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Lying on a large grassy space at nighttime while staring at the sky is just so wonderful. Like I'm seeing these pretty stars, that beautiful moon. I'm just so inconsequential and I honestly love that! In a universe so vast we can't even begin to comprehend it it's nice to know that someone's opinion of me and what I do with my body doesn't actually matter. And after being in a space my whole life where I 'matter infinitely' and so I need to act accordingly, it's such a breath of fresh air.

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saw that stupid 'god is a beekeeper and you are a bee complaining that the beekeeper isn't real because he isn't helping you out with your relationship with another bee' post and I know it's simply not that serious and I'm not going to jump on it to complain but I would just like to point out that a bee does in fact have a good reason to believe in the beekeeper. it can see her and feel her and crawl around on her arms every time she comes out to harvest the honey. like the beekeeper is present in a bee's life when a bee lives in a beehive, in a way she demonstrably would not be if the bee lived in, oh, I don't know, a hollow tree or something that grew by itself and wasn't tended to by another, greater intelligence.

also like, you can have a deist watchmaker-god understanding of the world and that's fine I'm not stopping you, but even if you're right that does still mean that my church, which taught belief in a personal, all-loving, intimately-involved deity, was very wrong about a lot of stuff.

but anyway that post was mostly about a dog in a propeller hat so I absolutely cannot reblog it and take myself seriously so I'm just gonna grumble in my own little pocket of the internet

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Some Things I Didn’t Realize Were Complex Trauma Symptoms

I don’t usually post personal shit but my friend and I were talking and there were some things she didn’t know were PTSD related, and sometimes it’s just so weird and out there so. Some stuff I learned too late were caused by trauma:

- Nightmares that have *nothing* to do with your trauma

- Getting angry at anything that startles you/is loud/is irriatating

- Becoming alarmingly calm in situations of crisis/chaos

- Shaking, just, all the time

- Needing very little sleep to function effectively

- Massive mood swings that often get mistaken for personality or mood disorders

- Feeling like there is a layer of dirt on you/that your skin is dirty and needing to get it off

- Believing you will die young and alone !! Big one!!

- Looking for reasons to cut people out of your life

- Needing things to be exactly as you like them to be – not necessarily clean/organized but just to be a specific way and be within your control, and getting angry when it is not *this one gets mistaken for OCD v often

- Preferring high stress/very busy lifestyles to keep occupied

- Needing compression/pressure (ie tight shoelaces, heavy coats and blankets, snug fitting hats, etc) to feel comfortable/safe

- Discomfort with silence

- Very sensitive to heat, smell, and lighting

- Ringing in ears!! I had no idea about this one tinnitus is not that uncommon for ptsd, even if there was no direct head trauma involved

- Physical numbness, often in arms & hands when a flashback or panic attack is about to start

- Derailing conversations when they are causing stress

- Sudden and unexplained onsets of just the most deep sense of melancholy (often accompanied by a lot of tears)

These are just the ones I know of from experience, if there are any others ppl know of and were surprised by pls add. But yea ptsd is not always flashbacks and panic attacks and avoiding triggers, it’s also just random small shit that effects how you exist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Some Things I Didn’t Realize Were Complex Trauma Symptoms

I don’t usually post personal shit but my friend and I were talking and there were some things she didn’t know were PTSD related, and sometimes it’s just so weird and out there so. Some stuff I learned too late were caused by trauma:

- Nightmares that have *nothing* to do with your trauma

- Getting angry at anything that startles you/is loud/is irriatating

- Becoming alarmingly calm in situations of crisis/chaos

- Shaking, just, all the time

- Needing very little sleep to function effectively

- Massive mood swings that often get mistaken for personality or mood disorders

- Feeling like there is a layer of dirt on you/that your skin is dirty and needing to get it off

- Believing you will die young and alone !! Big one!!

- Looking for reasons to cut people out of your life

- Needing things to be exactly as you like them to be – not necessarily clean/organized but just to be a specific way and be within your control, and getting angry when it is not *this one gets mistaken for OCD v often

- Preferring high stress/very busy lifestyles to keep occupied

- Needing compression/pressure (ie tight shoelaces, heavy coats and blankets, snug fitting hats, etc) to feel comfortable/safe

- Discomfort with silence

- Very sensitive to heat, smell, and lighting

- Ringing in ears!! I had no idea about this one tinnitus is not that uncommon for ptsd, even if there was no direct head trauma involved

- Physical numbness, often in arms & hands when a flashback or panic attack is about to start

- Derailing conversations when they are causing stress

- Sudden and unexplained onsets of just the most deep sense of melancholy (often accompanied by a lot of tears)

These are just the ones I know of from experience, if there are any others ppl know of and were surprised by pls add. But yea ptsd is not always flashbacks and panic attacks and avoiding triggers, it’s also just random small shit that effects how you exist ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Reminder:

No one who loves you will tell you, "Either you love me, or die!".

Much less, "Either you obey me, or I'm taking you into the basement and setting you on fire for all eternity!"

No one who loves you tells you, "You're so horrifically evil, you should feel lucky to have me!", or, "No one else will ever love you the way I do!", or, "You are WORTHLESS without me!"

Those are the actions and sayings of stalkers. It is CLASSIC abuser speech.

Yet, this is what the christian god is depicted as telling his worshippers.

And we're consistently told that this is 'perfect', 'loving', even 'divine' behavior that his followers should mimic in their own interpersonal relationships.

Pure nonsense!

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Going from a highly controlling and abusive religion to vehemently agnostic is like. I don't know what the fuck happens when we die. God may or may not be real but evolution definitely is. I would kiss evolution on the mouth. God can suck my @#$@%

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when we were studying the bible in literature class (so we have the context necessary for later works that reference the bible), i think we were at the book of jonah, and one of my classmates was studying the text very intently, and then looked up and earnestly said "professor, i don't understand the will of god"

the teacher was just like. well sadly i am a literature teacher and not a priest so i can't help you there. but if it helps, many people throughout history had the same problem.

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“Love my neighbour all I may, if I believe hell is real and also eternal I cannot love him as myself. My conviction that there is such a hell to which one of us might go while the other enters into the Kingdom of God means that I must be willing to abandon him — indeed, abandon everyone — to a fate of total misery while yet continuing to assume that, having done so, I shall be able to enjoy perfect eternal bliss. I must already proleptically, without the least hesitation or regret, have surrendered him to endless pain. I must — must — preserve a place in my heart, and that the deepest and most enduring part, where I have already turned away from him with a callous self-interest so vast as to be indistinguishable from utter malevolence.”

— David-Bentley Hart

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This has been said before better but the fact that to convince someone of christianity they must first be convinced that they are born evil is fucked up. Like its creating a problem just to sell a solution.

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I came out to my dad as bisexual at 14 and I was PANICKED because I had a crush on a guy in my Boy Scout troop and thought I was Going To Hell Forever and he was so kind and understanding of my distress, but he had NO idea what bisexuality was. He just said “yeah but you like girls too? This is normal. Everyone is like this.” And I love my dad and trust him with my life to this day and the idea that the concept of bisexuality had not occurred to him had not occurred to me so I put it off.

By 16 though I had a crush on like THREE boys. Three entire boys in my Boy Scout troop. I felt like my sin was slowly advancing, until like an untreated cancer it had become metastatic. I remember bawling my L’il limp-wristed sissy eyes out in his big rumbly truck on the way home from a scout meeting and him telling me that it was OK, that he still loved me if I was gay, but that he knew I wasn’t gay because I still had crushes on women and that meant I was straight. I didn’t quite know how to explain that those felt *~*different*~* and that I felt like I was losing a fight to evil inside me but I again felt comforted by his reassurances and his genuine fatherly love.

At 18 I was like “hey I’m realizing all my friends are going on missions. I don’t wanna do that. Idk how to say that and I don’t have a ‘good enough’ reason to not wanna go.” So I just put it off. Again, my parents were extremely supportive of the information I gave them (I blamed it on perpetually forgetting to start the paperwork.) and one day my mom texted me that she had done the paperwork for me! And that all I needed was to get a physical! So I did that (it was awkward af tbh, my hernia check was done by a trainee doctor and she spent like 3 minutes fishing around my inguinal canals before her attending rescued me) and was sent to Mexico City where I learned that in addition to dipshit himbos with strong hands and scruffy guys with artistic hearts I was REALLY into chubby Latin men with strong personalities who bullied me a little when I lived in Mexico.

I remember my first companion got annoyed with me during an argument and said we were just gonna wrestle and whoever won the wrestling match won the argument (I stg I am dead serious this happened.) I was like…SWEATING when he tore off his tie and threw his white button-down shirt onto the ground (I won btw, don’t ask me how).

I remember one of my companions with this really intense, almost manic energy telling me that he was gonna make sure I was safe in a new area I didn’t know very well. He cooked breakfast for me and we’d go shopping together on P-Days and in the mornings before breakfast he’d jog around and do pull-ups with his shirt off and I’d do anything but look at him because my face would break out in a sweat so intense he’d think I was crying and come over to see if I was OK and somehow make it worse. He let me play D&D with myself in the evenings even though it was against mission rules because he knew how lonely and stressed I was.

I remember one of my companions was a big chubby man with a loud voice and a great sense of humor. He was kind and direct when addressing conflicts with me, and always bragged about how he knew the secrets of women’s minds and it felt like he really did since it almost always boiled down to “Treat Them Like People and Love Them a Lot. Don’t Stop Being A Person For Them. Also Eat Them Out Sloppy Style.” Our P-Day activities sometimes felt like dates, and it seemed like he was more attentive to my emotional state than I was since he was always the first to suggest we slow down our Divinely Mandated, God-Ordained, Super Sacred Work and Wonder to get a snack or check out a Pawn Shop (I love Pawn Shops).

I remember another companion who asked me to bully him every time he did something against his goal of losing weight. It was like he gave me Carte Blanche to take out my crush on him by being a nuisance and I LOVED that. I remember having a breakdown one day after we’d spent the afternoon frantically cleaning our disgusting-barely-habitable mission house to make it look less vile that it was (not our fault imo?) and I started bawling and he pulled me into a hug and he smelled good and he told me he knew it wasn’t just the house and that I was mad at him for being a Huge Dickhead for about a week (true) and that he would work on it. (He’s also a huge chaser but that’s a separate thing.)

I remember one of my companions waking up early (and our schedule is already built for sleep deprivation) to make me a “birthday cake” from knock-off Nutella and bread. He used matches for candles and woke me up, lit the ‘candles,’ pulled them out, then smashed it in my face and took a bunch of pictures while I was still madrugada and disoriented as fuck. He had the same sense of humor as one of my HS crushes and I could push his buttons pretty easily which was so fun.

I came home from my mission and started back at BYU where I became actively and aggressively suicidal. I had a stalker the year I moved up there and my dad’s solution to that was to get me a gun. I know he wouldn’t have bought me a gun if he could have read my mind, but I had a loaded pistol under my bed during a trifecta faith/sexuality/gender crisis and that was not helpful. I remember that the day I decided to kill myself I figured I’d call the BYU CAPS and see if I could get into therapy because it felt like what I was “supposed to do” so I could check my suicide boxes. My therapist was the guy who’d helped me pick a major the year before and was this drop-dead gorgeous Hawaiian man who cried when I told him how I’d been feeling.

A few weeks into therapy I met another stunning man with soft eyes and a scruffy illegal-at-BYU beard he kept pushing his luck with. He was funny, kind, patient, married, and wouldn’t give me the time of day if he knew I was crushing on him. We were in my history of psych class, which was inarguably the worst psych class I have ever had, and we studied together for every assignment and test and I realized that my feelings for him and for all the men I’d already mentioned were in direct conflict with my faith and relationship with God. My already agonizing spiritual conflict became even more wretched and as a result of this plus some other tightly-packed experiences with Mormonisms bullshit, I left the church.

After leaving the church I decided to move back to AZ and transfer to ASU. My mom helped me get a dog since I think it had started to dawn on my family that my mental health was barely getting me through the day, and she knew that we both loved dogs. Madi made my last year at BYU livable while I got my shit together and transferred. In that last year, I went on a date with quite possibly the only semi-openly-out trans person on BYU campus. It was not a great date imo, I was not doing well, but the person I spoke with was fun and fascinating and talked to me about Gender Dysphoria and it really cemented my need to go. To leave and never come back to that fucking school.

I started at ASU a month after my last semester at BYU and within a very short time frame it felt like I was coming back together, like a puzzle magically putting itself together in an environment that wasn’t slowly draining that puzzle’s will to live.

On the 4th of July, the year I started at ASU, I saw a transition timeline photo of a gorgeous happy beautiful happy radiant happy woman and her former Mormon missionary self and I realized the light that was on in her eyes was the light that was off in mine. I looked into transitioning for 3 days, sleeping about 10 hours total during that time. I started talking to other trans people on Reddit (one of whom is now my beautiful fiancée @cintailed) and after about a month of making preparations to be disowned and kicked out, something I was not sure would happen but was ready to go through to Turn On The Lights, I came out to my family and it was amazing. I started HRT a month after that. I secretly dated some dorky guys for about a year while I applied to grad schools. I got into a great grad school for me and my needs. I got FFS. I did my trainings and classes. Me and my fiancée moved in together after some LDR shenanigans. We’ve lived together now for 4 years of basically marital bliss. We have a cat named Grandmother Esmeralda Weatherwax who bites the hell out of my feet about three times a day. My bi-cycle continues to be part of my life but now it’s not as scary. Baby gays in my life have started to look to me for advice. Idk how this all happened so fast. When the years, months, weeks, days, and hours seems to crawl by so slowly now they are rushing past me so fast it’s almost bewildering. Whereas before I felt like I was living on borrowed time, past my ‘expiration date,’ now it feels like I can Fucking Breathe. I’m training myself to slow down now and it feels worth it to Live In The Moment.

Idk why I wrote this. Idk why these thoughts only seem to come up on Sundays when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation. Idk why I’m crying rn or why I feel so happy. I’m gonna post this shit then get on with my dissertation I guess. Read more Terry Pratchett and give yourselves the time you need. Get a pet. Talk to someone. Re-examine the events that brought you here. Be gayer. Love y’all 💕

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i come bearing based edits 🫶🏼🌟

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Also feeling a certain kind of way right now about majoring in theology because like. I don't regret it, exactly, I really enjoyed it at the time, and I learned a lot that I wouldn't otherwise have had a chance to, and it was a vital step for me in being introduced to different ideas and digging my way out of conservative religious programming, and I love the people I met through my program and my degree has actually been really helpful in getting me into a career that I like

But I also feel like I wasted so much time and brainpower learning about made-up bullshit when I could have been studying astronomy, art, sociology, environmental science—you know, learning about how the world actually works!

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I feel like I'm constantly oscillating between feeling like, okay, religion is a part of culture, and the stories we tell as myths may not be strictly true, but they're a way of passing on certain cultural values and traditions, and even if I don't believe in the literal veracity of them anymore, I can still honor that part of my lived experiences and my family and my personal history and community and accept that other people are capable of having a more balanced relationship with it than I am

and on the other hand feeling utterly revolted and betrayed by my religious upbringing, and the people who taught me to believe in these things and the people who still remain, because how can you be a part of an organization that believes all of those things? can't you see you hurt me? can't you see the harm you're doing, the lives you're ruining in the name of an abusive god? and it's not even true

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Did you guys know there's nothing inherently wrong with selfish thoughts and desires and there's no such thing as thought crimes or thought sins and a balanced amount of selfishness is healthy and adaptive for living things to have and it's fine to act selfishly as long as you don't harm others