Monday, February 10, 2014

We run things, things don't run we

So in case you've failed to read all the many, obvious words running all around and between and all over the other lines I'm writing, I've been quitting my odious job and getting other work and ranting about Woody Allen while negotiating what seemed poised to -- but won't -- become a full blown relapse of a number of emotional issues with which I struggle.

These issues are pretty tightly entwined with my understanding of God, and faith, mostly because of the circumstances through which I was introduced to both of those concepts. I've been having a lot of false starts for awhile now, trying to get back into a space where I can really say I believe in God, and have that mean anything other than words to me, and in which I also can breathe -- because, for me, in recent years, belief in God has been the first step in a kind of decompensation that ends with me acting and feeling as close to crazy-crazy, muttering and not sleeping and manic, as I get.

And if I am totally and completely honest, while I know that there have been other points in my life in which I have felt that a believe in God and a spiritual practice have been a positive element of human existence, right now I primarily associate both of those things with being mentally ill.

I get that this is what the kids call a #firstworldproblem. Terrible, terrible, terrible things happen in the world all the time. Much worse than any thing that has ever hurt me. And so I am reluctant to dwell on or even to completely articulate how incredibly angry I am at the people who educated me, who took what would have been a challenging set of circumstances through any lens -- precocious kid in a family that is both intensely loving and unfortunately rife with mental illness, abuse, poverty, and addiction -- and molded a brain and heart so bent towards their own destruction.


Cognitively Dissonant Youth Strategies 101:

  • Tell a child who has no real power to protect her body from intrusion that her value lies in keeping herself pure.
  • Tell her that when adults hurt her, the correct thing to do is to submit to it, because they know best and so she must be bad to not want them to do this to her.
  • Teach her that others come first, always, always: I recall clearly the day I learned that, should I have one hypothetical gun in my hand and the other pointed at me, I should let my hypothetical assailant take my life, so that he might have the opportunity to get to know Jesus. 
  • Teach her that injustice doesn't matter, because God is making another, better world. That nothing -- good or bad -- that happens here on earth can really matter "in light of eternity". Not accomplishing goals, not falling in love, not friendship -- certainly nothing as worldly and suspect as sex or art or going after the things you want. (See how much of her childlike enthusiasm for life remains after that particular indoctrination.)
  • But also! Make sure to include this bit of mindfuckery: anything at which you are failing, anyone whom you might be letting down -- those things matter infinitely. It doesn't matter that I finished college because only Jesus matters, but I can sure as hell feel ashamed that I did so in a body that's Fat, that proves how entitled I must feel, since clearly I didn't need all those calories that paved my way to a fully funded PhD program. (To just acknowledge that, at around a hundred twenty pounds, you actually are not fat would be vain, but feel free to berate yourself for your ongoing struggle to simultaneously despise your body and feed it exactly enough and no more).

I feel about religion right now the way I felt as a much younger adult, when I just couldn't be around certain people from my childhood who -- while their net effect on my life ultimately was positive -- had just made me too angry and damaged too much for me to choose their company. There are so many other things to do, things that I spent a long time thinking I had no right to experience when I wasn't yet "right with God": my job, my son, my body, my husband; movies, music, books, pajamas; food, games, jokes, writing.

And then there is the fact that an entire subculture exists that seems built on reinforcing this joyless, ugly, damaging way of life, on making sure that we wrench each element of a culture around a Savior who, they feel, they are called to proclaim by pointing out where you're fucking up. A subculture whose adherents:
  • when faced with people deeply in love and willing to take on the incredible challenge of committing to another human being for life, are mostly interested in the gender of those people, in their "spiritual compatibility", in whether or not they've yet had sex. 
  • are boycotting Girl Scouts,  an organization that has spent almost a century empowering girls, making their lives awesome, and teaching them skills, because they support reproductive health and fail to adequately discriminate against transgendered and lesbian women. 

Personally, I just need to sit a few rounds out entirely. I've spent the last six or seven Sundays  looking on line for churches to which I might go, meaning to go, asking my husband if I should go, feeling guilty because I didn't go. But right now, I'm too angry even to try a new approach, a new community, a new practice -- and I sure as hell need a moratorium on the various Christian blogs (liberal and evangelical) I've been reading in an effort to stay "plugged in" (ugh).

Basically, at some point, my mind turned on itself in such a way that I can graduate at the top of my class, twice, obtain a job I was too afraid to even dream of, and -- where a healthy person might feel happy and proud -- experience an anxiety attack instead, because I believe I do not deserve anything as secular and self-serving as happiness.  And the more I work on how I became this way and what I need to do to change -- the further back I go, looking for a version of me that didn't feel compelled to hate and attack herself at every turn -- the more I encounter the same voices, the same verses, compelling me to overlook and disparage and rip apart everything good I have and am in an effort to stay humble, to keep my eyes on Jesus, to be not of this world.

I think there are diverse ways of experiencing God, but the ones that are best represented right now -- the Phil Robertsons and Bill O'Reillys and Mark Driscolls and Ken Hams -- would tell you only they are doing it right. And to me, what they are doing is hideous. The idea that anyone, however privileged they might be otherwise, would spent years feeling shitty and missing out because these guys said so, or their Sabbath School teachers said so, or their aunt or father-in-law or, God forbid, mom or dad said so -- well, what it lacks in genuine pathos, it makes up for in total pointlessness. Enough people are miserable for legit and unavoidable reasons. Why make someone miserable for no reason? For a God who might just as easily be totally fine with feeling proud of oneself or wanting to be the best or loving another man (or three)?

I didn't take these things so seriously before, but I look back on my life and I see an expanse of waste. It's not at all the whole story, and everyone has things they've lost or missed out on -- but a huge proportion of the unhappiness I have experienced in my life, I've experienced because of the things I was taught to believe about God. And it's those beliefs that show up and make me feel guilty and ashamed in those moments in which a non-God-fearing person would feel happiness. And right now -- because this still affects me daily, and the more unambiguously "abusive" experiences I have had no longer do -- I can understand why so many of the people I care for can just walk away from faith and feel no loss at all.

I don't think that's how this particular story ends, for me, but it's where I'm at today.




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