#the failure stakes you like the deepest knife

[boyharder]

ooo i’m curious about grit!

read here <-

grit issss.. like in the same vein as anguish upon reading the fics back, but grit owns a heavier guilt. my "haymitch struggling with religion" idea is one that is very recent, as i see him as a man who of course, believes in the philosophical and understands religion and why people are devout, and in a way his experiences stump him from believing in the idea of a higher power. how could someone plan your life in a way that inflicts such cruelty onto you? where's the divine nature in that? he had never really believed in prayers and repentance and forgiveness, but in the midst of his suffering (and his slow betterment,) there's a want to try and be saved and be gratified with the same sort of strong emotions towards god and religion that he's seen take a hold of the people he knows. he's lived his life a sinner to most, and by getting clean, he's trying to get clean of that idea too, in any possible way.

Alcohol was one of man's temptations; and maybe he could've been saved half the grievances had he smothered the lust that evoked from him at the simple hope of a drink.

more than anything, he regrets drinking, and not just because it may have severed his ties to god, (as if he cares, but still) but because it ruined him in a much worse sense than his trauma eventually.

If God had created humanity and folk for the sake of placing them in the annals of hellfire long before they could make it to the afterlife, then surely he was some sort of devil, instead. Especially if he was willing to watch and take lives as if they were simply pieces in a chess game. How different was he to such cruelty, if Haymitch had killed in the midsts of searing hell just to see what other people perceived as heaven?

he wars with himself over the hypothetical, and puts blame regarding his suffering towards a being or a figure that so many people had told him was kind, and was merciful. he doesn't find that in his experiences. it's betrayal to him.

Which is exactly why every bottle that he had stock-pilled on the way home from 13 were now long empty — not a single dreg of liquor could he possibly lick from the threads. But the sobriety had made him cruel; lethal in a white-hot way that made his usual cries of desired salvation into shrills of fury pounding against the walls like a hammer to the nail.

“desired salvation” shows that he's tried to be accepting and attempted to be open with his beliefs that had been stowed away and never really practiced, never something that had interested him before the pain, and the eventually “shrills of fury” are from his realization that its impossible to be saved by anyone but himself. to him, there is no god, and there will be no forgiveness of his sins from anyone but himself. he is completely alone and without an arm to rest on. hence why religion doesn't exist to him, even when he tries to turn to it in times of need. because it simply will never be there. he will never be touched by it, and he can never feel it after everything he's gone through.