#nobody invaded my boundaries to enforce this

[star-ocean-peahen]

I was watching one of those reddit reading videos (i'm pretty picky about the channels i watch for those because it's really easy to tip into misinformation and shock entertainment as opposed to the Tea and some reality checks) and I'm crying right now because I just read one about a kid whose family destroyed all their unicorn memorabilia because they thought it was "satanic", and when the mom came to her senses and tried getting the kid some unicorn trinkets along with an apology the kid just. stared apathetically and said they didn't want it anymore. and fuck, fake story or not, that's fucking real. the guilt and self-loathing and self-denial that comes with being told you're in danger of becoming evil if you love the wrong things or you love something too much is traumatizing. it's so hard to let yourself care about things after that, when you're supposed to weaponize your own joy against you.

for me that seeped into every decision i made. sometimes it just made me uncomfortable, other times i would punish myself for wanting food when i was hungry.

i watched the movie Big Hero Six once with some youth group friends, and after the movie i asked one of my friends what she thought of the movie. the first thing she said was "Um, I thought it was kind of heretical." she was referring to the credits song, which is titled "Immortals". the song is about feeling invincible when with a person you love. but it had the word immortals in it, so it would lure me away from God and ruin my life if I listened to it. (she did like the movie btw she wasn't being a jerk thats just how we were raised)

I loved that song. And I hated myself for loving it. Every time I watched the movie or heard it somewhere, I would fight a painful internal battle of the part of me that enjoyed the song and the part of me that was afraid of doom and annihilation.

I thought by not rejecting the "worldly" joys, i was rejecting God and the infinity of good things he represented, because I was just that stupid that I would pick a momentary joy over eternity. I believed I was choosing my own death by loving non-Christian things.

I don't really have a good end to this. I guess my point is that this kind of thing doesn't automatically seem so destructive, but it really can be.