soflea

[soflea]

Adult Siblings

Nobody warned me about having siblings as an adult. We do not get angry at each other because we don't play fair. We get angry because we work at the same place and my brother won't defend me when I'm being sexually harassed.

My brother manipulates my mother by threatening suicide when he doesn't get what he wants. He only tells her he's depressed when he's not satisfied with his life. He blames her. He blames Dad. He's blamed me.

My other brother is an undiagnosed messed that won't leave his shitty job or move out. We have no idea how to talk to him.

I am a fresh adult unlike them. I am the youngest child. I work, grocery shop, go to school full time. I keep up with my doctors appointment and am settled into a good medication. I have hobbies. I have friends. I am able to go sober. I have been in therapy for 5 years.

I'm wondering if it's more painful to watch.

[soflea]

In my dream

               In my dream, I am standing across from myself, in my current form. She is young; looks to be about six or seven. She is dressed like a child. She stairs at me like I’m going to punish her. There is a freckle above her lip that I no longer have.

               I beg the child to stay still. She is obedient. My hands reach her skull and mold to it's shape. It's so soft. I feel as though, at this distance, a whisper could concuss her immediately.

               My fingers move her thin hair out of the way. I missed how light and soft my hair used to be with little to no work. Washed in a tub I shared with my brother. Rinsed with a plastic cup. My fingers begrudgingly slide through the hair, wishing I could pluck it and force it into my own head, until I’m touching scalp. I can feel my hands ache at the prospect of breaking flesh.

               I grit my teeth and I push my fingers. She is quiet, she closes her eyes and clenches her jaw along with me. I know she is telling herself to hold in the tears. I know she is waiting for her moment to run away and release them in private. My fingernails break the skin. She squirms a bit. I’m pushing past skin to the skull. She wets herself. I can feel the bone. She groans in pain. I’ve cracked it open.

               She attempts to catch her breath once I’ve removed my hands from her head, and she looks up at me knowingly. I feel that her obedience during such a violent act has the same train of thought behind my cruelty. She wants to see what’s inside her head so badly. She wants to watch her brain think.

               She bows as she allows me to remove the bits of skull and push my fingers underneath her brain, breaking flesh that protected it from being harmed like the forces of my knuckles, popping through bits of meat. I raised the brain from within her head and held it between the two of us. She begins to cry. I think she knows she can now. We are in this together.

               I want to cry with her.

My eyes are bloodshot and my jaw is locked.

               It’s there and we can face it and tear it apart and know what’s in the middle of it. We can ask it questions and hear the answers and beg it to leave us be. It’s objective and it’s real and it has nothing to do with any fears or pleasures or impulses. It’s squirming like an earth worm on the sidewalk.

I begin to squeeze it and feel its resistance. She raises a finger to feel the soft flesh. We both know it can’t hurt us now that it’s out. We both know we could easily destroy it. My head feels light and my motions feel intuitive. There are no thoughts but peace and no motions but the right ones.

I stand there and hold it forever. She stands there and stares until the end of time. I don’t hurt it. It doesn’t hurt me.

[soflea]

Am I Addicted to Smoking Weed?

I’ve analyzed nearly all of my substance use to completion by now. I never was addicted to nicotine, only craved it once, and dumped my last pack of Marlboro ultra lights in the trash while walking through the farmers market yesterday. I determined I’m not an alcoholic, but I could binge drink less because of the fifteen pounds I’ve put on recently. And I’m so addicted to caffeine, but that’s never going to change.

               That leaves weed; the thing I’ve come to worship in the past six months. I realized I was feeling some extra stress, having a hard time sleeping, and decided to get a cart. Big mistake. I went from smoking when I was feeling anxious, to smoking every night to fall asleep. Not technically a bad thing, but should I need a drug to be able to get a good night’s sleep?

               I wouldn’t say I’m addicted; I don’t need it all the time, it’s just nice when I go to sleep. But it makes me feel like a bum. It makes me brain dead at the end of the night, and I feel ashamed to admit to how much I use it, no matter how many disorders I can use to defend it. I’m already on Prozac, is that not enough? I felt true shame when I mentioned my nightly routine of smoking to the guy I like, and he responded, “every night???” My last cart has died, I’ll sleep without smoking tonight, and I’ll try to turn myself around this summer, but I’m not quitting.

               This got me thinking, though, why do I care so much about how other people perceive my substance usage? My friend who broke her two year straight-edge streak for some cigarettes and now smokes them “just to look cool” isn’t a loser to me, I think she does look cool when she smokes them. My brother that uses weed like a daily medication isn’t a loser to me, he struggles sometimes and needs something to keep him regulated. I don’t look down on my friend’s mom that likes a martini after work. I don’t judge the people that like drunk cigarettes during a night out. Why am I such an exception?

               It’s because of the same answer I come back to constantly; OCPD. I can’t escape it, it’s who I am. The people in my life that I love tell me I don’t have a problem. I choose to believe them. I think this fear has been reignited because the guy I’m into isn’t quite on the same level as me with drinking and smoking, but I shouldn’t change for him, right? Right?

[soflea]

What Even is Doing Nothing?

               I am physically incapable of doing “nothing”. But then again, what is nothing?                I’m not sure there’s many people out there that literally just sit and do nothing. They’re probably scrolling on their phone, reading, enjoying a meal, or at least getting entertainment from the taste of a drink while they sip it and stare at whatever is in front of them. I’ve always been someone that struggles to do “nothing”. I can’t follow my intuition, everything I do is laced with the concept of productivity. I think part of this can be attributed to being OCPD, but part of it is also this dopamine addiction we all have in modern society.

               It’s my first day being home from college, and I’m already losing it. I got up and tried to have a “productive morning routine”, made breakfast, and after I finished it, realized I had nothing to do. It’s 1:21 PM, and I’ve already eaten snacks, watched a show, scrolled through reels, read a book, played guitar, and did my makeup for fun. I’ve also considered going for a walk, painting, and writing, which I am doing now. Still, nothing feels like enough, and I’m stuck trying to figure out how I can be productive and enjoy my day off.

               I’ve been thinking about obsession with dopamine, and while it’s not exactly where this addiction to productivity comes from, it is a problem. Last night, I watched YouTube while hitting my weed pen and eating Takis, the poster child of dopamine addiction. I don’t plan on stopping any of these things, simply just doing them less, but it was funny to me in the moment the way I piled them all together. I struggled to just do one, just smoke and then sit there, or just watch YouTube without smoking, or do any of that without a snack to eat. I even went back downstairs when I finished two mini bags of chips to get another one; gluttonous beast! When I’m at school, it’s a lot easier. I can go to the library and work on an assignment, go to class, take a nap or scroll through my phone (because I’m desperate to do nothing at school), or hang out with my friends. Here, I am the only one at home, surrounded by things to do, and trying to figure out how I can enjoy myself. Maybe, I don’t need to always be enjoying myself?

               I’ve always hated boredom, I remember throwing myself onto the couch and shouting to my mom, “I’M SO BORED!”. Of course, that would result in her suggesting I do chores, and suddenly my boredom was cured, but even now that I do chores to try to entertain myself, I am terrified of boredom. If I try to go on my phone to cure the boredom, I feel guilty. If I snack to cure the boredom, I get mad because I’m trying to lose weight. A book can’t keep my attention. I don’t feel like going on a walk. If I get back from the walk, then what? Then what will I fill my time with?

               Typically, I write a blog post like this with the answer, but I have no answer to be honest. I remember what my therapist says, if you don’t have a job you need to complete that day, make your job rest and recovery, which would make sense right now because I just finished a year of college and have a cold, but no form of rest and recovery feels productive enough. Maybe I’m actually just addicted to productivity.

               I don’t have much of a goal with all this, just trying to get some thoughts out. I think I’m going to challenge it by taking off my makeup, laying in bed, and looking at my phone.

[soflea]

The Bad Kind of Weird Kid

               I’ve spent a good amount of my life laughing over how strange I was as a kid. It wasn’t until recently that I realized the sadness behind all of it.

               My parents were always being backed into a corner with questions by every teacher that encountered me and my brothers. For the oldest, they were angry about how long he kept his hair (because we attended catholic school for a good portion of our childhoods). For the middle child, they were concerned about his dramatic, over-excited behavior, often avoiding calling him obnoxious by replacing it with the word “enthusiastic”. For me, they came from a place of concern about my antisocial behaviors. I remember sitting at the edge of the playground, staring at all of the other children playing or racing each other, and my teacher sitting down next to me to ask if I was okay. I’m sure in her mind I felt left out and wanted some company, but I only found these interactions to be annoying. My parents just told them to leave me be, and they were right in doing that. If I wanted to make friends I would have, but I didn’t like other kids. I liked them in the way that their actions were thought provoking and entertaining, but I didn’t want to talk to them unless I was finding a way to gain some sort of higher ground. Oh, you like to draw? Look at my drawings, I’m far better than you. Oh, your parents say you’re a princess? They only say that because they love you. You still believe in Santa? He’s not real. I enjoyed the experience of setting myself above my classmates with my talent and intelligence and tearing them down in the process; I hated their whimsy.

               At home, I tore down my brother. He was intelligent and talented in some ways, I loved him more than anything else, but his drama and vast imagination was sometimes obnoxious to me. I grew impatient with his unrealistic view of the world as he floated through it carefree of what people thought. I would play pretend with him for a while but would eventually miss the order and control I had in my solitude, and would use my words to shut him down until he grew so impatient with my stubbornness and dominance that he broke down into tears and ran to my mom. I lacked empathy for that sort of reaction because I always felt I was in the right. Nowadays, we rarely encounter situations like that, but I often wonder where my anger came from.

               In the end, the person getting the harshest criticism was me. I didn’t actually believe other people were worthless and stupid, but I felt a sort of burning passion and wisdom inside of me that I felt like nobody understood. Everything was so deep, so intense. Everything had a hidden pattern that I could trace if I got enough silence to think about it. The conversations adults would share were full of pieces of knowledge I would drown the rest of the world out to get to. Any playground crush I could develop was a complete obsession created by a burning fire inside of me that longed for connection, until one day they were just like everybody else and I moved onto the next (this behavior never left). As I learned to drown out the voices around me, the voice within me grew, and while my consciousness created beautiful products and ideas, it ate away at me from the inside. I will forever be haunted by the memory of me, 6 years old, standing in front of the full-length mirror in my brother’s room. I stared at every detail on my face, analyzed my features closer than every before, and asked myself, “why am I uglier than the other kids my age?” The self-hatred was endless and only grew as I got older. My main coping mechanism for distress when I could fall asleep was to insult myself, because I got some sort of personal satisfaction from hearing phrases like, “you’re so stupid” and “why are you the way you are?”. I would do it until I got so tired from the mental strain of insecurity that I would fall asleep and start fresh in the morning. I considered myself to be a morning person for most of my life because there was no string of insults fresh in my mind to go off of. I could fall asleep and pretend I never said the things that I did in hopes they wouldn’t affect me.

               For a good amount of my childhood, I was homeschooled, or unschooled, and was surrounded by other weird kids. A lot of my friends were autistic and had been taken out of school because they were struggling or had behavioral issues. My brothers also clearly delt with their own neurodivergent behaviors and genetic disorders, so I only felt out of place when my symptoms and regulation tactics differed from theirs. I was surrounded by weird, and I felt at peace with it. If my extremely autistic best friend had had enough of hanging around me, they would ask me to leave so they could sit in bed and play on their DS, and I would say yes with no problem because it felt good to make them happy. It wasn’t until I started school again in middle school that I had to face judgment once again. I was weird, way weirder than anyone else I went to school with, and I confused the kids around me greatly.

             �� My charisma and ability to sell myself got me through middle school relatively smoothly (it was middle school, how good can it be), but I started dealing with anxiety and depression in high school that stacked on top of my personality disorder. At the time, I had no idea that I had a personality disorder, and my therapist refused to diagnosis me with OCD because I didn’t fit the stereotypes I was used to. So, I tried my best to get through it while getting treated for the wrong disorders, suffered through some terrible friendships, delt with far too many anxiously attached and traumatized boys, and changed my look and personality monthly in order to fit in with a new group so I didn’t feel alone. I never met anyone that I felt like understood me.

               So, I graduated, and now I’m in college and doing a little better. I’ve begun to embrace the experience of being mentally ill and neurodivergent, because I don’t have a choice. But that means I often have to revisit the feeling of being a lonely little kid that has to do weird things to be happy and lashes out when somebody touches her things. The fact that I’m medicated helps me now, it’s less likely that I’m going to act passively aggressive when the sound of my friend’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard, but it’s all still there. I have to spend so much of my time now trying to figure out what parts of me are masking my disorder and what parts of me are my disorder and what parts of me are just my personality although maybe my disorder is my personality???

 I’m just trying not to beat myself up about it, because in the end, I’m the only person that I’ve ever really had.

[soflea]

My Father was Courier New (3/18)

My father was Courier New. He was his dark blue hatchback, and the wax seal he coated it in on April days that weren’t full of rain. He was his handwriting, all capitals in straight lines, that I tried to steal but came out polluted by habitual lack of craftsmanship. He was his job, close enough to the Airforce base to give him a constant reminder of his youth, but far enough to act like he wasn’t trapped in the years he served. My father was dozens of different people, two of which I had met, but many that I heard of from stories by his mother’s mouth. He was the dad that came home at 5:30 every day, arriving while me and my brothers were still in our starchy Catholic uniforms. We would run to his embrace and shove our faces in the heat of his armpits, taking in the smell of Speed Stick, or maybe Old Spice. I never got old enough while he lived at home to take notice of his favorite brand, but I knew the smell when I walked through the hygiene aisles of a supermarket, or mimicked my affection for him on a boyfriend.

            My father’s face was one that I saw much less the older I got, but his name seemed to appear more. He was found in every conversation within my mother’s dark kitchen when my brothers and I all came home for a break. The green of the cabinets chipped away, contrasting so starkly to the photograph I recalled of him standing, washing the dishes. I couldn’t remember them being that green, but I could remember how he couldn’t stand watching any of us try and scrape away the remnants of his steak dinner off a pan. “Here, let me just do it”. I never saw a steak dinner after he left, our diets were plant-based and Mediterranean as my mother wished. My mother’s accounts of him began heartbroken yet forgiving after their divorce, promising us she had no ill feelings in her heart. As we grew, her words became harsher, until she admitted to a regret of choosing him to care for her children. I wondered if she had been holding her breath for years after their divorce, until she finally released and could exhale. That breath was hot, and me and my brothers stood watchfully, waiting to breathe it in.

            I sat in my therapist’s office, and I felt like there was cement in my throat, blocking words of resentment and grief, and preventing loud sobs that I had been holding in since there was a child monitor to pick them up. She was still trying to get to know me; she only had an idea of how my life and suffering operated in the context of my social life, my mind consistently blaming high school for the thought processes I fought with. She asked about him, unaware of his identity, unaware of how my eyes began to burn at the idea of how long it had been since I felt his touch in a genuine, loving way. I was unaware as well, and began to choke, unable to get my words out. The coughs turned into sobs; the sobs turned into unintelligible sentences. She translated them as trauma. I translated them as meaningless sounds, like the filling of silence that isn’t uncomfortable until you announce it is such. I did not hate my father. I told myself that again, out loud and in my mind. I did not hate my father. Perhaps I was so adamant about this point because I really loved him, or because I was scared I was becoming him. The idea made the crying harder. The crying caused a realization of how I really felt. I got home and admitted to my mother how I truly felt about him, like a doctor announcing a death in a waiting room. Her raised eyebrows felt like knees dropping to the ground. Her knowing stare felt like a painful relief.

            This realization caused a complete change in the way I went about my life. All of the things that my father was, that he used to be, I found echoed in my life as a constant reminder of my past. He was something I was leaving behind no matter how much I saw him. Driving away from his house felt like waking up from a dream about your childhood, the golden lenses not just falling away from your eyes but shattering as you were left to stare at reality once again. Every time I tried to write a song about him, or started a conversation about him, it felt like picking at a scab that had turned to a scar years ago, my nail scraping away at tender but unbreakable skin. I found myself being shocked at his presence and relieved by his absence. It was probably better if he wasn’t there, he had things to do, and his gaze would only get in the way of our productivity.

            This maturity left a gap in my soul. I knew he used to occupy so much of my life and now I had this space with nothing to do with. I avoided seeing him in friends and partners, I rid myself of every feature and trait that resembled him. I winced at every text message I saw from him and found myself choosing the most profane words I knew over “dad”. I tried to fill his gap with my brothers, with my mother’s boyfriend, with my teachers, and with my grandfather. I felt like I was half a human without his influence, that I would never feel the breadth of life that others felt when they got to experience what it was like to be raised by a whole person. I laugh at my ignorance now. That space was filled since I was born. By my mother, a woman who was not only a whole person, but one who found a way to split herself into two and fill the gap that he left so ignorantly.

            My mother was her home, solid and stinking of history and culture. She was the walls that were covered in art from people she loved, whether she met them or not. She was the trim on the homes of our neighbors; she would offer to paint them in exchange for a cold glass of water and a recipe for sour-dough bread. My mother was a beehive; she buzzed loudly in the back of the yard, basking in the daylight, hard at work to produce a sweetness we would get to enjoy when she was done with her work. My mother was a bowl, or a plate, or a mug, that she would serve grapefruit on; that she would teach me to plate food on when I learned to cook a meal. My mother was her old Toyota, still being driven by my brother, because what she takes care of never dies. She was a quiet walk in a familiar forest, she was the roaring of a waterfall in the distance. My mother was a red wing blackbird bobbing on a branch, knowing it wouldn’t break because her posture was so graceful. She was a downward dog; she was the sound of her feet hitting the ground upstairs. She was the smell of mint tea, and she was a handblown glass I broke while doing the dishes. She was a sound of anger but a side hug of affection. She was not who she loved, she was not what birthed her, she was not a product of where she grew up. My mother built herself like an empire that would never fall, and I felt lucky to even be a temporary structure within her walls.

            My mother was the smell of sweat, like green onions and salt from her raw diet. She came in from the backyard covered in grass stains in a t-shirt from a yoga retreat she went on fifteen years ago. She let out a sigh, and chugged a glass of water, her crooked teeth visible through the bottom of the cup. She put her hand on her side and popped her hip before announcing she was going to shower before she fell asleep on the radiator in the sun. I never got why she laid there, instead of her soft bed, but now I lay in the grass, basking in the heat of the sun. The heat was like her arms, placing freckles on my face just like she had. I lift my arm and turn my head to smell the scent of my earthy sweat, it smelled like her. My father smelled like the scent of anti-perspirant clogging his pores, preventing the flow of heat from within his body. My mother smelled like how it felt to let out a sob, cook a meal, plant a flower, and let out a hot and passionate breath.

[soflea]

Am I Mentally Incapable of Falling in Love?

            I would not say it’s incorrect to assume that many people’s greatest dream is to fall in love. Of course, there are career aspirations, dreams of travel, hopes of a certain level of knowledge or spiritual enlightenment, but I’ve found that many times people describe these achievements with someone by their side to support them and to help them through the trials and tribulations of passion and hope. Some people hope for many loves throughout their life, some for one life partner, some for a continuation of love in the form of a family. It makes me happy to know that humans have this instinct to love and be loved built into them. Except for me, I do not have that.

            My parents started thinking there was something wrong with me when I would cry before school every morning because of the way my socks felt on my feet. I would sob until my face was purple, every single morning, until we reached the same stop light on the drive there, and I would suddenly stop crying. My brothers would laugh, and my father would resist the urge to, as I silenced myself like clockwork every day. I sat there ashamed of my emotions, confused on why I was so upset, and sweat through my socks until every pair that I could bear to wear to school was stained. There were continuations of this behavior; my constant want to be better than my classmates that drove my passion for drawing, the meltdowns I would have if my mother went through the kind labor of cleaning my room and reorganizing my dolls, my constant impatience with my brother's fluidity and emotions, my refusal to follow any instructions even if they were made with the intention of helping me. They were all clear signs of some sort of anxiety or personality diagnosis, but it wasn’t until I was 18 that I was relieved of the confusion that many mentally ill people grow up with, “why am I the way that I am?”

            Originally, I was convinced that I had obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which was in fact true, along with my long-held diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which have worked together incredibly despite my best interest. However, after working with my therapist for a number of years, she revised my diagnosis to obsessive compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), and I felt a little more at ease with how I labeled myself. I didn’t check the stove a million times before I left the house, I didn’t flip a light switch so many times that I was late to work, and while I washed my hands more than the average person, it wasn’t enough that my skin was cracked and bleeding. I found that a majority of my obsessiveness had to do with an obsession with perfection, morality, control, and stubbornness, and a complete ignorance of how toxic of a person it had made me. Toxic might be a stretch, but I recognize that it could be my disorder causing me to feel that I am a bad person for the things it causes me to do.

            So, I started this post talking about love. It’s no secret that mental illness can often get in the way of intimate relationships; whether you act out more selfishly, anxiously, you are a more avoidant person, your sensory needs prevent you from being able to be intimate in some ways; it goes on. However, I think that there is always a person who is able to slither there way right into all of your cracks and deformities. Able to make themselves (as well as you) comfortable in all of the things that have made you uncomfortable your whole life. Maybe they still feel inconvenienced at times by the things that you have to do to be happy, but they look past those things because the power of love lets them. That is a beautiful thing, unconditional love. Loving the things about someone that make them hurt, so that maybe they can see them in a better light. I envy the people that have conditions that don’t get in the way of their love, but I do not see myself as so lucky. Despite there being a passionate, hopeless romantic inside of me, it’s drowning in a sea of selfishness and perfectionism that would take a lethal dose of Prozac to let me rise above. Sometimes it can be shadowed by an excitement at the start of a friendship or romantic relationship, I start to think I’ve finally got past it and lost my need to nitpick everything that they do, until I’ve spent enough time with them to look closely enough at the way they do things and realize I actually hate them just as much as I hate myself, and they should really spend more time perfecting the way they live.

            The fact that my stubbornness is not only a part of my personality, but a part of my mental illness, makes moving past it an impossible feat. I don’t always mind it; it makes me come off as confident, which is one of my illusions I like to use in order to attract attention and affection. But I am not willing to change unless I think it will get me closer to the perfect person I want to be. I’m not following your request because I want to make you feel better, I’m doing it because I’m pretty sure I’m on the road to being a saint after I solve these few puzzles inside of my brain. Everything I do is to fix myself and make my life more perfect, and its never ending, because nothing is perfect to me. As evil as it makes me feel to say it, this means that no partner or friend I have is perfect to me. The human in me is often able to break through just enough (with the help of THC and medication) to accept the things about my friends that make them imperfect, and even to love them. My perfectionism honestly targets the smaller, less important things rather than the grand flaws. Although, I find myself getting a bit too angry in conversations where they are working to better themselves, which I’m sure my equally anxious best friends can attest to. This has not been easy for me; it has taken years of work to be able to interact with people who live differently than me without being filled with rage about the decisions they’ve made. The kindness that is somewhere within my still mostly human brain has broken through the cracks of illness just enough to learn grace and acceptance, and I’ve learned to love people for who they are, for the most part. But unfortunately, romantic relationships do not get this same privilege.

            Perhaps because of experiences I’ve had in my childhood, I’ve come to see romantic relationships as extremely temporary. I can leave when things get frustrating or boring, or when I realize I’ve spent so much time focusing on how I can fix someone else that I’ve left myself a broken individual, or at least less perfect than I like to be. Friendships don’t get this same treatment, I’ve had lifelong friendships with my brothers and people from my childhood that remain despite all adversity, because I don’t see them as needing as much attention. But, in my experience with the romantic relationships I’ve had, which have all been with fairly anxiously attached people, it takes a lot more attention and energy. So far, I’ve been unable to find someone I liked enough to accept the fact that I would have to let go of control of myself and of them in order to be happy in the relationship and to get the best out of it. I simply am not willing to sacrifice my life-long, codependent relationship with my personality disorder.

            There was a period of time where I thought it would just take the right person, but that is wrong. I think a lot of people make the mistake of believing there is someone perfect out there for them that can solve all of their problems (as far as I’m concerned, that person is me in my current condition). After being in love and it falling through, I realized that it takes a person you love and enough dedication to move past my mental illness in order to make it work; I can’t rely on some sort of fairy-tale love story to repair the things that have been wrong with me since I was born. So now you’re probably waiting for the part where I say I’m ready to overcome my flaws and find love because it’s always been my dream, and I shouldn’t let my mental illness get in the way of my dream. You are wrong! I am my OCPD, I am not my dream. Unfortunately, no matter how badly I want to sit on a porch in rocking chairs watching the sunset with the love of my life, I will be nauseated by the way they sit in their chair and want to throw them off of the porch and never see them again. I have a dependent, anxiously attached relationship with my mental illness, and after five years of therapy and multiple trials with medication, I’ve decided I am going to choose myself, myself being the worst and most flawed version of me, and we are going to live happily ever after.

            So, if in the off chance you are romantically interested in me, I hope reading this has turned you away from it. I simply am too hung up on my first love.

[soflea]

Do I Believe In God?

Ah, religion! Something I loathe and love almost equally.

I've done so much contemplation about religion and the concept of God in my life. Mostly from the standpoint of Christianity, since it's dominance in religion is completely undeniable if you live in the United States. I've grown up around people who hate the concept of religion and rebel against the ideals they were raised around, and I've encountered people that have asked me the lovely question of "where will you be when the world ends and God takes back your soul?"

I've also allowed myself to be guilted by people who feel passionately about the teachings of the bible. I am often terrified by the idea that I am an inherently bad person who has inherently bad intentions for the people in my life; religion only increases this paranoia. Preachers generally disgust me, because while I understand wanting to help others feel the same comfort you have felt, there is only so much you can do before it becomes downright unethical.

However, I recently read the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and I started to question my beliefs about a higher being, or "God". Is anyone really immune to this idea? Was I bound to believe in it one way or another?

That's when I realized I do not have to sacrifice my general distaste towards religion to believe in something that could be considered a God. In my mind, God is the projection of the spirit throughout the universe. You have an energy within your heart that has a dream and a plan for you, and when you let that energy flow between you and the universe, it projects back to you in the form of awareness and omens. That is God; the projection of your own spirit and greater purpose.

So, if I believe in God and have an appreciation for it, why do I still hate religion? (Don't get me wrong though, I love religious art and iconography.) To me, religion is the fear of what God really is. It is not enough to trust yourself, because in your eyes, you are imperfect and bad. You've hurt yourself, you've hurt others, and it's impossible that the best thing in the world could possibly be a projection of yourself.

Therefore, God has to be another person that is perfect, that has access to a land (heaven) that is perfect too. The human race has become so terrified by natures own duality that is needs to look up to the celestial concept of perfection and peace. Truthfully, this idea of God isn't even perfect, because wouldn't he stop our pain if he was?

That is why God is merely a projection of your own spirit. You are not perfect, nature is not perfect, the journey your soul is going to take through this world is not perfect. There is always an equal balance, and if you choose to be aware, you will find that.

Stop being scared of yourself and learn to trust your heart.