Oh.

Hello. It’s me again. I seem to have a lot of time on my hands lately which leaves me with little left to do other than be aware of my thoughts and feelings. It’s become pretty apparent to me that I have some incredibly worrisome questions about the state of reality that I never got answered as a kid. My best friend, Josh, says that I was born very smart and that ideally it would have been noted and nurtured. But instead it was gaslit and terrorized into having to assume that it must be insane. I’ve heard others experience relief and a return of sanity upon leaving religion. I still had a lot of unanswered questions. My god, it might be true. I might actually be a human being. Even though I am terrorized by a life of trying to ignore my existential angst and dissonance. Told that life was about virtue, about being sincere about being the best you can be. But life is about living it. That you don’t have to meet any kind of existential expectation. I am already natural as I am. I can just be alive. Being alive is the “reward”… not in the after life if you do well enough in your life. Being alive is the present. Is the Great thing. There is no longer a story of judgment. No one is coming to judge me. No one is watching me nor ever was. Sometimes I feel disconnected from my past because I have a mind that doesn’t believe in there being a spirit in my brain whereas back then I was thinking someone was watching my thoughts and talking directly to me. And so when I think about that time in my life, it feels unintegrated. Like I don’t know how to make sense of what happened to my mind because of the stories of Christianity. It’s not just like there are a lot of gods available and you just pick whether you want to choose a god or not. I choose no god. I choose that there is no one listening to me and there is no one who is going to judge me for how I live my life. And to the fear of “how then do I being a human being if I don’t live like that?”, as if I don’t have a nature. Don’t worry, you don’t need to figure out how to do this new reality. It just unfolds itself and you just rest into it. It’s like I am conscious changing my relationship to reality. No one can read my mind, I will not be existentially judged, there is no judgment - not now, not ever. No One cares. Because all of my behavior, the helpful and the harmful, is natural. There is nothing about my nature that is sinful or flawed. This whole time I thought I was crazy, going to clinics, having disorders, taking meds, going to groups, burning out at work. I thought there was something wrong with the reaction I was having to the experience of my life. I see now that my reaction, both behaviorally and mentally, is directly tied to the life I lived. There is no reward or punishment. This is just how life unfolds. You are a Glorious Human Being born on an amazing Blue Planet, we are amazing little beings pre-programmed with a really delightful curiousity and joy at being alive. No one can bootstrap themselves out of the consequences of trauma: “mental illness”. We just need to feel the feeling. Well, that’s me, anyways. I have no idea what everyone else is doing. “I’m going to get in trouble”. It’s a feeling I have pretty often. I was so focused on the sentence “I’m going to get in trouble” and looking for symbolism of its meaning from my childhood. What I was missing was that more generally, it was an emotion: fear. And that fear is something that is physically felt and narrated by thought. That those are phenomenons that your experience of Yourself observes. I observe sensations. I observe thoughts. Sometimes I just observe and there are no sensations or thoughts and I worry I will feel like I will lose my mind but it’s actually rather comfy and quiet. I cannot afford to lose another 4 years of mental health wellness just because Trump is re-elected and the American empire has an earthquake. From what I’ve been reading up on history, this planet has basically been suffering our bullshit since we overpopulated this motherfucker. MAGA? When? Ever? Anywhere? We are meant to be tribal. Seriously, we are a parasite and a succubus right now. I never thought I’d be hearing myself say this stuff. It sounds so “out there”. But who ever taught me that talking like this was “out there” (nevermind explaining what the hell it means when something is “out there”)? I think I’m pretty settled on evangelical Christianity’s view of the views of the rest of the world was deeply problematic. So, like, I am just a little animal. I belong here. All these humans are my family. These are knowings I feel like I was feeling intuitively when I was younger but was so frightened by them contrasted against the information I was being given in church. I don’t feel like I really had a reason to question the whole thing until I was about 13. Have I not actually deconstructed? I only “left”. People are talking more openly about “deprogramming”, something people need to go through when they come out of a cult to get their bearings on who they are and what’s real. Yeah, I didn’t get anything like that. The world didn’t seem interested because it felt like everyone was comfortable with Christianity being a thing. So… are you saying that I’ve been living with an answered, essential existential question for 20 years? What is real? What is happening? What is this? This is life. This is what it feels like to be alive. You don’t have to worry; it works like it should based on evolution, though, it is susceptible to injury. If you’re experiencing negative effects, it makes sense for its own reasons. So, I guess I just need to keep being curious and listening to what I’m feeling. Patience. Listening. Time. I didn’t feel real - probably cuz I didn’t know that we’re basically just swimming in emotion juice and thoughts that are created and maintained by our experiences. Jesus.

OK - I’m done.