Weird Cult Stuff

Apples to apples, dust to dust

Today’s therapy topic:

In the face of an unacceptable reality, it is normal for your brain to try to come up with explanations and solutions.

One of the available explanations/solutions is to consider it morally superior to have experienced the unacceptable reality.

It’s an available explanation/solution, but please beware: it’s a trap.

I am good at doing one thing in excess. My brain is just geared that way. It’s not obsession or fixation, it’s just dogged devotion. I find a thing and I do it, rain or shine, whether I like it or not, over and over and over and over.

These days I walk. Miles and miles and miles, of sidewalks and park trails. I walk an average of ten miles a day, sometimes it’s four and sometimes it’s fifteen. Tennis shoes on concrete, I’m not getting anywhere but at least I’m going.

It’s one of those things that throws healthy, normal, well-adjusted people off when I meet them. Red flag behavior, if you will. My ratios are off, I do different normal things in excess or not at all instead of in the correct amounts. But walking is benign, it hurts no one, and it literally keeps me out of trouble, so I walk.

And my friends fuss about me needing better shoes. Tell me I should not be walking at night because it’s not “safe,” and to wear sunscreen and hydrate more and share my location with somebody in case I “end up in a ditch.” They’re cotton candy people living in cotton candy houses and they switch activities every hour and a half, and I (a garbage gremlin) can only really fake doing that for half a day at a time.

I don’t know, I’m working on it. The type of problems I have now are soft, confusing, bogging me down. I miss the clarity and brutality of the problems I used to have, when what I had to do was simple and straightforward and hurt.

Horrible update: it seems part of the reason why I am inherently an uncomfortable person 100% of the time may be due to my habit of adopting multiple opposing view points to hold as my own simultaneously in order to avoid conflict. Thus giving myself massive amounts of cognitive dissonance constantly.

When I was 14, my father printed out a paper of reasons why I should ask to be baptized, reasons he believed I was ready, and his own apology for not baptizing me a few years sooner.

He called me away from the kitchen, where I was helping to make lunch or maybe it was supper.

In the machine shed, leaning on a dusty tractor wheel, he read the paper to me and cried a little. He had to pause and clear his throat a few times.

I felt deeply, deeply ashamed. We both knew I’d been avoiding the conversation for too many weeks to attempt to avoid it again. Him standing there, reading reasons and quoting Bible like that, and crying a little to boot, was righteously forcing my hand.

I genuinely don’t even remember what I said, but I know it was all half-apologies, feeble excuses and explanations.

He said he figured it was time, and that so did mom. I mean, really, did I have any reasons to not be baptized? Any sins before God? Any humiliations I wanted to dredge up in front of the church elders to talk about and probe and repent of, just to postpone my submission?

My mouth quietly agreed to the baptism. My consciousness floated up by the rafters somewhere in the hazy dust floating in the cracks of light seeping in through the walls.

He put his hand heavy on my head and prayed a blessing on my decision.

So much of my childhood was characterized by that sort of lazy-summer-evening sense of doom.

A few weeks later I did my duty, made my vows. And it didn’t feel clean or holy or even like a decision. It just felt like water.

I tried to mark it as a big day, by writing the date big in my journal under “Baptized” and signing it, and copying out a Bible verse from Acts chapter 10. I guess it didn’t feel any different because it wasn’t any different: saying the vows and submitting to the ritual was all formality, I had always lived those vows and would live them for eternity. For people like me, there was no such thing as a choice.

I felt a little silly for having put it off so long, really. I could have gotten the whole thing over with a lot sooner if I hadn’t been so self-centered on how I felt about it all.

Sometimes when I would tithe it felt like making payments on my soul. Not to be works-based about my salvation, but that is how it felt. Like I was fulfilling the role of Being Good and hoping it would solve everything eventually.

I still tithe 10% of anything I earn, but not to God or any church. It goes mostly to groceries I buy for the food bank’s list of needed donations, and to individuals I know who need a hand every now and then to fix a car or pay a bill or whatever.

And I tell myself that it’s different now, my motivations are different and the effect of my actions are different. It’s more direct, doesn’t line the pockets of any pastor or board of directors, and I’m not colonizing anybody or supporting any organizations that are. I say that it’s just me giving back to my community.

I do all the giving as quietly as I can, like some stealthy task, and I feel almost guilty about it every time. I mean, it’s a Christian thing and I’m not a Christian now. I still don’t like to talk about it with people, it’s a weird concept to give 10% away, and when I think about it too much it makes my throat hurt. I want to give more, and less, at the same time. The inequality of everything is hard to wrap my head around, how I’m housed and my neighbor isn’t and my coworker owns five rental houses. Someone in this town is going to bed hungry. Hell, I could use a new pair of work shoes. But I’m so much better off than so many people. Maybe that’s why I do it-because it’s a just-for-me show of excess, martyrdom and sacrifice. Maybe I’m letting it give me a big proud head, to be giving 10%, maybe it’s just a weird ego boost. Maybe I’m just a little bit evil, and like finding secret ways to feel superior.

And then that’s what it comes down to in the end again: I really do feel like I’m a little bit evil, a little bit bad, a little bit rotting away on the inside, and 10% is one of a hundred futile attempts every month to counteract the badness emanating out from me into the world.

At least it’s a vice that can’t cause too much harm. Or maybe it does, I mean who’s to say? I never thought I was doing harm back when I donated my 10% to anti-abortion campaigns and the like. Maybe we’re all fucked any way you slice it, and 10% in the big picture is not enough to change anything really anyway. Just a ritual I do because I’m broken, and stuck on my past.

I don’t know, I just wish it felt different to do it each month. But it doesn’t, really. I still feel like I’m making payments on my soul.