#grappling with your faith and mental illness will do that to a bitch

[smalleevee]

I feel like a really good indicator of how I was doing mentally as a child was how much I loved the song Cassie by Flyleaf

[newmindoldsoul]

To my troubled lover..

It’s genuinely painful for me to look back at photos of us because what I once thought were amazing memories are now tainted by what I’ve come to learn the past few months. I had no clue certain things were going on behind closed doors with you and it makes me reconsider all of our time together..I feel like so much of it was a lie. I feel lied to. There was not a single time in our relationship at Cornell where you were faithful to me, whether it was on Snapchat, tinder or real life- you were cheating. You’ve spent more of our relationship cheating than not cheating. Just thinking about that fact has fucked me up. And I’m not trying to be a bitch.. it’s just genuinely something I think about all the time. I don’t think it’s wrong of me to reflect back and ruminate. Because we’re long distance, those past memories are all I have to hold on to. And most of those memories are ruined now. We can’t change the past and I’m not trying to hold these things against you, but I feel like you want to sweep it under a rug and forget it ever happened. And while I understand why you want to do that, it’s hard for me to just look the other way, especially since again, you’ve cheated and lied more than you’ve been faithful and honest. So yea, I struggle a lot with all this. I love you so much, I really do. But you deserve to know how I feel. I’m just being honest. I look back at our past and I’m embarrassed (and not just of you but also myself). I feel like I’ve been a really good girlfriend from the very start and though I’m not perfect, I feel like my good outweighs my bad. I feel like I’ve proved myself to be a good girlfriend consistently over our time together, even when we both know you didn’t deserve it. I look back in time and start to wonder, “was I really even happy?” Or was I just so naive and in love that I was blind to what you were doing. Deep down my intuition always told me something was up (as did MANY other people) but for the first time in my life, I really liked a guy. As a woman, I grapple with one day having to tell our kids how unconventional our start was. I wonder, the first couple years you spend together should be the “honeymoon years” right? If things were bad even during our “honeymoon phase”, how will things be when we’ve been married for five years? What about ten years? Your bad behaviors were consistent and patterned. I have so much faith in you and your spirit. I know you’re a good man and that some decisions you’ve made are functions of childhood issues and mental illness. But at what point is this undying support for you detrimental to my own peace of mind? You know I’d take a bullet for you and sacrifice so much of my self for your happiness. But is that healthy? Maybe love of this much passion and intensity can never be healthy. I’m not sure what the answer is but all I know is that I’ve been caused a great deal of pain. I know you didn’t mean to, but you did. And I find myself having to pick up the pieces little by little, day by day to put myself back together. Don’t get me wrong, I was cracked long before you came along. But then you shattered me and left me with so many broken pieces and no glue to help put me back together. On the other hand, I think, “you asked him to change Charlene and now that he has, you’re still not happy!”. You did change and I am so grateful you did. But don’t I deserve someone who didn’t need a year and a half to realize he didn’t want to lose me? Don’t I deserve someone who loved and respected me from the very beginning? But I try to remember that real love is selfless and patient. That even if you can’t love me the way I want you to, that doesn’t make you any less worthy of my love. If I love you, I should do it without expecting it in return. I’d just like to point out that for most of our relationship, that was the case- I gave everything and you gave nothing. So if you ever question my love for you, remember that I kept giving you so much of myself, even when I couldn’t spare myself the same luxury. This may sound harsh but..there was never an ulterior motive for loving you. I didn’t get any “perks” from it (despite what you may think). Rather, there were probably more significant downfalls than anything. It wasn’t fun being perceived as just another notch on your belt by the entire Ivy League. It wasn’t fun opening myself up to you and never getting it in return. It wasn’t fun hearing rumors and being pulled aside by peers about your reputation. I just wanted to love you and that was enough for me. I was adamant that you’d change and get better. So in my defense, all I will say is that you will never meet another woman like me. A woman who will break herself down to her absolute core, compromise her peace of mind, vulnerability, and intuition for a man who only recently started to catch up. No one can tell me that I don’t know what unadulterated love is..unadulterated love was, at most points in our relationship, the only thing that kept us together. So if you ever doubt me, remember this. There is this Mark Twain quote that always reminded me of you..”but who prays for Satan? Who, in 18 centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most.” Now I’m not likening you to Satan (you were never that bad), but the quote still applies. You may not like this, but I think you needed someone to “pray” for you. You needed someone to show you love even if you couldn’t show it yourself. I was always told growing up to love those the way they love you. But those that don’t know how are often those that need it most. I admit, it was presumptuous of me to assign myself that role. You didn’t ask me to sign up for this. But I always had a feeling we met at Level B on my 19th birthday for a reason. That’s why I never left. It’s why I never could leave even when I had every reason to. The love I have for you is unconditional and it will ALWAYS remain intact. All I ask is that you understand our past, how it has impacted me and promise me you’ll spend the rest of our lives together showing me that it was all worth it. You changed my life. You gave me a purpose. And THAT is love. I can’t even begin to explain it.. (Sorry for the awful syntax; these are just my first hand, honest thoughts)

[blueraith]

Less funny post, but:

These movies also heavily feature the Catholic Church. Same church I was raised in, don’t follow anymore with the exception of holidays with my family, and heavily resent.

I prefer not to think of it most days, and when I do, I joke about how bad of a Catholic I am. Very bad. The worst.

But these movies the Church is front and center in, and I find myself thinking about them and my relation to them. I used to be a far better Catholic. Not a perfect one. I did find myself stuck in between what I could see for myself and what faith meant to me. Faith is something I still grapple with. I suppose it means something different to everyone, but I’ve never been much of a faithful person. Why believe in something if you can’t prove it? I find comfort in things like numbers, statistics, and trends. It means that whatever it is I’m looking at has happened before, this was how it panned out, what people did, and how it ended. Rinse and repeat for a vast variety of subjects.

Faith, on the other hand, means believing in something that may not even be real. That no one has seen. That you just have to hope is real.

I’ve tried that before. I used to pray every night. As a kid it was about dumb stuff. That kid’s prayer one will see in movies a lot. Praying for a Christmas present. That my school bully wouldn’t mess with me the next day. Those were easy prayers to ‘answer.’ If such a thing was happening. People like to say God challenges you. Well, I’d like to think that I challenged God as a teenager. Because that was when my prayers started to get more serious.

My ADHD hit around the eighth grade. That was when I started to fall apart academically. I didn’t happen all at once nor did I completely collapse all in one moment, but between that time and the time I graduated, it was a rollercoaster of failure, developing mental illness, and constant, nightly prayers that desperately hoped for something to change. To get better. For an answer or even a goddamned hint as to why this kept happening. Why couldn’t I just do my homework? Why was I always overwhelmed to the point of feeling sick? Why couldn’t I get out of bed sometimes? Why did I feel this way? Why was I doing these things? Why?

I hate that question, because that was one I was asked by my parents, teachers, and administrators constantly. Why? I don’t know. That’s not an answer. I don’t know. Why not? How can you not know what’s wrong with you? I don’t know.

See, I pray to this guy every night, and nothing happens. I wake up to the same repeating nightmare over and over again. My parents call me a failure and eventually, I see myself as one too. Because I was smart enough for the grades they wanted. My teachers and administrators were so confused as to why a previous straight A student could just systematically collapse like this for seemingly no reason.

It was maddening. Oh. I remember sitting on the couch and getting absolutely roasted by my parents for an answer as to why I couldn’t just pass my classes. For hours. The stress eventually got to me, and I distinctly remember telling my dad I hated him in a fit of anger. Man. That was the last time he ever spanked me. It sucked.

And you know, I didn’t get answers until I was twenty-two years old. Long after I stopped praying. Long after I was out of the view of the adults who really should have noticed what was wrong. I went after answers on my own. Got a therapist, who suggested a psychiatrist, got evaluated, and suddenly, I do have a mental illness on top of a disorder. Oh, man. My mom used to ask mockingly if I had some kind of learning disorder.

“What do you have ADHD or something? Do you need medication?”

Why, yes, mother. Medication would have actually helped a hell of a lot.

Too bad nobody ever answered my fucking prayers and had anybody notice a god fucking thing and sent me to a mother fucking doctor to get this shit sorted out. I slipped through the cracks, and I will forever resent certain people for that. My parents for one. That bitch high school counselor I had, who I talked to regularly, who barely enjoyed her job, said trite things to me every meeting, and never did actually ask me any real questions.

So, science ended up saving the day. Soft science, perhaps, but a real science, nonetheless.

But that’s not the only thing that led to my resentment of the Catholic Church. Because, all of the above is really just the first sledgehammer sized hole knocked into my sense of faith as a whole. I didn’t become angry at the Church itself until I realized I might just be gay.

That was a tough one. First, I didn’t even know gay people was a thing until I got into junior high and heard kids joking, mockingly or course because I live in Texas, about them. Didn’t even know homosexuality as a concept. No wonder it took me until twenty fucking years old to realize what was up with me. Geez. Anyway, I eventually did realize that I was possibly gay, and then proceeded to have an existential crisis.

Because gay people aren’t hidden from you, aren’t renounced as a ‘lifestyle choice’ and ‘sin’, unless the purpose is to make you hate them. I mean, Catholics who believe this shit might say that ‘hate’ is a strong word, but that’s what they believe when you get right down to it. I’ve heard my grandparents enough times to know that. “Hate the sinner, not the sin” is a bullshit lie. They hate the sinner too.

I had a lot of beliefs that threatened to crush me. I tried to literally pray the gay away. And, like before, received no sign that I was even heard, let alone answered. It’s absolutely crushing to grow up religious, led to believe that someone’s always listening, that you can turn to this person if you can’t go to anyone else, and then when you absolutely need them:

Nothing fucking happens.

I mean, yeah, sure, I didn’t expect God himself to come down and solve my problems. But, if this religious stuff was to be believed, he was supposed to act through others. If God had heard me, I would have been noticed struggling in highschool. That didn’t happen. If God had heard me, I would have been able to find some kind of sexual feeling towards men. Neither of those things happened.

Turned to him. Twice. And was either ignored, or just wasn’t heard.

For a formerly religious person, this hurt a lot.

But what ended up being the final nail in the coffin was when I turned to the Church itself for answers.

When I realized that this gay concept wasn’t going to go away.

Well, if it wasn’t going away, if it was my new normal, then what did the Church expect me to do with it?

My mother has a catechism book. It’s thick, and heavy, and dry, and the pages are about as thin as an actual bible’s, and small printed. The index was a thing to behold. I looked up homosexuality in it.

And what I found was what finally made me angry. At all of it.

Because the Church believed that what I was going though was either a ‘trial of abstinence’ or a call to serve.

My choices were either to never act on any of my sexual or romantic feelings for the rest of my life.

Or become a nun.

I’d always struggled with the story of Job. That story seemed cruel to me. Excessively so. I mean, what kind of God just goes out and absolutely torments an innocent man, worse a man who believes in him with all his heart, just to get in a pissing contest with the devil? I mean, this is an all knowing, all powerful being. The devil basically told God, “Na-na, I bet I can get this guy to believe in me more than you! What are you gonna do about it, huh?”

And then God did his best to destroy this man, just to see if Job would still believe in him in the end.

The story, of course, ends with Job still believing in God, God gives him back everything he took (which includes the guy’s family for fuck’s sake) as if to say, “Psych! Just fucking with you, man! Tee-hee!”

You mean to tell me that God was so fucking insecure, that he spiritually, mentally, and emotionally tormented a human being to his breaking point, just to prove his superiority to the devil?

Fuck that.

That story was the only thing I could think of when I read that in the catechism. I didn’t want to be a trial or a test. My life was mine. I didn’t want to have my faith tested or some shit. I just wanted what everyone else got to have. The option to get married. Maybe have kids if I was so inclined. I don’t even know if I want that stuff, but the fact that some being whose never heard a goddamned thing I’ve ever asked of him just thought he could close the door on those options, without even so much as asking me, it stung. Worse than that, it was infuriating. It was the last straw, because it felt like my life was a joke to him.

I remember closing that book and going to bed.

The fiery resentment didn’t kick in till later when I processed all this over the course of a couple of years. When people tell me about ‘God’s plan’ and shit like that, I just feel it in my chest. That anger. They say that about all kinds of things. Gay people trying to abstain. People dying too young. All part of ‘God’s plan.’

It’s a shitty fucking plan if you ask me. I don’t want any part of it. I don’t find comfort in it. And I sure as hell don’t want to be told about it. Because if God has a plan that involved tormenting me to the point of potential suicide, then I was going to systematically go through every single thing I believed in and determine whether or not that belief needed to be changed. For my own mental health. If what I believed in made me hate myself, then it needed to be changed.

Religious or politically inclined, those beliefs were flipped seemingly over-night. (It took just over two years. Hardest fucking thing I’ve ever done. Changing your entire belief system is not easy and if I had to do it again, I’d do it with the help of a therapist because this shit was emotionally backbreaking.) My mother just doesn’t get it. She thinks all of this is because of her. That I became a ‘raging liberal’ overnight just to spite her.

No Mom, I became a ‘raging liberal’ because I didn’t want to kill myself over the toxic beliefs the Church uses on its members. Because God never answered my prayers. Because I didn’t want to be a living ‘trial’ and I sure as hell didn’t want to end up serving a nebulous being that put me in this situation in the first place. Become a fucking nun?! Are you serious? After the shit you’ve already put me through? No.

I’m sorry. This rant is particularly long, sad, and angry. I’m mostly making it because I’ve been reminded of it by the movies I’ve been watching, and because I know I’m going to actually be talking about these thoughts very soon. I’m sure my parents will bring up religion when I come out.

Hoo-man. I’m gonna have to come out twice in one conversation. Once for sexuality, and second for my less than stellar views on religion. I don’t know if I’m strictly atheist. I’d like to think that something’s out there. But I’m currently mad at that something. If it wants to talk to me or judge me, then it can do it when I fucking die. Clearly it doesn’t want to talk while I’m alive.