, so to speak

based on the comments i’ve received i think this might be everyone’s favorite part. in my mind age of consent by new order was playing in the background. in pretty much every fic i have a scene like this one and all of them are based on the poem first base gold by rh*annon mcg*vin from her book branches (censored because she has a tumblr and i don’t want her seeing this haha)

i absolutely can’t do the poem justice by describing what it’s about, but the simplest, most basic interpretation of the poem is that there is no better place to kiss than right here, right now, because of the past. i really like that imagery and tend to use it a lot. she as a writer has been a big inspiration for me and if you’ve read my fic true minds i should add that the nonfiction inspiration for that was directly as a result of one of her youtube videos. i particularly love how the last paragraph (stanza? im not a poet) is one big run-on sentence that’s jovial and tongue-in-cheek and colloquial and straightforward. it feels triumphant in a quiet way to me and i love how it’s done. obviously my attempts at something similar are nowhere near as insightful, but still, the most basic image of this is that there is no better place to kiss, and that’s how i felt about the two of them finding pudding in the supermarket

this part is autobiographical; while writing this last year, i went through six months of intravenous drug treatment, a month and a half of which involved long days of doctor visits on every weekday. when you’re on stuff like that for a long time you end up with a central line for better access (potential plot hole in all of this: scully never had one) but for a month and a half i got poked almost every day and strangely enough it got harder over time. the first couple you never feel, but a week or two later you start flinching, and if the needle goes in the same vein each time, it hurts the more it gets prodded. i reached a point toward the end of the in-office visits in which i would bleed a lot every time i got poked, and i can’t watch anything like that happen to me so i was looking away each time, and when i felt that the nurse was done, i would look back over, and sometimes i would be looking down at a pool of blood that i hadn’t expected to see. it’s weird, you don’t actually feel yourself bleeding, i would’ve expected a hot bloody feeling but instead it felt like nothing. and when i say a pool i mean that it would drip down beneath my elbow, stain the sheet they’d put underneath, and i wouldn’t get all of it off until i showered. i didn’t necessarily find it scary, but it was surreal and kind of pulled me out of normalizing the experience i was having. for a very long time needing iv drugs was my greatest fear and i was surrounded by that then and fine, and then, there was blood all over my arm, and like, haha, this is actually not fine. you’d think something else would’ve been scarier, but it wasn’t. and now looking back at this paragraph i wish i’d edited it differently but hey that’s life

i’d never really understood the purpose of religion as a self-driven part of life until i took anatomy in college. i was raised catholic and though culturally i understand having a religion and being raised with one, i’ve never really reached for religion when i wanted answers, and i haven’t personally understood why that’s someone’s first option. and i know there’s been plenty of commentary on the hypocrisy of dana scully as a catholic who believes in science, yada yada yada, i think everyone has read all of that by now. but what struck me while learning anatomy is that there is a kind of neuron we don’t know the function of. there are four kinds of neurons, and one of them is still a mystery to us. and then, there’s all of these different parts of human bodies that exist in a certain perfect way, but why do they exist like that? to support life, yes, but why is it that we can make comparisons? why were irises not the same color? and we name valves of the heart after religious figures. we are so hell-bent on meaning that something literal will never be enough. and all of that made me think that dana scully has god to fill in what science won’t answer, at least not yet. and there’s definitely a bigger conversation about science as denial of indigenous cultures that i am nowhere near qualified to start. after taking those classes, i think i would be more shocked if she wasn’t religious. you can ignore pretty much all of the paragraph above but it was important to me that at some point in this fic she willingly conceded that she didn’t know what would happen and that she didn’t have answers. with illness, there is no logic, there’s no thinking your way out of it, and i think that would plague her for a long time. to me, she only would accept her death when she could say she had no idea what would happen, she has no answers, there’s nothing filling in her gaps anymore, and she’s comfortable with that. and i put all of that in a paragraph about my thoughts on god because it made sense to me. there are times that just feel like you’re in a movie and there’s no one else you can say caused them. it’s not enough to build belief on but it’s enough to bring a certain kind of wonder. also one time my parents insisted on watching stripes because it was so funny and when watching it none of us found it funny at all and my parents grimaced and were like what were we on that made that good back in the day so that’s in here now haha

and now, the biggest question: does she die at the end? when i came up with the idea for this fic, i knew the beginning and ending but not the middle, and i posted this as a smaller project (ie: chapters below 3,000 words) while illness made my bigger projects harder to work on and essentially flew by the seat of my pants the whole time. i wrote the last line a long long time ago and have always seen the ending as written as the concrete ending. when i started writing this, i never intended for there to be a definitive answer to whether or not she dies. i like premature endings (the ending of girls burn brighter comes to mind) and i think that this works better without saying whether or not she lives. and i also have a hard time with giving a definitive answer because this fic very much is about death and having her die would, of course, be traumatic, but showing her living instead i think ruins any takeaways people could have. i’ve never had cancer but as a chronically ill person i think i can speak to how you never actually win with illness; the best you can do is tie, and sometimes, no matter how much effort you put in, you “lose” anyway, you lose spectacularly, and all of your effort was for nothing. i wholeheartedly believe that humans can’t emotionally or logically process natural disasters or illness, hence why much of the talk about illness in this is from mulder’s perspective as he experiences her terminal illness secondhand; that way, he doesn’t need to (but still likely will) find logic or reason or meaning for death from a terminal illness, so his discoveries and his coping mechanisms aren’t as urgently needed. had i written a chapter that describes how she lives, i think that the discussion of death in this would be voided altogether. and i also don’t believe the ending would be much different whether she lives or dies; there’s still the need for death acceptance and talking about dying, whether or not she lives, and none of the story in this fic would have happened had the characters known she would live. the whole point is not knowing.

for a little while i toyed with writing an unofficial sequel of sorts in which i spelled out what i think happens after the ending, but after realizing that that would end up being longer than the original fic and would also have some massive plot holes, i decided against it. i do have my own version and i don’t want to share that version because i never really intended for my version to be some kind of genuine sequel in which every question gets answered and everything is wrapped up and happy ever after and whatnot. it was just where my brain wandered in the same way it wanders when i watch an open-ended movie. all of that to say, if you think she lives, then she lives. if you think she dies, then she dies. it’s your decision. i’d much rather you choose than me. i never marked this as “major character” death on ao3 because, well, she doesn’t die in this fic. whether or not she dies after the fic ends, that’s for you to decide. 

thank you for taking the time to read my writing. i never expected this to blow up (it blew up for me at least, for a while it was my most popular fic ever, with i think thousands more hits than anything else i’d written) and the response has been mind-boggling and wonderful. i don’t respond to comments often because it makes me feel like a pompous jerk (”thank you for enjoying this! i, too, enjoy this thing i have written! oh ho ho!” is how it sounds to me in my head, whereas when other writers respond to comments to me it just looks like thanks man have a good day, feel free to call me a weenie) but i’ve appreciated all of them very much. THANK YOU! i hope your new year is a Whole Lot Less Shit than 2020. i don’t plan on writing more msr because i don’t really have any ideas for them. thank you for making my last time special <3

[childofthetheoi]

my religious journey - hellenic polytheism

this is going to start when i started on the hp path because before that it was a MESS yall. but uuuuh here we go!

edit: uh holy shit this really got away from me - i’m really not kidding when i say i could write books about this stuff. there’s a tl;dr at the bottom

here’s an attention-grabbing summary: my path has had a LOT of bumps and pain and sadness but im in a really good place right now!

okay, so my hp path began when i was 16-17 ish (i’m 22 now). i was raised presbyterian and wasn’t personally christian, but i liked the idea of having something to believe in and help guide my life.

my high school years were some of the darkest of my life second only to freshman year of college, and i felt like i was floundering and needed an anchor. i started thinking about religion, but i just Wasn’t Christian, so that wasn’t a path for me. i had dabbled a little in general paganism, doing some things here and there, so i started turning my attention to the theistic forms of paganism. i followed a lot of people who were very open about their faith, and i think that really helped me feel comfortable with taking the first steps - i wasn’t weird for being pagan.

at first, i looked to the kemetism. i had a lot of interest in it as a kid, so i thought that was as good a place as any to start... but nothing ever really clicked for me. i felt pretty bummed about that, because i was just so desperate for SOMETHING (you’ll find this is a common theme here lmao). so i went back to being unsure, until i started to take a hard look at things that felt powerful to me and special. i’m someone who is incredibly drawn to the ocean and the night sky, but also fire in any form. so, i started looking into those things individually. i’m not really sure how, but i eventually ended up reading a bunch on hellenic polytheism - this is around age 17-18.

nothing still quite felt right that i was reading, but i really liked hekate. i started trying to reach out - i built an altar, made offerings, said prayers, the works. i now do think she was there with me, but i was so caught up on needing Big Signs and Religious Moments that i just discouraged myself when that didn’t happen. i stopped working with hekate at age 19 - i was upset, mostly with myself for my own perceived failures. i went back into sadness and desperation, and continued to read about hellenic polytheism and following blogs on tumblr about it. i was frankly jealous of everyone else, because they seemed to have these intense, special relationships with these deities. i think part of my downfall is that i am an extremely skeptical person - and i tend to be a bit dense and miss the little things. i had (and have, at times!) SO much doubt in me, and i just didn’t see the whole religion thing happening for me.

finally, at the end of 2017 (age 19) i met one of my best and most special friends sarah. i honestly don’t remember how i found out she was a hellenic polytheist, but i don’t think it was until 2018? anyway, i asked her a bunch of questions and was just generally excited to actually meet someone IN REAL LIFE who was pagan like me. she is... a very patient person, and answered any question i asked her (and still does - bless you) about her experiences.  something that sarah said off-handedly at one point really changed the game for me.

there’s no right way to do or experience religion. WHAT? i had lived my whole life thinking there was One Right Way to do everything, and she crumbled that impression with just one sentiment. i don’t think i’ve ever actually mentioned this to her - but it really opened me up to realizing that things may turn out right for me, and i’d find where i belong in religion.

i spent a lot of 2018 in a lot of pain and upset about not being able to figure out religion, and it all came down to new year’s. i had been talking for months about wanting to find my place, and a deity (or several) to worship and maybe even dedicate myself to. i told her about how much it hurt to feel like i was lost, searching for my anchor. she did a tarot reading for me about my path, and told me about where i was and where i was going. she told me she felt someone extremely excited to meet me, almost like they were outside a window - pointing and jumping in my direction, and going “I CHOOSE THEM! I WANT THEM!” this absolutely flabbergasted me. a deity, excited about meeting me? excited about having me in their followers? surely that couldn’t be right.

i took this experience to heart, and began trying to reach out and soul search about who could be reaching out. i hit a lot of brick walls, but i kept reminding myself that i was strong, and that it would happen with time if i just kept myself open.

and then it happened. i was in my room, doing a general prayer, basically just talking out loud about how badly i wanted to ‘meet’ this deity.  then hermes hit me like a brick wall. i feel like this is a universal experience for people who worship hermes, lmao.

i did a ton of research, started directing my prayers at hermes, and i realized that he was in every facet of my life. i felt him when i worked out, i felt him when i was in class, i felt him on the road, i felt him when i was at my lowest points. and, honestly? he really was excited to have me. i had someone on my side.

i’m not sure i can even begin to put how happy, overjoyed, satisfied, and peaceful i feel now that i have been working with hermes, worshipping him, loving him. his presence in my life is honestly one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and i cannot express how thankful i am for him.

TL;DR: i had an extremely bumpy path throughout my religious life, and when i stopped putting pressure on myself to be perfect, i finally came to the new beginning i was looking for.

if you’re curious about any part of my story, or want to know more about my worship with hermes, or even about random things like how i think my christian upbringing affects my current religious path - PLEASE send them my way! i would love nothing more than to share.

i may make another post soon about more specific things - the things i have experienced working with hermes, my particular relationship with him, my doubt, other things like that in various posts. i’d really like to share more in the future, because i know it’s important to me to try and help others religiously - i pray that my stories can help anyone like others have helped me.

i hope you enjoyed reading this, and maybe it brought some kind of new perspective to your worship or your path ♥