.Being.Us

CW: Rape, abuse, suicidal ideation, Christianity, religion I'm writing this blog to process through my feelings about a recurring dream I have in which I return to my old church for a visit and am shunned by the people there who used to be my friends. I used to be heavily involved in the Church. When I converted to Christianity at 15, I took it for granted that God would talk to me and was hailed as a prophet by some in my church as I "heard from Him." When I hit 18, I found other people who believed God still talked and worked among people today, and I became heavily involved in the Charismatic Church movement. I continued to be involved in this for several years. I even went to college for a year on track to be ordained as a minister and leave as a missionary at the end of my schooling. When I transferred to another school, I changed my major to Teaching English as a Second Language with the same goal in mind. At age 22, with my Associate's Degree in hand, I fled...

I used to be very religious. I've talked about it before. I was Bible-thumping, evangelizing on the subway, spending all my time in churches, memorizing the Bible, all-in, 100% religious, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Not everyone who is religious is judgemental, or mentally ill, or prone to black-and-white thinking, but I was all of those things. You see, being very religious didn't make my mental illness go away. One big symptom of my mental illness is trouble grasping reality, and, being immersed in the Christian religion, I used the Bible as a guide for what was real and what wasn't. This means that I lived in a reality where I heard God, angels, and demons, and saw them too, and I didn't seek help because I thought my experiences were real and literal. Autism isn't a mental illness, but it leads to black-and-white thinking for me. During this time period, I didn't think I was allowed to have a personality or interests outside of my...

I used to be really interested in religion. I was obsessively, devoutly, wholeheartedly religious. This blog might not be very well-written, because I've only recently started trying to put this to words, but I'm going to try to explain why I'm not so religious, anymore.  I converted to Christianity when I was 15, and in my autistic, all-or-nothing way, I was all-in. If this religion was true, in my mind, every word of it was true. My near-eidetic memory for text allowed me to memorize many parts of the Bible quite quickly. I was 15, an age when it's normal to think a lot about higher powers, life's meaning, and humanity's place in the world, and I had a lot of questions. Since the Bible said God talked to people, I asked these questions primarily directly to God. In order to believe Christianity wholeheartedly, I had to "turn off" a certain part of my mind. Theologians might call this suspension of disbelief, and psychologists call it allowing ...