181. dilly

This afternoon a friend of mine posted an article from the Guardian about the top five regrets people have as they come to die. As an atheist who doesn’t believe in any kind of afterlife and that each of us only gets one shot at life, being intentional about avoiding regrets has been a major motif for me in the past few years. I don’t want to arrive at the inevitable end of my mortal coil with the taste of an unlived life in my mouth.

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

This is the principle reason why I finally came out gay almost five years ago, and as an atheist almost two and a half years ago. As a self-identified Christian, I wasn’t being honest with anyone (including myself) about the fact that I didn’t really believe in God, and that church was basically about socializing for me. And after coming to the realization that my sexual orientation wasn’t something that was ever likely to change, and that I didn’t even want it to change, I decided that living in fear of what my parents and community thought wasn’t worth wasting the opportunity to express who I truly am. Worse, it’s not worth the opportunity to experience life through the lens of marriage and intimate relationship, and to learn to love and be loved by another human being — in my case, another man.

I didn’t want to get to the end of my life with the knowledge that I’d missed the chance to find someone who I couldn’t live without.

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

For me, this has less to do with working long hours and more to do with the nature of work that I do. For most of my working life I’ve taken the safer path and accepted jobs that paid the bills or didn’t provide much challenge. Even my degree I chose in college was something I knew wouldn’t carry much risk in terms of accomplishment. But ultimately, I’m most happy when creating, whether musically or with words. The best times in my life, when I felt most alive, were when I was working on a show, or writing an opera or novel, and so on. And life is too short to not be remarkable and do what brings you.

“It’s not so much do as you like as it is that you like what you do.”
– Dot, Sunday in the Park with George

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Heh, as anyone who reads this blog or follows my Facebook posts knows, this is not an area where I often hold back. Even my face frequently betrays what I’m thinking and feeling. I was a very outgoing and exuberant child, but there was a span of years during my childhood where I was shut-down and self-repressed. I’m not entirely sure why that happened. There were troubles with my parents, as many boys experience, but few photos from those years show me smiling. I’d become very self-critical, a trait that has survived well into adulthood, and remember being very dissatisfied with myself, particularly how I looked when smiling.

Thanks to one drama teacher in junior high, however, I rediscovered my ability to express myself, to smile and to laugh again. It wasn’t until after I came out as an atheist that I was really able to start expressing the pain and hurt that I experienced growing up. And once I’d given voice to the hurt, and truly grappled with the concept of the finality of existence, start expressing to people in my life how much they truly mean to me.

Words from the Bible that I grew up hearing and reading now take on a new, ironical meaning: “Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Only that “me” ended up not being some religious figure.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

I’m trying to do better about this, but as an introvert with some hard-to-shake social anxiety and hermit tendencies, it’s a daily struggle. To that end, and thanks to the influence of a friend of mine, I’ve started maintaining a spreadsheet to track who I spend time with, and how often. It was partly in response to wanting to be more intentional about my social life, but also getting tired of saying, “It’s been a while!”

Quite a few friendships were burned in the process of coming out twice, some on my part and some on the part of others. You do learn who your true friends are when you show them your true self, and they can either live with that identity or reject you because you’re not who they wanted you to be. And it made me realize the importance of choosing your friends wisely, and spending time with truly good people whose company I covet and value.

One of the bedroom decorating tips in feng shui is to “choose images that you want to see happening in your life.” That’s how I’m approaching friendships now. Quality over quantity.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

This is probably the hardest one of all. As Aslan says in C. S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew,

“… he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh, Adam’s son, how cleverly you defend yourself against all that might do you good!”

Part of the impetus in starting therapy last September was to find a trained, impartial third-party observer to help me identify the ways I’ve tied myself in knots over the years. As Bob Wiley realized, “If I don’t untie myself, inside the emotional knots, I’m going to explode.”

Baby step: untie your knots. Life’s too damned short not to let yourself be happy.

180. genethliac

This weekend was my nephew’s third birthday party. I’m still unsure how to feel about being an uncle since I’m not really that excited about kids. Even as a child, I had no idea what to do with other kids, especially other boys, whose interest in intellectual pursuits was about as pronounced as their desire to have teeth pulled.

(Granted, this was in central Kansas in the 1990s, where my family was until we moved to Minnesota when I was 10 years old.)

At the recommendation of a friend, I paid a visit to Creative Kidstuff in Saint Paul. At age three, most kids have an attention span limited to anything colorful or dynamic. My nephew likes running around, being active, and doing things with his hands, and my sister informed me that he does like crafts, but also likes books.

After being pointed in the direction where I’d likely find presents for active, creative three-year-olds, I spoke with an adorable young guy who gave me several ideas for things that would be age-appropriate, aid in tactile development and hand-eye coordination, and fun. (I tried not to think about all the fun things I wanted to do with him, but that’s another story.) One was a paper bag hand puppet craft kit that I thought both my nephew and his mom would have fun with.

Crafty, fun present – check!

Then it was over to the book section where I saw a collection of the Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit stories. These were stories that my sisters and I grew up reading and hearing, and I especially remember the vivid illustrations. It was one of the first books I can remember reading out loud by sounding out the syllables, much like the scene in the play Wit where a young Vivian makes the association between the word “soporific” and the picture of the sleepy bunny.

Then I saw another book that also occupied many happy hours of my childhood – Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. My parents had a copy from what must’ve been the 1950s that looked very much like this one. As I leafed through the book, memories came flooding back, of poems like “The Land of Counterpane” and “Foreign Lands.”

“Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.”

I had the thought that even if he didn’t appreciate books as presents now, he might someday find himself in search of a present for his own nephew, and nearly break down in tears while remembering the stories he read as a child. And those books will be around long after I’m gone, which is more than can be said for the flashy toy cars and games other people gave him. Toys are played with and forgotten. Books endure.

So I may not be the “fun” uncle who plays jokes and steals noses, but I can be the uncle who takes an interest in my nephew’s intellectual development. And for whatever the reason, my sister tells me that he was asking if I was going to come to the party. So apparently I’ve done enough to warrant being memorable!

I was surprised to see that a classmate of mine from college who had roomed with my sister years ago was also there. We’d fallen out of touch over the years as we graduated, and even before as we went our separate educational ways – me on the music performance track, she on music education. We were close our first three years of college, having most of our core music classes together, but she and the other music education majors had an extra year of courses to complete so I didn’t see much of her or them after junior year.

We chatted for a little bit, and of course one of the first questions she asked was whether I was doing much composition! I always feel guilty when saying no, that I’m squandering the talent that I invested so many years in developing, or that I’m not living up to my potential or expectations that everyone had for me.

In an unexpected turn, she disclosed that the previous year she and her (smoking hot) husband (who was swimming just outside the party room and walking around shirtless and in swim trunks, showing off his washboard abs and sexy pecs) had lost a child due to a rare genetic disorder. They’d been advised that the child likely wouldn’t survive, and that if he did it would be with significant disability, but they brought him to full term anyway, like the Evangelicals they are.

Even though the baby lived for only five minutes after being born, she talked about the peace she was able to find in God, in her church, and “in the Word.”

Given how long it’s been since we last spoke, I’m not sure if she knew that she was talking to an atheist, but in a moment where a mother was describing her experience of losing a child, it didn’t seem appropriate to bring up the fact I don’t believe in God anymore. I’m glad that she as able to find comfort and solace in her religious beliefs, but it’s one of those moments as an atheist when you realize how much privilege Christians still enjoy in this society.

Of course, my atheism isn’t really that big of a deal in my own life. Frankly, I don’t identify as an atheist except when dealing with fundamentalists pushing their Christofascist agenda on the rest of the population. I don’t hide the fact that I don’t believe in God, but there are more important things to care about – guys, music, literature, philanthropy, current events, friends, science, etc.

I do wish, however, that I could bring up my non-belief with old friends without being interrogated and politely judged. It is a significant life event, after all…

Name(required)

Email(required)

Website

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

167. decathect

“Perhaps I have been wrong to keep so much of my mind from you,” said Mr Norrell, knotting his fingers together. “I am almost certain I have been wrong. But I decided long ago that Great Britain’s best interests were served by absolute silence on these subjects and old habits are hard to break. But surely you see the task before us, Mr Strange? Yours and mine? Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England. We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

Happy 2013 everyone! Here’s hoping this year is better for everyone than the previous one.

Second, in the past couple of days I’ve had an odd but pleasant series of encounters with old friends I haven’t seen or heard from in a while.

Friday night while picking up a game piece from a local store at one of the malls near my house, I heard someone calling my name. I looked up and saw that it was Dawn, a woman I knew from my old church, the one I’d grown up in from age 10 until leaving it at about age 24. It had been almost six years since our last meeting. She and I were in the choir there for many years, and had done some acting together too. I even directed her daughter as the White Witch in my adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we performed one year.

We exchanged some of the usual pleasantries about the newest developments, and talked about mutual acquaintances we’d bumped into randomly while out and about, as we were doing then. Turns out she’d been following me somewhat on Facebook, so it wasn’t necessary to fill her in on the biggest developments — namely, that I’m gay and an atheist.

“You don’t exactly hide it!” she joked.

And it’s true. I explained, as I do for everyone, that I try to live my journey as publicly as possible to be an advocate for others who feel isolated or powerless. If anyone can benefit from my story and experience and not go through the same struggles, it’s worth it.

The other day, Leah, a friend of mine from London popped on Facebook and we ended up having a delightful conversation along the same lines. I met her at Northwestern College about ten years ago when she was spending a year studying abroad. Why there and not somewhere else? I don’t know, but whatever the reason I’m grateful for the friendship.

In the course of catching up she asked about my dad, and I said I hadn’t talked to him in about a year. I told her a bit about the split with my family, and the reasons, and the struggle that’s been. Though she’s a Christian, she was at a loss to understand how they could refuse to accept me. Hers is a god of love and acceptance rather than one of rules and strict regulations.

It’s funny, there are so many people from that period of my life who I haven’t talked about my sexuality or loss of faith with, either because we’ve drifted apart and lost contact, or because the occasion hasn’t arisen. I suppose, for whatever reason, there’s some hesitation to share who I am now with who I was then.

Just a few months ago, before I started going to therapy, I would’ve found the notion of either friend offering to pray for me offensive. Depending on how spiteful I felt at the moment, the offer might even be thrown back in their face. I don’t believe that there is any evidence that anyone is listening to their prayers, or that they have any tangible effect on the physical world. But the curious thing is that I’ve learned to look past the religious undertones and hear that they are thinking of me when they pray for my immortal soul. Dawn said whenever I popped up on Facebook that she would talk to God about me. How often do we really keep in mind the people we care about, take an interest in their welfare, and go out of our way to be a positive change for them?

The past week or so I’ve been listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Part of it is Simon Prebble’s captivating performance, but it’s such a good story. The other night while running some errands I was struck by the above-quoted passage.

“Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England,” says Mr Norrell. “We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

I realized that this has been my attitude towards God and religion since 2011. We must break people’s dependence on the supernatural. The first flash of my atheism showed itself on 9/11. In watching the towers fall, it suddenly seemed to me that no one was minding the store and that bad things happen solely because of people’s choices, not because some higher power willed anything. In the following years I began to rely more on evidence and reason for my beliefs than on the teachings of thousand-year old religions.

If evidence could be found for the existence of God, I’d gladly consider it. But the more we look at the universe, the more we see the workings of a wholly natural one, processes we’re just beginning to grasp. We don’t need a higher power, and for me that doesn’t lessen its beauty or importance. If anything, it makes every moment I’m alive that much more breathtaking for its transience and ephemeralness.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”

To live at all is miracle enough.

155. tardigrade

I am tired.

It’s been over a month since my last update here, and not for a lack of anything to write about or say. On the contrary. There’s almost too much to say. So many thoughts charging about like metaphorical bulls in the proverbial china shoppe, but so little time and energy to actually sit down and give them air.

This marriage amendment campaign is exhausting me. I’m so tired of this fight, of viewing every interaction as a potential battle with some fundamentalist Christian who is either trying to save my soul or convince me that I’m a disgusting faggot. The divisiveness is killing me emotionally, and the fact that it’s put me at odds with basically my entire old social network is wearing on me psychologically. There are so many old friends who don’t talk to me anymore, either because I’m gay or an atheist. There aren’t even really words to express how sad I am over this reality, and angry that many of the people I once counted close (or as close as I let anyone in college get) don’t think that I’m deserving of equal recognition, either legally or socially.

Then there’s the social apocalypse still resulting from the fallout from my birthday almost two years ago. There was the social network from my youth group at church that fell apart when I went to college, and the social network at my church that fell apart when I left that church in 2007 after basically growing up there. There was the close social network that formed in college that lasted for a few years after graduation, and that continued and grew during my time working in the theater department there. There was the little commune that was the apartment and then townhouse I shared with some of my best friends, but they’ve all moved on, marriages and life and such.

There was the community that grew up amongst some friends over several years that seemed like it might blossom into something, later coupled with the hope of a romantic attachment that went devastatingly wrong. For me, that community fell apart when the chasm between he and I drove me into self-imposed exile. I hear through various channels that people miss me, but it’s too painful to go back and try to navigate that labyrinth. So old friendships have splintered and dissolved as necessary boundaries were forged and lines drawn in the sand. In my absence they’ve all only grown closer. In the process I lost one of my best friends earlier this year, but there’s nothing to be done about that or any of the other relationships that have become casualties of this hurricane of change. So now I find myself in the midst of the ashes of a massive forest fire, having lost basically my entire community and feeling incredibly alone.

I have a terrific, caring and supportive boyfriend, and his family has more or less adopted me. But it doesn’t quite make up for the loss of my home, of my family, of close friends. I am finally seeing a therapist to deal with the past, and understanding that this is all part of the grief process—a process I’ve been avoiding for some time.

So I’m just exhausted. And there are many miles to go before I sleep.

139. obtuse

“Defriending” is a messy business sometimes. What was once just a website started by a couple of college guys is now a major part of our global social fabric. What happens in the online universe now often has real-world consequences, as in the recent case of the Marine discharged for comments made about Obama on his Facebook page. Earlier this year in February there was a double murder sparked by a defriending. Couples’ relationships even begin, evolve and end on Facebook.

Yesterday I happened on an event that a friend of mine commented on that I wasn’t invited to (for reasons that were pretty obvious to me). Late last month I helped some friends move out of a house they were live in and taking care of while a friend of theirs was on deployment. Soon they’ll be moving into a new house and have enlisted more friends to help them. I’ve known them for many years. We went to the same church for years, practically grew up together and were involved together in the young adult ministry, and for a long time I thought that we were fairly close. These are the friends that started the GLBT-friendly church.

Now they’re moving into a house with Seth.

I had a chat with my housemate this morning on the way to work about it because I have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand I see the positive aspects of it for them. My housemate pointed out that it won’t be as easy for him to be a total slut living under the same roof as my friends, but for them there’s also the part of being a Christian community together. And I get that.

And frankly, just because Seth and I had a major falling out (understatement of the decade right there) doesn’t mean that anyone else should pattern their lives around that. To an extent I’ve been expecting my mutual friends to do that, which isn’t very fair. They have to do what’s right for them, which I can respect. That doesn’t mean, however, that I have to be okay with it—which I’m not.

Ultimately, I have to do what’s right for me. They’ve essentially made a decision about the future of our relationship, and by living with Seth they’re sending the message (and I know them well enough to know that it’s not intentional or personal) that they’ve taken his side against me. I know that they care about me to an extent and they don’t want it to be this way, and I don’t expect them to like it, but at some point you have to draw the line where personal integrity is concerned. They can’t have it both ways, and it’s not fair of them to expect me to go on as if nothing happened.

So I decided to sleep on it, to see if I was still upset enough in the morning about this, and I was. So my two friends have been defriended, both in the digital and in the real-world sense. It’s unfortunate, but I have to respect myself enough to not be a doormat. As much as they say they care and love me, moving into a house with the ex-lover who ultimately treated me like shit is hardly a sign that they want to continue to have me in their lives. So I just have to move on.

In physics there exists a hypothetical particle known as a strangelet that is so unstable that any matter they come into contact with is also destabilized and converted into something called “strange matter.” Without a working knowledge of physics and how quarks work, that’s about the best I can do to explain it; but that’s essentially what Seth has been for me. A strangelet. He wandered into my life like one of those rogue particles and because of his cosmological mass rearranged everything.

Like a passing star, he dislodged me from the solar system I’d been orbiting comfortably in for some time, and now I’m off into interstellar space, with ever-growing distance between the people that I used to know. As a consequence of knowing him (not that it’s his fault—I was headed in that direction before we met) I became an atheist, which affected my relationship with my family, friends and everything.

My housemate and one guy on Facebook made the comment that leaving Minnesota won’t necessarily solve everything. And it’s true. That’s wishful, magical thinking to believe that changing geography will alter the situation. But I do need to physically distance myself from this place and from the people who are involved.

I am developing a new secular community of friends right now, people with whom I share values, so it’s not like I’m just sitting around being lonely and sad. If I have to be single for now, I may as well be as busy as possible, if only as a distraction from the fact that I desperately want to be in a relationship.

But I’m through being there for people who aren’t there for me.

131. brisance

Sorry for the gap in posting the past few days. I’ve been doing a lot of writing outside of the blog lately, both musical and literary. I’ve completed several arrangements of pop songs for the vocal group I’m in that’s getting started, as well as completing work on an original choral piece based on an Edna St. Vincent Millay sonnet that I also had to secure rights to use.

I’m also working on several short stories and starting in on a series of essays about my experiences as a bad cultural American, some of which I hope will be quasi-therapeutic in getting over my Seth issues.

Speaking of, I went for a walk with a friend of mine today around Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis. It’s an absolutely gorgeous day outside; a little windy and cool for wearing short sleeves, but my goodness am I glad that the weather is nice and that the good-looking guys are finally shucking their shirts when they go for a run. I love that about the spring: The return of eye candy.

However, I was informed today that I’d been uninvited to an upcoming birthday party because Seth is planning to be there. It was moderately placating to hear that it wasn’t because my personality is defective; and I honestly hadn’t planned on going since Seth is close friends with this guy as well as (to take a turn for the Anglo-Saxon) quasi-regular fuck buddies (though at this point, between this guy and several others (Justin Lee, for one) I’m wondering who Seth isn’t fuck buddies with). What irks me further is that recently he apparently had the audacity to tell this friend that he thinks that I need to find someone.

(Sure, let someone else fix the mess you made, asshole.)

On a side note, it’s ironic to compare the liberal sex lives of the Christian gay guys I know and with my own sexual ethic as an atheist, which is becoming more conservative (at least for the time being). There was a time shortly after Seth “dumped” me (I don’t know if there’s a word for what happened there since we were never actually “dating”) when I was a pretty unscrupulous slut. My ex (Aaron 2.0) had recently introduced me to Grindr, and the day after the infamous night of my 28th birthday I had two hookups with complete strangers that began a long series of very unhealthy acting out. I had sex with at least a dozen guys in relationships, none of whose boyfriends knew of their extra-curricular activities, so you’ve got to wonder how “serious” those relationships were. All of that left me feeling more empty than ever, and I’m at the point now where I just want to find a good guy to be with. I don’t want to have “no-strings-attached” sex with guys who I have no emotional connection to.

Anyway, I’d just assumed that Seth was going to be at this birthday party and hadn’t planned on attending. However, it did strike me as odd that I received the Facebook invite only for it to mysteriously disappear shortly after arriving.

This is, frankly, one of the many reasons why I need to get the hell out of the Twin Cities and make it like a tree to Seattle (the other big reason being my immediate family and the fact that there are just so many ghosts of my fundamentalist past around here).

This is precisely what I was afraid would happen after the events of last February. Some of it may be my hardline approach towards Seth and cutting off all contact in the interests of not re-igniting a fire that I’ve been trying to put out for the better part of two years, but he has indeed become something of a Rubicon between my friends and I. He’s standing on one side, with his church and all the people who are allied with him. On the other side is me, and all the people who are somehow in the middle of the No Man’s Land that I’ve inadvertently created and forced some people into. The people closest to me at least make an effect to not mention him around me because I’ve been very honest with them that I’m still not entirely over him, and that references to him still make me go slightly crazy.

But the current state of affairs has made it so that I can’t be with my friends for their birthday parties and other community events he’s likely to be at. My friend Emily actually assured me that she hadn’t invited him to her 30th birthday party because having me there was more important than being hospitable to him, her pastor. (I can’t help but wince at that and even feel somewhat selfish, that she would be so accommodating of my insanity.) But in a few weeks I won’t be able to help some friends move because he’ll be there.

So the moral of the story is that I really need to start over in a new place. Not necessarily running from my problems, but just getting free of some factors that are impeding my progress towards getting psychologically healthy and healing from some of the wounds that I’ve sustained over the past couple of years.

Plus, there’s my romantic life. The guys here in Minnesota have ultimately been disappointing in terms of finding someone who I can connect with emotionally, as well as someone who is equally non-theist. Seattle has a fairly large and active atheist community, is more liberal, and has a higher percentage of gays (and therefore a wider pool to draw from). And I just can’t stand to be alone for yet another year as I’m getting older (and less marketable).

Like it or not, Seth has changed my life, and not for the better. But who knows. Maybe it will be for the better in terms of ultimately getting myself together and on a healthier path in a new place.

119. crib

crib, verb: To pilfer or steal, especially to plagiarize; slang: One’s home; pad.

Regrets collect like old friends,
Here to relive your darkest moments—
I can see no way, I can see no way.
And all of the ghouls come out to play.
— Florence + the Machine, Shake It Out

Change is inevitable. That’s the way of evolution. It’s the driving force of the universe. If things stayed the way they were, nothing would exist.

I’ve called Minneapolis/Saint Paul home since August of 1993 when my family moved here from central Kansas, where we’d lived since 1986. Ever since we came up over a hill and the skyscrapers of Minneapolis came into view, I’ve never wanted to call anyplace else home—even after visiting England and Ireland in 2003. This is where my family is from, where my friends are, and where a million memories are connected to.

But over the past couple of months, like a person gradually losing their mother tongue and having it replaced by an alien language, it’s felt less like the home that it always has been.

A similar thing happened in 2007 when I left the church that had been home for 14 years and went off by myself to another church, where I’d be for the next three and a half years until finally becoming an atheist.

When we moved here in 1993, we quickly decided on a non-denominational church in Saint Paul. Everything about it felt just right—the people, the teaching, the Christian education programs for both adults and children. And we got involved right away. We got connected with the active homeschool community at the church, and soon we were there 3-4 days a week, including Sundays. There were music practices, AWANAS, clubs, and regular events.

Later I would join the adult choir at age 15, which became my special church family, and I honestly cherish every memory I have from that group. And we were good. We were not your typical warbly church choir. We were an auditioned ensemble—and voiced. Our music director was incredible, and we were seated according to how our voices blended.

Needless to say, there were a thousand things about that church that I loved. But then our pastor left after a coup of sorts by the executive pastor who was hired to basically turn us into a mega church. That eventually led to the installation of the pastor who is currently there, a much younger guy who had his own “hip” ideas about church. The sermons were watered down in content and quality. Services started resembling rock shows, with one of the pastors shifted over to overseeing production.

And then one day I was standing in church, looking around, and it suddenly hit me. “I don’t belong here anymore.” I couldn’t put my finger on it, but so much had gradually changed that it no longer resembled the church I had grown up in. It was someone else’s church. At the time I was working at the church as a custodian, and I continued to work there while going to Saturday services at the church I would eventually move to.

In the same way, Minneapolis and Saint Paul have ceased to feel like home. Only nothing about the city itself has changed. The people have. And I have.

For many reasons, this past Christmas I cut off all contact with my immediate family—my mom and dad, two younger sisters, a brother-on-law and a nephew.

Many of my friends have also either moved away, or gotten married and/or started families of their own. A very close-knit group of friends of mine scattered last year after about half of them moved away. I lived with two guys for about a year and a half until one of them moved out to move in with his girlfriend, and then the other guy was getting married so I moved in with my parents for a bit until I found a new place to live. They became my “church” after I left the other one.

Then there’s SafeHouse, the church that my friends are starting. For those of you who’ve never been in a church, there’s a closeness that comes with being part of one that makes everyone on the outside feel a bit alienated. It’s not intentional on their part. They’re just becoming a tribe. It’s basic sociology.

… there’s also Seth.

It feels like playground politics to say it, but he’s really become the line in the sand with my old group of friends. Before the night of my birthday in 2011, I had grown incredibly close with that set of people, and Seth (at least for me) quickly became the center of it all. He’s incredibly charismatic and likable. From the first time I heard about the kid who had been kicked out of his Christian parents’ home when he came out to them, to when I read his blog and fell in love with his words, to when I actually met him for coffee and fell in love with his personality and his incredibly piercing, beautiful blue-grey eyes, I was taken.

Then it all fell apart. Now he’s my friends’ pastor, and on one side of the line is me and on the other is all the pain and ugliness that lies between him and myself, as well as anyone who calls him “friend.” And I miss him terribly. There are few days where I don’t think about him or wonder what he’s up to, and wish things happened differently.

So I’m seriously contemplating relocating to Seattle this summer. It’s pointless to run from your problems, but neither is anything getting better; and sometimes a radical change of scenery can help, like women in Jane Austen novels vacationing in Bath.

There’s the need for physical distance between myself and Seth, from SafeHouse, and from the people in my life who I just don’t belong with anymore. And I can’t figure out who I am now as an atheist when I’m dragging this horse around with me.

117. excogitate

excogitate, verb: 1) To think out; devise; invent; 2) To study intently and carefully in order to grasp or comprehend fully.

---

Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit.

And nothing would be worse than a scholarly analysis. Erudition. Interpretation. Complication. Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.

I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see that I have been found out.

— Margaret Edson, Wit

I’ve always been a solitary sort of person. Just ask my roommates. Like the stereotypical scholar, I can hole away in my room for a day or two, seemingly without the need for human company. The west end of my bedroom is lined with books up to the ceiling, and my headboard is currently filled with volumes that are in the process of being read. I often emerge having forgotten how to actually talk to people, or converse with them in a way that isn’t on paper or screen. Such is the peril of the writer.

When I was about twelve years old, I distinctly recall driving to church with my family. I don’t remember specifically why, but on this occasion I can remember being angry with my father. That isn’t particularly notable since I was often angry with my father. Aside from the occasional connection over music, we’ve never really gotten on well. That in itself is also probably not particularly notable. It’s the age old theme, isn’t it? Father against son? Son against father? The Jungians were fascinated by “father hunger” and the pang felt for an absent parent, physically or otherwise.

My own father was physically present in the home as much as he could be. When we were younger he literally worked across the street at the Christian community college he taught at in rural Kansas. My two younger sisters and I were homeschooled during our entire stay there (1986-1993), so we’d see him when he came home for lunch some days. But he was largely absent emotionally. He and I rarely spent any time together, and if we did it often ended in a fight and me getting sent to my room. I don’t know if I even knew what was going on, if I knew to ask for his attention, or if he even knew how to reach out. Likely he did not. His own father was distant, from what I can hear, and physically abusive towards his own children.

So that afternoon, driving to church, sitting behind my dad with my sisters in the backseat of his blue Saturn, I suddenly decided then and there that I was going to have nothing more to do with love of any kind. (Yes, I know, very Ring des Nibelungen. And yes—das Rheingold is a gimmick.) It was messy, nonsensical, human, and left the lover open to getting taken advantage of and hurt. The best course of action was to shut myself off from the world; to be hard and untouchable; and all that sort of thing.

But the sad thing is that it rather worked. Now, this is around the time that I started to enter puberty, and was also starting to get an inkling that I might not be heterosexual, despite all the indoctrination and against the expectations of my family, so this may have been an unconscious tactic to guard against them finding out.

Part of it was too that I was tired of not being accepted by my family. Shortly after this my parents started attending parenting seminars and began to see all of the mistakes that they’d made, but it was rather too late for all of that. The damage had been done. And to keep myself safe, I shut my family out. I refused to let any of them love me, because for so much of my early years “love” meant getting hurt. Sadly, this also meant that attempts on my parents’ part to make amends for that glanced off, and were met instead with violent resentment from my child-self.

Even now, I still resent my parents for what they didn’t do then; but there’s no going back to change anything. They’ve apologized, but I doubt it will ever be enough.

Yes, other people have had much worse from their parents—years of physical (and even sexual) abuse, neglect, abandonment, etc. But it feels as though they left me half-formed as an adult. Most people miss out on those things from their parents, but find it in friends or other parental figures. My younger sister and I were homeschooled up until the 9th grade; but aside from some friends from church and a few kids in the neighborhood, I didn’t have many friends. My younger sister had many friends from dance, and my youngest sister had friends from band. For me, I threw myself into the only thing I was decent at: piano. I practiced a lot, sometimes up to four hours a day.

For me, love, self-worth and acceptance are tied up in what I do, and how good I am at those things. Any failure (perceived or real) is viewed as a personal defect that downgrades my personal worth. The only way that I felt I could get my parents’ approval was to be really good at piano. And for a while I was. Then I was good at composition. And then I wasn’t getting commissions, and getting rejection letters from competitions and contests and artists.

And the sick thing is that I know intellectually what’s happening. I’m writing about it in an almost auto-narrative fashion! But I can’t seem to do anything about it.

As desperately as I want to be in a relationship, there’s no way I could be in one right now without unconsciously sabotaging it. I can’t believe that anyone loves me because I don’t truly love myself.

So much for being smart.

113. poinephobia

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
— Psalm 37:1 (King James Version)

I’ve been a little crazy this week.

This past Sunday marked the first “preview gathering” of SafeHouse Church that many of my friends are a part of, and that Seth (my ex-pseudo lover) is a pastor of. To be honest, I’m a little jealous of what they have going. They’re having meetings, band rehearsals, and volunteer training meetings, and it’s all making me feel unhinged.

Part of it is feeling left out, and this sort of phantom limb pain that comes from the memory of what all of that was like; of being part of a church, being actively involved in the planning and execution of services and events—and most importantly, doing all of that with my friends, and with people I loved and cared about.

In the last entry, I touched on my growing desire to find atheist/nontheist community of my own—my “tribe,” as it were. To find anything close to the equivalent of the church experience for any nontheist is next to impossible. We’re an independent-minded lot. We tend to think for ourselves and resist being herded into anything. It’s more likely that, as many have suggested, I’ll find community in the various groups I eventually volunteer with, sort of piecing together a nontheist “network” from those people I meet. But it won’t ever be anything like what I enjoyed years ago, in church orchestra rehearsals and the like.

That’s over.

It’s a bit like being exiled from your former life. But that begs the question of whether it was ever mine to begin with, and whether all of this wasn’t inevitable, in a way.

There are days when I do miss being a Christian—in particular, the days when I’m feeling lonely and depressed, and there’s no way that anyone can understand the immeasurably dark place that I’m stuck in, and no way that I can humanly express any of it. It would be really nice to have a god who listens. And like that phantom pain, I wish I could get that belief back sometimes. But it’s gone. Even if I wanted to, there’s no way that I could ever go back to being a Christian, not after opening the door to atheism. It’s a bit like Alice going through the tiny door and then eating the cake—you simply don’t belong anymore. As the moral of the story goes in Igor Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat,

“You must not seek to add
To what you have, what you once had;
You have no right to share
What you are with what you were.

No one can have it all,
That is forbidden.
You must learn to choose between.

One happy thing is every happy thing:
Two, is as if they had never been.”

Part of me is also going crazy over everyone being there at church with Seth every week, chatting with him like absolutely nothing is wrong (because for them, nothing is wrong—because he didn’t brutally mangle their hearts); singing “worship” songs along side him to an imaginary god they fancy exists; being at church community events with him; listening to him preach; getting pastoral advice from him (as the “pastor of community care” or whatever the fuck he fancies himself); going to his apartment for dinner/parties where he’ll mix them drinks because he’s also a fucking bartender.

Then there will come the day when he meets someone, and that guy will also be in the lives of all my friends, further alienating me; and this guy will be Seth’s husband/partner, and they’ll love each other and be a staple of the community; and everyone will think what a great couple they are, how wonderful Seth is and how wonderful the other guy is…

Sigh. If you think that sounds like jealous ramblings, you’d be spot on. I fully acknowledge this, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. If there were a way to kill these feelings and forget all about Seth and all that happened between us, I would. Yes, those painful emotional moments are what define us and make us who we are; but this thing is still consuming my mind like a raging, out-of-control fire, nearly a year after the awful, infamous night of my birthday party when he dashed my heart to pieces. It’s almost like these thoughts and feelings are large enough to be another entity entirely.

Yes, some of my ire at the Church is fueled by my love/hatred of Seth—some transference, if you will. It’s completely irrational, and completely and totally unhealthy, but the moment that SafeHouse comes up or is mentioned, I basically turn into a crazy person. All of those raw, barely-beneath-the-surface feelings for him come bursting out and onto the paving stones like sulfuric acid, re-opening those wounds.

And of course this would all be happening right around the time that I formally became an atheist in the first place. It feels as though everyone I know who is going to that church, who I’ve considered my family for some time since my own family is less than welcoming, has slammed the door in my face and is rejecting me by virtue of building a community around the very beliefs that I have rejected so that I can’t be a part of their lives anymore. And these are people with whom I have history, with whom I have shared experiences.

Yes, I’m unhappily single, and that’s a factor (I need a boyfriend!!); but I’m also feeling increasingly isolated. Some of it is me pushing people away—and that’s bad. But I also don’t know where I stand with them now as a nontheist. I’m different, and you can’t choose whether you truly believe or not. It would almost be easier to cut ties with everyone and start fresh. But that’s hardly a mature reaction, nor is it healthy.

… but is this healthy?

112. codification

One of the great things about living in a city is the inordinate proximity and access to basically everything. There are a gadzillion restaurants to choose from and sample; opportunities to attend arts events; and stores of every size and niche to find whatever you happen to be looking for.

One of the downsides of living in the city is being surrounded by a gadzillion people, but still feeling completely alone. Even for those of us who have a ton of friends, we still run the risk of feeling rather isolated. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday; that we have friends who we rarely get a chance to see because we all have so much going on. We have jobs that take up most of our day; errands to run and things to do; then some of us have families and significant others to attend to; and seeing everyone becomes a scheduling nightmare, so we may go months (or years) between seeing certain people.

This is one of the good things about the church that I miss probably more than anything: the built-in, readily available social network. You can get together on Sunday morning for a couple of hours every week and see all of your friends in one place. You can even see them several times a week, at bible studies, choir/band practice, potluck dinners, etc. That sort of thing simply doesn’t exist in the atheist/skeptic community, and it does make me sad.

I’ve been feeling dissatisfied lately with that lack of community in my life. As much as I enjoy the company of my Christian friends (some of whom I’ve known for over ten years, and with whom I have had many wonderful experiences and memories), being with them now isn’t the same as it is being with nontheists. This is something they don’t tell you when you’re first deconverting from Christianity, that your world is about to go topsy-turvy; or if they do tell you, you can’t imagine how extensively everything gets re-written. It’s a bit like going to summer camp or Europe, having an incredibly life-changing experience, and then going home and not feeling like you belong anymore; or that you returned home only to find that your childhood home had been magicked away by a wicked fairy (sorry, I’m nearly done with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and am rather concerned about fairies). It’s what Frodo experiences coming back to the Shire after going to Mordor, when you long to be amongst those who have been on the same journey. As nice as some of my Christian friends are, they simply can’t understand how differently the world looks once you no longer believe in god.

A while ago a friend asked me why it mattered that I needed atheist friends. After all, I have friends who love and care about me. To me, this rather sounds like conservatives asking gays why they want gay marriage instead of civil unions. To those who already have a place of belonging, surrounded by people who (mostly) believe the same things that they do (i.e., believe in god, that this personal god is the “author of human life,” etc), it may sound like atheists are just whining. After all, we chose to leave the church—right? We chose to stop believing in god—right?

We are primates—pretty advanced primates, but primates nevertheless. Like our close cousins, we have a complex social structure based on our belonging to and our place within the tribe. With our larger brain size and capacity for higher intelligence comes self-awareness, and all of the perennial problems associated with it. Instead of sniffing each other’s butts, belonging is more like complex mathematical algorithms now, with a long matching checklist of beliefs, social class, media preferences and so on.

Being a nontheist is a unique experience in humankind today. A thousand years from now our descendants may look back with quaint curiosity at their primitive ancestors embroiled in stupid squabbles over religion and belief. Perhaps in a thousand years belief in gods will have died out, just as the Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago or so. What must it have been like for the first tribe of homo sapiens to be living amongst their Neanderthal kin, alike but different? For the first time in recent geological human history, there are those amongst us who do not hold belief in gods or the supernatural. We are a small tribe living amongst those who still believe very strongly and very fervently.

But we are growing.

As Richard Dawkins writes in the preface to The God Delusion,

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.

It’s one of the reasons why this year I’m planning to get more “activist” about my atheism, and engage in more volunteering in order to start finding and building community.

But how to re-create the community that I enjoyed in the church as a Christian? Is it even possible? And what might it look like? Atheists don’t really believe anything. We have no codified tenets. Some of us had abusive church backgrounds, while some of us (like myself) knew wonderful people; and some of us grew up in secular homes where god was rarely (if ever) mentioned. All that unites us is our non-belief in gods and the supernatural, and our shared humanity.

A few years ago I lived with several friends in an apartment complex. Myself and two guy friends lived in one unit, while three of our girl friends lived next door. Ours became a central “gathering spot” for everyone. I wish our community as atheists and nontheists could look like that.