Good morning! It made me happy yesterday that some friends who I confided in and trusted to keep this blog anonymous looked at it and gave me their feedback. One friend was concerned and wanted to be supportive of me because she derived from my post that I was suffering from low self-esteem. I went back and looked at my writings and, indeed, I had focused on the negative more than just a little bit in the post. This surprised me because when I wrote it, I was actually feeling happy and optimistic about the future. So I decided to put up a new entry this morning addressing the things I forgot to include in the last post, or which were badly expressed. 🙂
In my last entry, I mention right upfront that I had reached “rock bottom.” I said this because I am, indeed, facing quite a few challenges. Due to my trauma I have experienced dissociation to some degree or another basically constantly for my whole life. Most of that time, I had no word for it and was even completely unaware that it wasn’t something that everyone in the world went through. However, it recently hit a point where I was no longer just “spacing out”/losing time, but I was also losing basic skills that I had long treasured. Like talking. Or literacy. Or eating a sandwich. Thankfully, I was and am under the care of a phenomenal doctor who explained that there is a machine called an fMRI which we had no access to because it is used exclusively for research studies and besides not too many of them exist and they’re far away, but he could tell me with no doubt whatsoever that if I got a scan in that machine, sections of my brain would have been “offline.” The dissociation was so extreme that I had no access to these lobes or whatever. There was nothing to be done; I couldn’t do anything to make it go away and neither could he. We just had to wait it out. And, happily, although the experience SUCKED, waiting worked and I am much less dissociated now. In other good news, when I dissociate, I don’t do things and then not remember them, as some people experience. I mostly just space out or lose time. However, since it has been just me and my pet turtle living alone together for some time, it’s not safe for me to have dissociation to this degree and almost entirely outside my control. Also a concern were my suicidal tendencies, which I had picked up at about nine years old. My mother never got me any help, she kept it from me that help existed, and she actually did and said things that made it massively worse, until I entered adulthood with “suicidal” as a major part of my identity. This, combined with my trying to go through life with both serious trauma and the belief that I was “blessed” and had had a wonderful life thus far, thrust me into some pretty low places. I fell apart after college and got increasingly suicidal with actual impulsive attempts of varying extremity through the years until things got REALLY bad shortly before this admission. All this seems bad except that I was extremely fortunate to end up at a great hospital where I AM FINALLY GETTING HELP. I can’t describe the frustration of being constantly cranked in and out of hospitals, only to be told after a opulent days or weeks that I was going to be discharged because I was back to “baseline” and the suicidality was just going to be “chronic.” I am so tremendously thankful to the doctor and social worker here, who have been very firm that my baseline for the past 10 years has been unacceptable. The relief of being believed is indescribable. The weight off my shoulders that a hospital cares, and is not just going to send me home to suffer is one of the best things I’ve ever felt. I wish I could go back and promise nine-year-old Me that this would happen, and just leave out that it would take over two decades.
A second thing is that some thought that I was using the word “apostate” as a pejorative. Indeed, for many years, I would have seen it that way, too. I used to write long, thought-out journal entries, trying to prove to myself that Christianity was the Truth. I read devoured all the books I could get on apologetics, and then write down all the inconsistencies I found and try to reconcile them. I even tried to talk to pastors and share my journal entries with them so they could tell me where I went wrong and why I kept coming up with the “wrong” conclusions that did not support Christianity. Unfortunately for me that was impossible because I was female and the only pastors I knew of that were around were male, and there were extremely strict rules in place in that subculture that a woman could not be alone with a man unless they were either related or married. (You know, any twenty-something girl searching for spiritual answers would be unable to resist seducing an unwitting pastor who sat down with her and gave her attention, right? Few things are as dangerous as those darn harlots masquerading as innocent spiritual seekers…) Through all that time, no piece of me believed that Christianity could actually be wrong; I was 100% sure that the problem was my failure to understand it. Finally, over a period of years, I came to see that maybe the problem was not with me. Maybe the problem was a mismatch between the ideology that had been lain out for me, and any ideology that I could be at peace with. Now, it gives me a tremendous amount of empowerment and pride to be able to say in no uncertain terms that I LIKE BEING AN APOSTATE. In fact, I love it! To me, it is the feeling of being able to pursue answers wherever they may may be found, the liberty to actually embrace intellectual honesty. Other people get this same feeling when they arrive at Christianity, and I rejoice for them. But no more than I rejoice for myself. I am my paternal grandmother’s granddaughter, and I never would have lasted as a Christian. If I had grown up in a Christian home that was happy and supportive, the only difference would have been that I would have been able to become an apostate without being rejected by my family. I consider myself an existential nomad because, like Neil deGrasse Tyson, I’m not afraid of learning new things out of concern that they will change my beliefs. Of course they will! And whatever I end up believing, I am fine with. I hope to have children someday and they will probably believe different things from me, and that will be great! I’m no longer navigating ultimate questions with specific answers that I’m compelled to reach. For me, my journey is much richer now that I no longer have a destination in mind, and I’m no longer afraid of getting “lost.”
Yes, there are certainly things at this juncture in my life that are painful. But I HAVE ABUNDANT HOPE FOR THE FUTURE. My life is not over. Just the opposite: I may be headed for long-term care, but it will not be permanent; the end goal will always be for me to be able to work, live independently, get my turtle back, have a family, use my skills, and be a fully productive member of society. Decades of pain largely stole my youth, but now my life is just beginning.
I know that there are other promising things going on right now, but I’ve been pulled many different directions since I sat down to write this this morning and I don’t want to sacrifice this post’s cohesion by continuing it much further. Suffice it to say, I FEEL LIKE I AM CURRENTLY GOING THROUGH A TIME OF SUBSTANTIAL POST-TRAUMATIC GROWTH and I know that things will not always be easy and progress is not linear, but when I put up entries involving my struggles, the context is an overall upward trajectory. I feel very thankful to the people who helped me remember to clarify that, and I will try not to leave it out of posts in the future!
