In which I talk about how I'm reading Plato because I need everyone to know how well-read I am
and how my religious upbringing ruins my days sometimes
Trying to describe the intricacies of evangelical fundamentalism to those who have the privilege of existing outside of it is a difficult task. It is one thing to observe the American evangelical church from the outside. It is another to live it and have your entire existential framework created by fundamentalism from a young age. The institution is a fringe group, by desire and default.
Existing in the fringe is ontologically essential for evangelicals; the strength and legitimacy of faith is generally measured by a Christian’s incompatibility with the secular world. I grew up with the phrase “you are not of this world” floating around my head, never quite sticking. I found it unsettling, even as a child, to think that I was allowed to exist around other people but that I would always be kept separate. I did not like the idea of being different or special; I have always craved mundanity.
I live in a city now surrounded by people I often have to explain things I have never had to explain before. This is hard because fundamentalism left a tangled mess in my brain, and even though I've been out for six years, I still feel isolated from the people around me. Sometimes I get moody and I can't explain why because I know the reason why is hiding in that tangled mess. I'll find the reason eventually but this disconnect creates a disconnect between me and the people I value in this city. I could include my grad professors and cohort in this because they often have to push me to elaborate on my work on fundamentalism because they don't understand what I'm trying to say or why I feel like I have to say it in the first place. I don't have a cohesive reason a lot of the times either, other than the need to empty out my brain of the tangled mess because it becomes so significant that I can't see anything else in my life. Or I see everything else in my life through the lens of fundamentalism (without the religion part; I'm firmly agnostic at the moment). The lens of fundamentalism is brutal and unforgiving. It isolates me when I want to connect.
I often watch people exist as if I will never be able to join them. I sit at a bar with my friends and their friends and their friends and pretend to be like them, to eat the fries that taste like paper, to drink the tequila that tastes like nothing. I know this is dissociation. Despite it being crippling sometimes, I'm better about getting out of it than I used it to be. But I still feel like I am separate from those around me all of the time.
I don't think this writing is ever going to have a clear goal or thesis; I write to figure out what is going on in my head, to deconstruct. The act of leaving a fundamentalist religion is the simple part, it is the rebuilding that comes afterwards and feels like a task that will never be over. So I write to make it easier for myself. And if the people I care about can read my writing, then maybe they will understand what is going on in my head.
To be clear, I don't want this to excuse any bad habits I have developed because of religious trauma and otherwise. I have a hard time being eloquent when I speak out loud, but writing has always allowed me to communicate things I couldn't otherwise. Words get stuck in my throat. Or maybe in my Broca's region where trauma shuts down language.
If I could be allowed to write forever and never speak, I think I would be happy.
A LIGHTHEARTED NOTE! I would never leave you guys on such a downer ending. I am here to take care of you all.
I am reading Plato right now. I am aware of how obnoxious that sounds but I don’t care. The way he talks about God would send some evangelicals into a tailspin and even though I don’t really identify as a Christian (I don’t even know what that means anymore), Plato’s words click for me in a way I don’t think I can elaborate on right now so please do not ask me to do so.
“Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not most of things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.”
Oh my god!!!! Imagine teenage Allie in church with this in her arsenal. Of course, she would need the ontological framework to even understand what this means and she did not have it then, even though she strutted around pretending that she did.
“Shall I ask you whether God is a magician, and of a nature to appear insidiously now in one shape, and now in another—sometimes himself changing and passing into many forms, sometimes deceiving us with the semblance of such transformations; or is he one and the same immutably fixed in his own proper image?”
Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. I don’t know the answer. But I couldn’t ask questions like this in the church. It was too much doubting. But now I can and I don’t have to have an answer which is the nice part.
You know what, I’m going to share another quote that I recently read in Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer:
“People my entire life have told me I am too much in control, but that has never been the case. I have never truly been in control, have never wanted control.”
This isn’t always true for me because sometimes I want to control everything and everyone around me but that is usually me being trapped by some self-inflicted responsibility that doesn’t actually exist. I don’t actually want to be in control. I want to have agency and I want to get what I want but the responsibility of being in control will make me do and say things that others would refer to as “crazy.” I decided February is the month of incorporating this letting go of control into my daily life. I am already happier and a lot less NERVOUS. Sometimes I forget that I am mentally ill and will act accordingly. That’s not an excuse for being unhinged but it is a reminder for me to be nicer to myself. And I care about that more than anything else.
so good allie:)