Thank you, Heidi. You are sooo appreciated. <3
I went for a run on my poor, broken Achilles. It helped. Then I started drawing again.
I've begun making more time for myself, and I've been feeling a little happier, much less ragged, as a result.
Still confused and frustrated with my work and angry at myself for skipping classes, but little steps are sometimes the best kind.
Disclaimer: This is not a rant against religion. This is my experience with religion, and how I feel as a consequence. I support and encourage those who decide to follow a religion to go for it – be happy, and believe what you wish. Same to those who do not wish to pursue religion.
Just be cautious of who you pursue it with.
” I found God on the corner of First in Amistad
Where the west was all but won
All alone
Smoking his last cigarette
I said ‘where you been?’
He said, ask anything
Where were you
When everything was falling apart?
All my days
Spent by the telephone
That never rang
And all I needed was a call
That never came
From the corner of First and Amistad”
I’ve always connected with this song, You Found Me, from the first time I heard it. The Fray so completely captures the helpless, angry feeling when you rely on something and it never comes, or comes too late. For me, that was a God.
I’ve been struggling for years, wondering if the Being I was raised to praise and believe in and place my heart, my soul,
my everything in was there for me. I read through my Bible again and again. I prayed and remembered not to swear and was kind to my neighbors and
got through shit because I was a little trooper – I was a child of God, and in Him, “nothing is impossible”.
But after that, after years of neglect and things a child should never go through, I began to shake off the daze. I realized what had been happening to me, that some of the leaders in my church, people I thought could be trusted, had known about and done nothing to fix.
It wasn’t just me suffering, either. It’s the whole world.
I have never, even to this day, been able to leave the religious community. My family are strong Christians. I go to a Christian school. My friends are religious, and strongly so. My teachers, my mentors, the people I look up to. I feel so isolated, the black sheep of the family. They’re ashamed of me, and as a result I feel ashamed of myself. They make me pretend to pray every morning in front of my siblings so that I don’t, and I quote, “corrupt them”. Does this mean I myself am corrupt?
I clearly remember that one day, the day I realized that, in other countries, children were being shot through the head for no reason, fighting another man’s war for him. In my country, families were being murdered. Forests cut down in man’s quest for self-extinction. People’s babies being driven into lakes and left to drown, thrown off bridges in a spouse’s petty revenge plot. Mothers and fathers who hate their children. Bloody fights and murder and sickness and rape. Manipulation and corruption, everywhere. That day broke me. Realising that what I had believed ‘normal’ was wrong. Realising that the God I believed was doing good in creating mankind was wrong, and later, the realization that He was never there at all, in my life anyway.
I’m so confused about so many things, and this is just one of them. Do I accuse a God, or deny His existence? And how can I deny His existence when I have no proof of anything? What if I’m wrong? And why,
why can’t I stop thinking??
And once again, there goes my little spiral.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.I don’t know.“Early morning
City breaks
I've been calling
For years and years and years and years
And you never left me no messages
You never send me no letters
You got some kind of nerve
Taking all I want
Lost and insecure
You found me, you found me
Lying on the floor
Where were you? Where were you?”