Reflection

I had an interesting conversation with myself this morning.

While doing my daily routine of reading various blogs and news articles using the Pulse app, I read an article about "rights of passage for twenty-somethings." One of the ones listed was "Finally being able to give up the whole 'God' thing and start actually living your life." I found that offensive, so I stopped reading and went to a different article. Similar remarks were made there, in a joking manner. So I switched blogs entirely, and there was an article called "Faith to Atheism in Five Easy Steps."

I gave up, did my Bible reading for the day, and went downstairs to clean the kitchen. I was trying to figure out why I was so bothered. I got to thinking about my cousin who's went from simple non-belief to verbally violent and abusive attacks against people that never did anything wrong against him, simply because he's reading that kinda stuff over and over again. The thing is, as a firm believer and intelligent twenty-something that's made a study of scripture and science alike, I find that I disagree with religions that teach things that aren't in the Bible at all as much as I disagree with people that profess non-belief as the only "intelligent" choice. But it's the latter group that actually makes me feel offended or angry.

 The former do, too. The morons that say "tornadoes hit Oklahoma and killed a bunch of people and children 'cause God needed more angels in heaven" and "If you don't pledge $500 a month to our church you're gonna burn in Hell forever" and so on. But generally speaking, I'm able to reconcile people at least trying to believe easier than those that attack the ideas as a whole.

Then I realized why it's so prevalent in my mind lately. Why it seems to be popping up everywhere I look. I live on the internet. And just like hypochondriacs, fanfic writers, perverts, and aspiring authors, the internet is a breeding ground for "militant atheists" or secular humanists or whatever you want to call them. People that would rather spend time trying to make people that express any sort of faith feel stupid, or use comment sections to equate belief in something larger than yourself with believing in fairies and unicorns. Trying to make others feel small.

They'll defend themselves, say that it's only fair since everywhere they turn, religion is being shoved down their throats. And maybe in some small communities it is. But overall, even in America, the world is becoming more secular by the day.

These sorts of people like to talk about hypocrisy among religions. They aren't wrong there. Whether it's Catholics paying off victims of abuse and quietly moving abusive priests a few states away, or Baptists preaching eternal damnation then going out and committing every sin they preach against, hypocrisy is just a facet of human nature. But militant atheists make these accusations as though they're above the same sort of hypocrisy.

Example. A person I know from the internet is an atheist. She talks often about how she's the only one in her family that is, but she's very firm on it. She's far from militant about it, but she does bring it up from time to time, and talks about how happy she is not to have to deal with anything regarding Christianity. Then every December, she celebrates Christmas.

(The validity of Christmas as an actual Christian celebration is itself not accurate, but that's not the point. It's considered to be very Christian.)

Now, some would say that they celebrate "for the family." Some would say that "It's not really just a Christian thing anymore." Whatever their excuse, despite this professed view of non-belief, and the militant stance they take on the subject as a whole, they still take part in what is widely considered to be a Christian holiday. That's hypocritical, and that's not how faith and belief work.

Then there's the fun "atheism isn't a belief, it's a practiced non-belief!" But according to the dictionary, atheism is "the doctrine or belief there is no God." And atheism is most definitely a faith-based belief. It has to be.

Faith is defined as "a belief that is not based on proof." I prefer how Paul put it in Hebrews. "Faith is the assured expectation of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld." Doesn't atheism require a substantial amount of faith? You have to believe in statistical improbabilities so large that they almost can't be expressed. You have to accept that at a certain point in every science, walls are hit where things just don't make sense. You have to accept that people that know things you don't are telling you the truth, no matter what political or financial pressures are put on them to publish their findings in a certain light. Unless you're going to devote your life to studying every branch of science and conducting every test yourself, you're going to have to put faith in men that lie, that cheat, that steal, that stretch the truth, that make mistakes.

I daresay it takes more faith to believe in man that is fallible than in God.

Still Sick of This

Now that I've slept, I thought I should come back to this. It's not my intent to use this blog as a journal for every crazy, self-centered, or otherwise narcissistic thought I have. It's just depression. But it feels like more sometimes. And those times, I feel like I should write about it to help...get it out. Maybe fight it. Make it go away. But it seems that writing about it just makes it more real. Harder to fight, harder to push through and ignore.

Today I'm wondering about how much I do it to myself. Nonna does that. She has some genuine problems, but she also craves the attention. If she hears about something or reads about something, then all of the sudden, she has every symptom. And some of them even show up. That's the power of the mind. Psychosomatic diseases. You're depressed, you're hurting mentally, so you start aching everywhere. You read a list of side-effects of a new medication you're nervous about taking, and suddenly you have all of the symptoms.

The mind is powerful. I've faced hard times before. I've faced stress, and pain, and loss. And all those times, through my faith and through my own force of will, I pulled myself up, and kept on going. Kept moving forward. I got over whatever it was, and found motivation, and reason, and discipline to keep me moving ahead.

Why can't I now? What's so wrong that when I dig down deep inside myself, to find that same quality, that same ability that used to come easily, that instead I find...nothing? No reserve. No motivation. No "shut up crying and get over it." I just find...nothing.

I still have faith. I still have knowledge. I still have desire. But putting those things to work is what's causing me so much trouble.

So how much am I doing to myself? How much is me just being a lazy bastard that doesn't want to do anything, so I'm making up all these reasons not to? How many of my problems are psychosomatic, or just plain psycho? People love me, people care about me, people worry about me. There are people that need my help. And when I see that, when I focus on that, some part of who I used to be comes through. I don't matter anymore, I want to help that person.

Like with momma the other day. She was upset and hurting and I wanted to help her. For an entire afternoon, I felt a bit like my old self. And when we were all sitting around talking and Nana started getting upset, I was there for her, and I felt a bit like my old self. Then I slept. The next day, I was still okay, I was still riding a bit of that...whatever it was. But by the end of the day, it was gone. I wanted to crawl into bed and hide under my blankets and not ever come out. That's still how I feel.

So what does that make me? Some sort of...thing that leeches off of other people's bad moods? That uses other people's hurt to forget my own? That's not right. That's almost terrible.

I don't know anymore. Maybe that's what bothers me the most. I've always had plans, ideas, understanding. There's so much that I don't know, that I'm not sure about, that I can't understand. Maybe that's why I can't get past these things. Because they're taking away that most fundamental part of myself that makes me who I am.

My creativity is starting to leave, too. The last three days, I haven't had hardly a creative thought in my mind. My desire and enjoyment of doing things I love to do is slipping away. I know that's a sign of a depressive episode. Maybe that's where I'm headed. Again.

Or maybe I'm just doing it to myself.

Sick of This

I am sick to death of this. It doesn't make any sense. It has no rhyme or reason. I'm not me, and I hate who I am now. I don't want to leave my house. I don't want to leave my freaking rooms. I can't stand the idea of being around and interacting with people. If I'm not sad all day, I'm angry. The smallest, stupidist, most insignificant things can either make me mad as hell or make me want to crawl in a hole and die.

I'm constantly apologizing. I feel like every bad thing that happens around me is my fault. I feel like when I'm around, I suck the air, the life out of everything. I hate myself, I feel sorry for myself, I hope for it all to change, to go back to the way I used to be.

My health is awful. I feel and look like this giant blob of grease and fat and sickness, and that adds to the feeling bad for being around and the general unhappy. Not to mention the not wanting to be around people. I take five pills a day now, three of which are supposed to help with the crazy. But they don't tell you that they don't always work. That sometimes they make things worse. That they aren't really a cure.

What happened? What did I do? What changed?

Common logic says that its not anything that I did. That it's beyond my control. But how many people deal with worse and get on just fine? What gives me the right to be sad because I'm sad? Because someone on the internet said something that hurt my feelings? When I have so much and so many have so little, what's so wrong with me that it's okay for me to be a perpetual mope?

Mom wants me to see a shrink. Should probably let him read this. No one else will.

New Beginnings

 Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker. - Arthur M. Jolly

Hello, again, world wide web. It's been a long time since I started trying to record my random thoughts online. It was always for my own enjoyment more than anything else. I have nothing very particularly important to say. I say a lot of things people don't agree with, or find unusual, or just don't think make any sense. But I like to write. Let me tell you, oh imagined readers, why.

When I was fifteen, I was in desperate need of an outlet. Many teenagers are, and that proper creative outlets can help many young people today is a topic for another post. I had tried taking up art. Drawing and I did not get along. We were mortal enemies. I was constantly afraid that the poor, mangled stick figures I managed to create would come off the page and strangle me for daring to doom them to such a dismal existence. But that was the key.

I've always loved to read. Depending on which relative you ask, I was either reading at age four, or was born with a book in my hands. My mother says four, so we'll go with that. I loved to read. As I got older, my skills developed rapidly. But the time I was in the first grade, I was reading at a middle school level. After I was pulled out of public school and started home schooling, I advanced further. At ten years old, I was reading at a senior high school level. When I went to take an evaluation at age fourteen to start a high school correspondence course, I caught a few mistakes in the testing program's grammar, and aced the reading, comprehension, and grammar tests faster than anyone else at that particular testing center.

I don't say these things to brag, but just to point out that reading was a big damn deal to me. It was an escape, a place where I could go to learn, to entertain, to see what other lives, feasible or fantastic, lay out there. But it never occurred to me to try writing as a creative outlet. Until I found a software program in a bargain bin at an office supply store. It promised to make anyone that loved to read a prolific writer. I got my dad to buy it, I installed it that night, and in two weeks time I had went through every single exercise it provided. I started keeping an idea journal, I started writing little things here and there, things that couldn't properly be called stories by anyone other than me and my loving and encouraging parents.

Back to the drawing. Reading had instilled in me a vast, powerful imagination. After time and practice, I was able to dream up worlds, people, concepts, locations, anything at all without much effort. Sure, when I was starting out, my ideas were simple, or heavily borrowed. But they were mine. I was creating. And that aspect of creating is what makes writing such a powerful thing to me.

Over the years, bad things have happened. Bad things happen to everyone. When you're young, you feel untouchable. The world is yours to command. There are no consequences, bad things never happen to you, everything is right and fine and perfect all the time. We're forced by time, by circumstance, by life to give up those ideas. We suffer loss. We encounter hardship. We realize things cost money, money doesn't just appear in the bank. People get sick. People die. Things happen every single day to every person you know that you have no control over.

But. The power to create? Takes that away. You can hide from the pain, from the hurt, from the bad things, in places that you make entirely on your own. With people that you make, that you control. It becomes something of a high, almost. Escaping into fantasies isn't always a good thing, necessarily. But when done right, with the right balance, creating becomes cathartic. It's a release, a pressure valve that lets you take everything you have pent up inside you and get rid of it. It can clear your mind, clear your conscience, help you sleep at night, give you hope and something to look forward to.

Music, art, cooking, cleaning, decorating, acting, organizing, writing, all let you create something, in one form or another. There are dozens of methods, of outlets, to let these creations happen. I've found a few. Games like City of Heroes (may it rest in peace) and The Secret World, MMORPGs, have the capacity for creation in a structured environment. Roleplay (RP) is a combination of writing and acting. It requires creation, motivation, and improvisational skills. Blogs are online journals, a place to record stories, ideas, random thoughts. Even social media has the potential to allow for the sharing of thoughts and ideas on levels unprecedented. Of course, it's rarely used for that, but that's another post entirely.

Why do I write, though? It's my release valve. When the world is pressing in on me, when I'm pressing in on myself, when I'm lost, when I'm hurt, when I'm afraid, I can slip into someone else in some other world. Escapism at it's best. But it's not hiding from problems, not all the time. It's an encouragement. A pick me up. A shot in the arm, a motivation. When I feel inspired, I am in control. When I feel in control, a bit of that childhood idea of invincibility comes back to me. There's no problem I can't face, nothing I can't handle. I'm me, and I'm awesome.

Welcome to my release valve.