Have you had a life-altering change in who you are?
The kinds of change I'm referring to are hard to put into words. A few examples may be switching from one end of the political spectrum to the other, leaving one country or culture for another, religious conversions and deconversions, or leaving behind one's family. Often, these changes are caused by deeply personal events like receiving a serious medical diagnosis, conflict, the death of a loved one, midlife crisis, or merely examining one's values or beliefs. There are countless other examples of both changes and causes, many of which I've never considered.
There is shared experience between these changes: the world hasn't changed, but somehow everything is different. Everything is in a completely new light; it's as if you've moved between parallel universes. Not everyone has had or will have such a moment, but these changes seem to be the most important in catalyzing who we are. As much as we think sharing opinionated memes or arguing at Thanksgiving is going to shape or mold people around us, it is often personal experiences that actually make such change possible. And some small number of people do experience profound change: racists become antifascists, liberals become stanch conservatives, Christians become atheists. These sorts of life-altering changes are often what tell us most about who a person is.
I made this post because the discussion of these changes are among the most valuable discussions I've had with others, and people often don't get socially-acceptable opportunities to share something so personally important to them. This is potentially a heavy subject, so don't feel that you need to share or elaborate any further than what's comfortable for you.
Oh god, so many. I'm gonna give the brief overview.
I was bullied heavily starting from roughly the age of 7. Between this trauma, and the redneck community I grew up in, I was a homophobic bigot come the age of 18. This is the thing I am most ashamed about myself. It took a lot of personal growth to overcome this.
Growing up in a Christian household (Lutheran for those who care), and came to terms with the non-existence of God around the age of 11. This was in the 90s, and very isolating as family didn't take to it well and went the denial/more Jesus route. This drastically altered my worldview and it took till I was about 25 until I outgrew my "angry atheist" phase. I still am fairly anti-religion 15 years later, but am much more polite and tolerant of religions/believers who return the favor. This was probably the 'core trigger' from whence most of the subsequent changes followed.
It wasn't until I moved away for college and actually started meeting minorities and gay people before the 'bigot worldview' showed cracks and started falling apart.
Discovering drugs also helped with the above, as well as start breaking me out of Republican-hivemind into the learn->change political leanings that lead me through a Ron Paul libertarian phase, through to the full-blown anarco-commie that I am today.
At some point in my early 20's, I had multiple manic episodes with full-blown psychosis requiring inpatient treatment, converting un-diagnosed but quite obvious depression into diagnosed Bipolar I. Spending time in the mental ward gave a similar level of life-expanding experience as 'first genuine exposure to (out) gay people.' Not just for getting to see just how nasty the medical system is in the USA, but also getting to know some of the terminally-mentally-ill patients.
Having kids really hammered me all the way from centerist liberal to hard-lefty real quick. It drove home and highlighted the horrific influences of modern day capitalism, the patriarchy, and damn near everything else.
Edit bonus for the latecomers:
I cut my parents out of my life after my mother shook my firstborn. There's a bigger story to that but short version is that after cutting them out, my qulity of life and mental health increased 3fold.
Please don't be ashamed! You did the work, and you bettered yourself. Rejoice. I am proud of you :)
Oh I am. Perhaps "most ashamed about who I was" would be more accurate.
On the upside, I think that this collection of factors has made me a more well-rounded person, able to 'speak' the language of the right in a way people who never lived that life don't quite get.
A valuable skill for the social chameleon. I have a similar ability as I grew up in a very small town and have lived in large cities. It does come in handy on occasion!
Someone on the internet once told me "You couldn't be ashamed of who you were if you hadn't grown enough to see the past behavior as problematic, so it's really an opportunity to celebrate your growth." I've been practicing consciously noticing when I'm feeling ashamed, identifying the action(s) I'm ashamed of and reflecting on how much I had to grow to feel the way I do now. When I'm really on it, I'll imagine how I'd have dealt with the situation if it happened today instead of back when... 60% of the time, it works every time.
Tad bit late, and someone already said complimented you but still. Growth is to be celebrated, and something I think you can be proud of.
All to often we judge ourselves, and others, for how they were in the past. But we can't choose how we grew up, only how we decide to grow further. In that sense, you're a better role model than those who support minority rights in a rather milquetoast manner.
Not many people develop the self-reflection you demonstrate with your life.
Probably fair to say life has been punctuated by these experiences when I think about it. I'll share one from a long time ago, an experience that both changed me in the moment and resounded through what I did for years and years.
When I hit senior year of high school I went through a really dumb/bad breakup, and my group of friends disintegrated. Up until that point, I'd occupied an odd social position, of being both a very good student and an extremely reckless person. In high school at least, recklessness got you plenty of clout, so I was not an unpopular guy. I could float between different groups, had friends kinda everywhere, and could get away with nearly anything because how could the kid with good grades do that lol. It meant a lot of folks knew who I was, and me becoming single meant a whole lot of new attention. I was in the band (I played a saxophone) and one day I noticed a flute player looking at me some type of way. She was very pretty, but wasn't someone I'd really associated with, because she dated a guy who was scared of me and herself had a kinda mixed reputation. Her boyfriend and I butted heads earlier in grade school, and I smacked the crap out of him, was the story there. The same day I noticed this girl looking at me, after band practice, I watched her boyfriend throw some kind of tantrum and speed off without her. I offered her a ride, she accepted very happily, and along the way she asked if we could stop at a park, so we did.
For a long time we just talked. About a lot of different things. I wrote before she had a pretty mixed reputation. It was pretty typical high school shit - girl has male friends, therefore, half the women at school called her a slut, and folks wanted to believe it so it stuck. The truth was that what guys she did date were not fun folks, and Scared-of-me-Boyfriend had a propensity to talk shit when she didn't go along with stuff he wanted. Practically everything folks said at school was wrong in some way, if not just an outright lie. At some point the conversation died down and we just looked at each other for a bit. I remember a moment in which she said she felt something she couldn't put words to, and I told her how I felt something similar. I'd encounter this again in life, over and over - sometimes you meet someone and there's just an attraction. An intense, physical sort of attraction, wordlessly recognized and overwhelmingly present. No one was there to stop us.
We would meet up every weekend pretty much across the year and for a month or two after I graduated. We'd only ever meet in the evenings, after whatever stuff happened in our own social groups, because we both didn't want folks talking about us. As time went on, it almost became an in-joke - let's see how wrong everyone is this week. I existed outside the gossip sphere and she liked poking the bear, so we'd compare what we'd heard and make fun of people for lying/making shit up. As we talked though, it also became clear how unfair it all was. She didn't really do anything to begin with. While she'd antagonize folks at present, originally nothing really happened except a boyfriend being a big piece of shit. I was the only person she actually did anything with, because I had always been respectful, and was known not to gossip. "Safe" was the word she used, and I told her I was happy I could do that.
Our evenings would stretch across the night, often with us coming home just before sunrise. We'd talk, for hours and hours, with occasional breaks to work out some of that mutual attraction. We'd compare notes and laugh at the dumbasses making up stories and being petty. Sometimes we'd go way out of town and shoot guns, in the woods, at a junkyard, wherever. You could do that where I lived if you knew where to go. We'd bring each other things - snacks, trinkets, band stuff, etc. Outside of that time we each had our own social groups, our own friends, our own realities playing out, and over time we really came to understand ourselves as looking into things from outside. Above and beyond the bullshit, so to speak.
The experience of this really shaped how I understood people, and more or less stopped a reckless streak before it happened. I was still reckless, mind you - it's a wonder I didn't come out of this with a kid - but contained to the one person, the one behavior, with a lot of positives. I was happy, too. That woman understood me better than anyone I'd ever known. And yet, we both understood, there is no future in what we were doing. She wasn't going where I was going, I wasn't doing what she was doing. When I graduated it would be over. We just accepted it, and had fun. But too, in getting to truly know her and in telling our jokes, we both got to observe just how completely ridiculous other people could be. How they'd just make shit up, add details that never happened, say whatever outrageous thing got them some attention with no care for the expense. They never did figure out what we were up to, but said all kinds of things about her. We'd shout our memes at each other between classes just to see if anyone would catch on, but they never did, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. As an example, my ex would tell folks this dumb story about having a dream about me cheating on her. I never did anything like that (never in my whole life, I can say today). It was a stupid way of trying to drum up attention. My friend and I called this "the dreamcheat", and occasionally shouted "YOU'RE DREAMCHEATING" to amuse ourselves.
After I graduated, for about a month or two we continued to see each other. The very last time, we each thought to bring the other a big gift basket and had a big laugh over it. Wished each other the best, and hoped that for each of us the future would work out. I went on to college, met tons of new people, and got myself thoroughly immersed. She had one more year left, so as it naturally happens we drifted apart. Until one day I got a phone call from her.
This was about six months into my freshman year. I got the call in my dorm room and answered immediately. For a few seconds I couldn't hear anything, and then, a voice. A voice, but not words. It was her voice, that much was there, but for the life of me I could not make out what she was saying. I said it must be a phone issue, and tried calling her back. Same thing. There just wasn't anything there I could understand. So I said I'd reach her on Facebook. When I sat down to do that, and found her profile, I was confronted with a shocking reality.
I'm not going to spare it, but heads up, this is pretty rough.
The first thing I saw was a photo, of her on her birthday. She was in a motorized wheelchair. Her head was tilted, slumped, and her mouth hung open. Her eyes were not focused. There was a small tube in her ear. Her arms were bent, hands twisted, fingers curled. The cake had the word "miracle" on it, with a single, thin candle. The room was very brightly lit, like a clinic, and her mom was there with a smile that had a lot of tiredness behind it.I had to sit there for a while with that. I cried. I looked through her profile a bit to understand what happened. She was riding with someone, a guy who was once my neighbor, and he did something incredibly stupid. He was speeding along the highway, and while breaking 110, hit a semi-truck. They both, somehow, survived, with him coming out of it able to heal completely. Not true for her. It was indeed a miracle she was still there. But she could no longer speak, she couldn't move much, and there hadn't been much change since that new reality had settled in. A flood of memories hit me. The stories we told, the jokes we had, the gnawing anger at the unfairness of things. I worked myself up a bit, and called her back.
In that call, I told her what I'd seen, that I understood what happened, and that I was sorry for the calls before. I asked if I could just tell her some things, and she responded well enough, a gentle "hmm!". I told her about how much it meant to me, to have someone to talk to, who saw the things I could see, and how much fun I had with the jokes we told each other. Each time she laughed, it's like time stopped, because in those moments she didn't sound any different. Each time was like being shoved; a quick, intense burst of feelings. I couldn't maintain very long like this, so I brought it to a close by telling her how I'd never forget. As we'd talked about, our lives were going in completely different directions, so we understood it probably wouldn't be that we would keep in touch very much. I was also beginning a new, serious sort of relationship and you know how it goes with "exes" with that I'm sure. I didn't consider her an "ex" because that wasn't how we defined our relationship, but expecting someone else to understand is a tall order.
I did though, check in from time to time, and saw that she did end up improving quite a lot. The last time I saw some photos, besides the wheelchair she didn't look much different to how I remembered her, which made me cry in an entirely different way. By that point in time it wouldn't have made much sense to reconnect for a variety of reasons, so I left it there and carried the memories with me.
This whole experience set me up to look at things a bit differently. Arguably, it set the course for a lot of what I would do. Because I had gotten to see so clearly behind a veil, it made me more aware of the presence of many veils. And because I'd had the experience of such a positive, encouraging sort of relationship, it meant I could handle myself better as I navigated those. It didn't save me from a life of reckless, debaucherous nonsense mind you but it did mean the character of that wasn't quite what you might think. A lot of that nonsense was nothing but positive. I was painfully aware of the moments in which I had been the asshole, because of this experience. In moments when I'd feel some type of way, angry or vindictive over a bad time, I'd remember her, and shape up. "Shape up", because as I had been so clearly shown, whatever bullshit was going on in the moment could drastically, completely change, so instead of dwelling on the negative feelings I'd set out to bring the situation to a stable place. It also meant I would give folks some extra benefit of the doubt; a bad reputation could just be a lie, after all, and sometimes it was.
This experience, in two parts, had an immense impact on me and I think changed a lot about how I would behave afterward. I was a pretty wild person and would continue to be, but this experience meant I always tried to be that wild person without it coming at anyone's expense. I had the proof it was possible. Arguable how successful that effort was, but I tried. There was still plenty of growing to do too, so over time more experiences honed and shaped my perspective. But this, I think was foundational, a piece that persists until today and continues to affect a bit, how I go about engaging with people.
I think there are two that come to mind for me. One is, having been raised religious, I distinctly remember the moment where I came to peace with my lack of faith. My dad would always tell me that it was "better to believe in god and find out that he doesn't exist than to not believe and find out that he does" or whatever. I eventually came to the acceptance that just pretending to believe wouldn't change anything in that regard, and that if there actually were some kind of supreme being, that it would judge me on my actual thoughts and actions, and not based on whether I believed in it or not. If this supreme being was so vein that it would punish me simply for not literally bowing down to it, then I wouldn't want anything to do with it anyway. That overall realization was very freeing for me.
The second was where I realized that I didn't have to blindly subscribe to all of the issues on one side of the political spectrum. Yeah, I always have to vote for someone who doesn't align 100% with my beliefs, but I can still look at issues individually instead of just subscribing to a bundle of beliefs that come packaged with one political party.
Did this have any effect on your life or worldview outside the religious sphere? Did this impact how you saw people around you, or did it cause any existential reflection?
It did and still does cause me to see people differently when it comes to their religions motivations. It makes me wonder how many people truly believe in the religion and god(s) that they prescribe to, as opposed to using it purely to attempt to justify their beliefs and/or just participate in a community of people who are like-minded outside of their actual god faith.
In general, I am all for people having the individual freedom to believe absolutely whatever they want, and supporting (or not supporting) whatever they want, as long as they're not forcing everyone else to prescribe to their viewpoints and not preventing others from living their lives. So taking an outsider view to organized religion always makes me wonder what someone's motivations are when it comes to participation in religion. There are certain aspects that I admire of the concept. One is that it provides a possible answer to questions to which nobody definitively knows the answers. The other is the sense of community that it provides, that is difficult for adults other ways. But that can be used with (IMO) negative impact to the people outside of that community.
It's hard to put my thoughts on this into actual words, but at high level, the separation of actual religious faith from religious community definitely made me view the world a little differently, and makes it a little more complicated for me as to if/when religion is a positive or negative thing.
This line of reasoning reminds me of this interview with Stephen Fry.
Haha I had a good laugh at this. But yeah, that's pretty much how I feel when it comes to religion.
Even though I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember, I still had inklings of this idea for quite a while, and it's not an uncommon idea. One of the things that broke me out of it was realizing the fact that even if there were a god, the Christian depiction of god would be just as likely to exist as anyone else's, so believing in the Christian god isn't really hedging your bets at all. In fact, it could turn out that the real God hates, and is offended by the concept of the Christian god, and punishes anyone who believes in that concept, while being ok with atheists, since it's a rational belief from our point of view. Wholely possible, and just as likely as a Christian god who punishes you for not believing in him.
You could spend a bunch of time trying to wargame this, but in my opinion it's better to just go with the evidence.
Pascal's Wager is I think the first official coinage of idea. It's something I struggled with too, but it really comes down to "you can't force yourself to genuinely believe something you don't genuinely believe." If you're only believing in god because of game theory it feels like it wouldn't really count anyways.
My favorite response to Pascal's Wager is Pascal's Mugging. I don't have any weapons, but if you don't give me all of your cash, you will suffer infinite pain and torment in the afterlife. But if you give me your wallet, you'll be repaid with infinite everlasting bliss instead. It's the exact same thing as the Wager, but with two key differences—I'm a tangible being that you already know exists, and you only stand to lose whatever is in your wallet, rather than decades of dedicated worship. If the Wager is a reasonable argument for you, then PM me your credit card details.
I've made a number of significant jumps (not so much boolean switches) in my life. Without implicating from which to which, perhaps a more suitable explanation is from certainty to a more nuanced stance:
Abortion, euthanasia, organ donation, child free and having kids, IVF + gametes donation and surrogacy, mixed families, LBGT, military vs pacifism, existence vs nihilism, religious fundamentalism vs pan-religion.
Strangely absent from the list: I never felt like I could honestly embrace any shade of atheism.
That's relatable to my experience over most of my adult life. I had profound changes in my views in my late teens/early 20s, but the decade or more since my beliefs have merely become more nuanced. I was a hardcore sectarian of insert_leftist_political_tendency_here, but now have a blurry generic lefty view. I was a bitter atheist who was mad at religion, and am now agnostic (was raised as a rightist Christian fundamentalist.)
I believe that life experiences really give one a lot more perspectives.... Whether that's growing up, or moving away or travelling or your peers bringing new perspectives. If we keep accepting new people and opening our eyes to their experiences, we could live to 500 and still be changing our minds / developer deeper nuances. So long as we maintain our love for other human beings.
I'm curious about the atheist part. Why do you feel this way about it?
hmmm, I think it has a lot to do with my experiences, coloured by my upbringing. (TLDR: much of the best and most curious experiences of my life are best explained by a non-flat / materialistic universe.)
To quote myself answering a similar question
One of my favourite movies, Hot Fuzz, has the premise that a certain small town in England has an extremely high accident rate, and an abnormally low crime rate. : ) The townspeople see nothing wrong with all the accidents, but an outsider observer who is used to seeing murders and violent crimes find the string of "accidents" extremely unlikely. There are certain types of atheists and theists who insist the other camp are full of evil idiots....but I don't believe that to be true. I think people are basically good and kind and intelligent, who have existing ways to interpret the many data points of life, choosing some to add to their plots, and discarding others as random noise.
Sir David Attenborough, whom I admire greatly, have trouble reconciling between parasites that hurt little children with a benevolent God. Sir David has seen any number of miraculous and beautiful and convergent and wondrous things in the natural world that weave together a joyous planet full of splendor, but none of the myriad are enough to convince him of the benevolence of God. All the beauty and order and synergy do not plot onto the supernatural -- the worm in a child's eye is as real of a data point as the heart of a blue whale - they are part of the natural world. The supernatural either do not exist, or they must answer for each an every crime and flaw before they are allowed worship.
On the flip side, I have trouble reconciling between my experiences and a cold, uncaring universe. How does the natural world explain kindness, altruism, cooperation, self sacrifice, patience, humility, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation?
Which, I supposed, brings the next question: how many horrific experiences and disappointments would I have to experience before I will change my mind and say, you know what, no, there is no god and this is a cold, uncaring universe, or worse. That's the whole premise of the story of Job, I guess: terrible things happen to a blameless man - does that change what he believes to be true, or, if there is still a god, should he curse this evil god and then kill himself? I would hope that when difficult times come, I will have to answer for every kindness I've received or seen others receive before God is allowed to not exist.
I hope that the explanation is not too unsatisfying. : ) thank you for giving me the opportunity to put my thoughts down.
Thank you for your response. I'll be honest and say that it is unsatisfying, but I don't want to debate you on this subject unless you wanted to. I feel like this post isn't the place to do so.
You say you jumped stances and mentioned abortion. How do you feel about it today and how has your view changed?
:) thank you for your honesty. I heard a cool phrase recently and I'm stealing it forever:
The experiences that render me unable to take atheism seriously will sound like coincidences and cultural indoctrination and self delusions, no doubt. We cannot convince others of the rationality of our love, hope or faith. Sadly, the absence of these, of hate and despair and doubt, are much more convincing and easily communicable.
But thank you for taking the time.
On the abortion issue, (no flame please) I've gone from totally pro choice to reluctantly pro choice. I can't side with the actions and implications of the pro life side even if I ideologically agree with them on life begins at conception. So it's murder, okay, but how is eye for an eye going to bring those babies back to life, or improve the life of the mother? We live in a universe where, if we choose to hit someone with a stick, it does not become a sponge, nor does the ground open up and swallow us whole: let the Lord judge, because only He has all the facts, only He is just and only He has life and resurrection and healing as part of His restorative justice system. We were specifically commanded not to judge, only to love, to redeem, to walk the extra mile and turn the other cheek and visit those in prison. I dont see pro life politicans doing that, I only see them crying out for blood and condemnation. I can never be a part of that.
Friends of mine, a Christian couple, went ahead and adopted a baby so the young couple wouldn't have to make the tough choice. The young mom finished highschool and is going to college. The young dad is supported and thankful to be given this honour of fatherhood. Turned my friends' lives upside down but they put their money where their mouth is and took on caring for three strangers into their homes even though they have other struggles of their own. I am nowhere near that saintly and so, who cares what I think, I'm just a selfish bystander who couldn't have done what they did.
A less morally centered and more politically charged opinion of mine is that neither parties care for women and children, the abortion issue is a blunt tool for power and handy tool to distract from class warfare. This view hasn't changed since my youth.
I don't want to put words in u/Chocobean's mouth, but the critical part is this to me:
We all believe foundational "dots on the board" about reality without proof. These are the axioms of our worldview. For instance, we tend to agree the external world exists; there are things outside my mind that exist. Of course, I may be wrong, reality may only consist of a single disembodied mind, my mind, and I am hallucinating or dreaming at all times. I may be in a simulation or may be otherwise deceived about the presence of external reality. Generally, most philosophers believe in the external world, because it's hard to have a useful discussion with others if we can't even agree on this point.
Another example is we generally believe other minds exist. We have absolutely ZERO evidence they do, everyone besides you may be a philosophical zombie and you are the only conscious person in the world.. We generally accept that other minds exist for pragmatic reasons, and because, it really feels like they are there even if we don't have any evidence for it.
Besides the external world and other minds, there are countless other things we may decide to believe axiomatically, like objective morality, or maybe even some sort of theism.
I want to get back to this quote:
You can imagine a skeptic that goes further than the materialist and has even less dots on the board. They are skeptical that any other mind exists, and won't change their mind without evidence. They are skeptical that the external world exists at all; they can't trust their faulty senses. They have virtually no dots on the board.
At bedrock, we construct a worldview starting with these unprovable axioms and build up. I think we are not only justified in believing that these axioms actually reflect reality, but should realize that these axioms have instrumental value in helping us chart the otherwise incomprehensible reality around us.
I appreciate the insight.
To say we all believe without proof would be grossly misunderstanding science, evolution and overall collective knowledge, just as it would be untruthful to say there is zero evidence to say other minds exist. There is partial or full evidence that minds exist based on tests and experiences about consciousness and our definition of it.
You cannot believe that science, evolution, or even collective knowledge exist without first believing that the external world exists. It is precisely through your access to the external world through your senses that you gain access to the discoveries of science. If you were skeptical of the existence of the external world (it may all be a dream, hallucination, simulation, etc.) then you'd have no reason to trust your senses when, for instance, you use them to read a book about evolution. You could never have evidence external to your senses to justify their trustworthiness. The greater point is that there are assumptions we must make axiomatically in order to get anywhere.
Maybe you can make the claim that it is impossible for philosophical zombies (p-zombies) to exist, which might entail some burden of proof, but if it is at least metaphysically possible for p-zombies to exist, then it is impossible for you to tell the difference between a human with phenomenological experiences from a p-zombie, since the only human whose phenomenological experiences you have access to is your own.
I've had a few watershed moments in my life.
Turning against organized religion: I grew up near some hyper religious households, and remember a day when some Christian girls made a younger Hindu girl cry by telling her over and over that she was going to hell. I was talking to my scout leader (decades ago) and religious mentor why they would do that. He answered that sometimes you have to tell people the truth. This was someone I admired greatly, who was a doctor (rural area so that meant a lot then), and philanthropist, who did life saving mission work in developing countries. And he was justifying making a young Hindu girl cry. I couldn't reconcile these facts, and that's when I decided that organized religion was problematic, and it's more likely to make good people justify bad things, than help bad people to be good.
Work: I worked as a lead contributor in many roles, director of engineering, etc. I learned the short coming of technology first solutions when I supported remote and rural operations related to rural broadband and serving place bound populations. Went and got my MBA, marketing degree, etc, and my world view has changed substantially in how I go about solving problems. The tech bro's don't have all the answers.
Children: when my youngest child turned one, I had a moment of reflection where I asked myself what I really wanted in life. My answer was to see my grandkids graduate college, or at least go off to college. I know I can't control that completely, but I can do a lot to help that along. I lost weight, started regular exercises beyond my already active days, took my preventative healthcare more seriously, and struck a different work life balance. I used to be the type to have a cot on my office. Not any more.
Bonus: the day after Thanksgiving years ago when my youngest daughter was 5, I was sitting in the dimly lit dining room listening to Christmas music, and she comes up to me and asks me to dance with her. Just as we start, Nat King Cole's "The Christmas song" came on, and we slow danced quietly to the whole thing, me hunched over awkwardly, then picking her up and holding her. Afterwards she ran off to play with toys, and I went and got all misty eyed to my wife. I (jokingly) decided that she needs to have a winter wedding so that can be the song for the father daughter dance. Of course she will actually choose how to live her life, but I still get misty eyed whenever I hear that song and envision a white winter wedding.
That just reminded me of an instance that changed me quite a bit. I was a sophomore in college, coming from a right-wing fundamentalist/evangelical Christian upbringing, and I had always had issues with the exclusionary and apocalyptic parts of it. I was talking with a good friend who was gay, agnostic-leaning-atheist, liberal-not-leftist, and whom I really loved (still do!).
He was asking me about Christianity and Jesus and the afterlife and so on, and he asked me the perfect question: "So, do you think I'm going to hell if I die right now?"
I went with my gut, my honest belief, and it was "no! I think there are other ways to heaven, and I don't think heaven and hell are necessarily concrete nor afterlife related." I remember thinking that my then-girlfriend was a bit appalled, and maybe even disappointed at my answer. It was that moment of direct human connection that let me stop caring about justifying my spiritual practice and beliefs to other people. But instead of a move to the more entrenched antisocial side, it was a move to a pro-human and loving side. It's still where I'm comfortable. He also respected my answer and it strengthened our bond.
Interestingly, though my girlfriend's reaction I first made me feel I had dropped the ball on "witnessing" to this guy, she later told me she agreed but had to wrestle with things. Now we're married 16 years, with two kids, and much farther to the left than before, raising our kids with total religious freedom, and only sharing what we believe when asked. And we don't always agree on that stuff, and that's okay.
It's interesting that your move was from organized religion is a force for good to force for evil, rather than a change in the belief about the facts. Was there never a full belief in the truth of your Christian tradition? For instance, if it was indeed true that the Hindu girl was in imminent danger of being tortured for eternity, certainly it actually would be justified to do anything in one's power to save her from this fate. Similarly, tackling a girl to save her from a bus barrelling towards her is morally righteous, even if she is injured; however it would not be righteous if the bus didn't exist. For us to rightly conclude that making the Hindu girl cry was wrong, this necessarily entails that we believe that the claims of the danger she is facing are factually inaccurate.
By the way that bonus story is very sweet.
There are a lot of concepts I grappled with as a child and a young man. I grew up rural and poor, dropped out of school at 13 to raise my kid brother, worked split shift as a dishwasher, and had parents with their own demons.
The pat answers that Christian religion offered never really resonated with me. There is a plan, mysterious ways, etc. If that is the case, my plan was shit and I want to speak to the manager. It created a baseline level of doubt. At the same time, I differentiated individually spiritualistic or individual worship, from organized dogma. I started to see a difference between people who used faith to explore their own morals, privately, and on their own terms, from those who outsourced their moral authority to an organized church.
I didn't see those private practitioners, even really devout ones, justify the more hateful aspects of religion. I'm sure it happens, I just didn't see it.
So in my scenario, it wasn't really an examination of facts as an examination of the process of religion. Even if one accepts the particular tenets regarding accepting Jesus to enter heaven, that doesn't require hateful behavior. Whether someone has a spiritual Awakening and finds God or not, is a problem for God and should be a part of the plan. If you believe God wants you to nurture faith in others, it can still be done without hate.
I don't know if that answers your question or not. Have a great day!
Thank you for sharing your experience!
But organized religion and Christian tradition are two separate concepts. They overlap, yes, but belief or disbelief in one doesn’t necessitate a belief or disbelief in the other. And how one chooses or does not choose to proselytize is altogether a different and equally contentious matter in and of itself.
:Not saying this has anything to do with what the original commenter to whom you addressed your question might believe or think, only noting something that caught me as interesting about your comment.
Specifically, to judge that it is wrong to make a little girl think she's going to hell, you need to believe that this isn't actually the case. I agree that she isn't hell-bound, and agree that this is morally wrong, but if I actually thought she was in danger of conscious eternal torment if she didn't change, then I would think that it would be wrong not to attempt to save her by any means necessary. This doesn't have a bearing on whether the belief comes from an organized tradition or not.
While you're technically correct, my experience is that this kind of absolute conviction is hard to come by without the reinforcement of some kind of in-group community.
I think things are probably different now than when I grew up in the 80s and 90s. Back then, it was mainly religious groups cresting this kind of dogmatic certainty, but now there are non-religious in-groups (like some online communities) that can perform this function as well. It would be interesting sociologically to try to understand the similarities and differences.
I don't think I've ever had the singular coming-to-god moment you're probably more looking for, but...
Feeling shy about crying in front of my dad at Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, then looking up at him and seeing him crying at Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, made me feel a lot more open about my feelings for art and feeling closer to him.
Reading about psychologists needing to confirm gender affirmation surgeries scared into me that my gender questioning was something to hide.
Watching End of Evangelion warped my view about signal and structure of everything that affects me.
Reading "nice guy" stuff in college made me realize how passively I assumed things would come to me, and to be more proactive.
Going the opposite direction in a fling with a friend and losing them by being a weird, pushy, clingy asshole trying to spend more time with them got me, hopefully, a little less entitled.
In the middle of the bazillionth depression mode about my gender, reading Bokura no Hentai got me to finally open up to people about being genderfluid.
Spending a night with my one week old baby and my wife back in the hospital made me feel, ironically, like a proper adult and a parent with things under control for the first time.
First of all, love reading these stories. Self-growth and self-reflection are such amazing human qualities, I love reading any story that involve them.
As for myself, I most definitely did.
I had a tough childhood. We weren't really poor, but we couldn't really live comfortably. I had hand-me-down clothes, never traveled, had 1 car for the whole family, a small house, etc. On top of that, my parents never really loved each other and they divorced when I was 11. We (my brother and sister) ended up staying with our dad because he had the best salary, but my dad was horrible, man. He wasn't the violent/drunk type. He was the sneaky manipulative type. Good Christian, friends with everyone, charming, social. With us? Terrible. He used to come at the house for his three kids, made supper, then watched TV. That's literally all he did. We did all the chores all our lives and would get absolutely manipulated into thinking we were horrible human beings if we didn't tend to the house... while he did nothing.
Fast forward a couple years and I ended up reading a book about manipulators like him when I was a teenager and, sadly or fortunately depending on your perspective, my relationship with him would never recover from that. The book helped in protecting yourself from people like him and the fits he would throw would only be worse from that point on, but, at least, I got to keep my sanity.
After some years, while I had moved away from his house, I kinda had the thought "what if I'm like him?" So I reread the book with the perspective of myself. "I am the manipulator". While I found that I wasn't as worse as him, there were definitely parts of my personality that were manipulative and it really hit me like a truck.
For the next two years or so, trait by trait, I slowly deconstructed and changed those manipulative traits to become a better person and I must say that I succeeded. For example, I used to really like sarcastic humour, which is fine, but when you really think about it, sarcastic humour can really be abrasive at times, to the point where unless you really know the person, it can easily come off as insulting. I didn't really realize that and in a way, I kind of used sarcastic humour to push other people down and raise myself up. Initially, I forced myself to add "I'm just kidding you/teasing you" or changing my tone and, eventually, I just stopped using this type of humour entirely.
It's a small example, but when you added all the other traits, I wasn't really the kind/nice person that I wanted to be and I'm happy to say that I am now much closer to this ideal than I was back then.
Thats a great story. Kudos for the self realization and introspection that has fostered your journey.
Probably the most prominent in my memory that I still tell people about over 20 years later... It was probably the first month of college and I was sharing a room in the dorms with one of my friends from high school. This was a local tech college that was only a 15-20 minute drive from our respective parents' houses, but it was large enough to have dormitories and we both thought it was a good idea to get out of the house.
My roommate was a pretty good skater, and would go out 3 or 4 times a week back to his old stomping grounds. One day he comes back and has a giant black eye so a bunch of us mob him and ask for the story.
He'd get random girls that would flirt with him and they'd text every once in a while. This particular day he had told one of these random girls that if she wanted to see him skate later he'd be at X place. So he's out there and this girl has been watching him for about an hour when her boyfriend pulls up, which my roommate had no idea about. The guy was being a prick and really wanted to fight instead of... ya know... get a new girlfriend... so despite my roommate trying to de-escalate the situation, the guy just throws a sucker punch.
So we're all sitting there while he's telling this story and go "no way! What did you do?!". And he says "I laughed."
That's my moment that changed how I see the world. In those two words, he taught me something no one could ever even begin to explain to me prior to that point: you are in charge of your actions, and your emotions.
The only way I ever knew to respond to someone hitting you was: swing back and get your ass kicked, swing back and kick their ass, or don't swing back because you know you'll get your ass kicked then have it eat you up inside for weeks to come. But my roommate had this completely different option on his quiz sheet. And it was amazing. It changed the entire dynamic in that fight with a simple laugh. Instead of being someone who just got in a fight over some random girl, he instead took the power away from the aggressor with a simple chuckle.
I always think about it when I hear someone say "they made me do it". No - you chose to do it. Or "they made me mad." No, you chose to react with anger. You're in control, if you want to be. Don't give them that power. Don't let someone else control your emotions.
I've been through quite a lot of them, like others have been saying. I've talked about most of them here on Tildes already. The latest one was a change of diet, to a whole foods plant based diet.
It took a lot for me to want to change. Probably the biggest motivators for me were the health-related ones. I was suffocating at night from sleep apnea and it was causing my quality of life to get really bad because of it. I had a machine to help with it but the pressure was so high it was extremely uncomfortable and I could only sleep for about two hours before I would tear it off of my face. Beyond that I was also seeing that I was starting to develop some inherited health problems; I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high A1C, and was approaching pre-diabetes. I have spent years before this seeing my family suffering from these problems, and even though I'm still in my early mid 30s, both of my parents are dead, and my older sister is dealing with all of these problems (and furthermore she just got her teeth pulled and fitted for dentures). She's just 7 years older than I am.
I don't mean to be grim, but my youth was spent with me seeing the appeal in death. I never really feared death so much as I did the pain that would preceed it. But nothing is more terrifying than a slow death. I'm seeing that in realtime right now with my grandmother.
It's only been around a year since I have made the change, but my health has improved on all accounts. My blood tests have all come back clear since then, my blood pressure has (only minorly) improved, and I just got reexamined for a lower pressure for my sleep apnea problems. Most notably, I've lost a lot of weight. I've got some circus tents I used to call shirts in my closet right now. I have more energy; I can walk significantly longer and have been known to take walks in the morning from time to time.
None of this would have been possible if I didn't first change the way I thought. A whole foods plant based diet is a vegan diet, and I was previously eating meat for almost every meal of the day (often for snacks too; I loved beef jerkey). This meant not only cutting out meat, but any dairy or animal products and most all processed foods and even salt. I actually chose to go this way because it was such an extreme change; it was supposed to be a way to reset the way I thought about food, and boy did it.
Basically the entire world has big problems with food, both in the ways it gets produced and the relationship that people have with it. It tends to get swept under the rug because it's just part of the status quo; food is, after all, a foundational part of culture. When we get taught in US history classes about Upton Sinclare's The Jungle and how it managed to get people up in arms about ensuring their food was unadulterated we tend to think, "how on earth did things have to go this far until people started to make a fuss about it?" But there are still so many problems with food production today that basically get ignored. Regardless of if you are vegan or not, everyone should be concerned with the countless issues of factory farming and the environmental impact our extreme consumption causes. Dairy is thought to be this wholesome thing, but we produce so much milk that we barely know what to do with it. How is it that nobody has realized that the dairy section in the markets have become so huge, or that dairy products are in virtually every processed product in the store as well? Even plants have problems; the world is consuming huge amounts of oil and that's lead to deforestation as oil palm plantations expand - global consumption of palm oil alone has quadrupled since 2000.
As a result of this I have come to appreciate the role of individuals as a means to global scale change. By no means do I expect everyone to become vegan, especially not overnight, but I think that some basic changes like reducing meat consumption or processed foods can cause some massive improvements - not only to the environment or marketplace, but to your own personal health! Big changes can't happen if everyone's implicit in the the problems at hand. The only path forward is to make those good choices yourself and be a positive influence to those around you.
Some years ago when I worked at an animal shelter, the worst day of my time there made me a vegetarian.
Dead cat.
Specifically, an entire litter of stillborn kittens. It struck me that their placentas looked exactly like raw steak. That did not make me want to eat steak. I cared deeply for those animals, I mourned when they died, and seeing those kittens flipped a switch in my brain and made me figure out that all of those cows and pigs and chickens are exactly the same as those kittens. I never knew them, and still I feel awful knowing that if they did live, it was a short, tortured existence.
Since then I've had to get used to the fact that most people simply don't care about, like, anything. It doesn't matter how many people you show Dominion to, they'll just do the same thing I did ten years ago: ignore it. Pretend it isn't happening. My favorite thing is that as soon as people find out I'm vegetarian, or I bring it up on the internet, there's this compulsion to defend their decision to eat animals. It's annoying when people say shit like "I'm gonna eat two burgers tonight just for you," but at least they're open about not giving a shit. It's worse seeing someone act like they care about animals before going home and making chicken soup.
Anyway, if you're going to eat meat, do the world a favor and buy Elwood's Organic Dog Meat. The Chihuahua sausage is inexpensive and super tasty.
I think quite differently about eating animals. I don't think it will be very productive to debate it here, but I wanted to say that the Elwoods site is amazing and thank you for posting it. I found myself a little disappointed that it was not real and quite curious about lab steaks. I'm not sure if that makes me a monster, but I think it does make me at least somewhat internally consistent.
My new commute takes me past chicken farms, and frequently see the trucks driving too and from the slaughterhouse. They are in open crates, packed very tightly, and they look incredibly unhealthy. I can take comfort in knowing I’m not contributing to their suffering (I’m vegan), but the situation is still immensely saddening.
The thing that most turned me away from eating meat was watching videos of animals loving hugs and snuggles from humans. Cows are basically big dogs, they love being cuddled. But videos of chickens, ducks, pigs, even fish ALL loving getting touched and giving affection just like my dogs really made me see them in a different light.
I grew up in a small town in East Texas. I grew up in an upper-middle-class household attending a very conservative, non-denominational church (think Southern Baptist if that helps you locate it). This was a place rife with racism, patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia, but I would not understand most of that until much later.(1)
My parents are both excellent models of human kindness, forgiveness, and fairness, so I avoided the most overt manifestations of those problems in myself. And being a white male, those structures are made to support me, so a lot of the suffering they cause was invisible to me growing up, as was the fact of my own privilege.
A turning point for me was George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests, which led to a group of people at work going through some material from the Smithsonian about race, bias, and privilege (It doesn't look the same, but this seems to be where that material ended up - it is very good and thorough).
This started me down a road where I learned how different my lived experience was from so many other people, and how this had kept me from seeing or understanding social problems and suffering that was happening all around me. I read Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, which started to give me vocabulary to name things from my growing up years that had made me uncomfortable for reasons I could not, at the time, understand or express, but that I understand now were the markers of structural racism.
All that was happening while we were locked down during the pandemic. For almost two years, we went almost nowhere in person, including church. In college and after, I had always been a sporadic church attender, driven more by peer pressure than conviction. I had always chalked it up to social anxiety and "sinful nature", but it took trying to return to in-person church for me to realize that my values were so at odds with my idea of the church that trying to be there made me physically ill.
This negative feeling is more about the problems of patriarchy and homophobia that I observed and participated in growing it up than with the church my wife and I attended when all this was happening. I eventually realized that for me, church was a place I expected to be judged for my actions and a place where I expected to have to do and say certain things I didn't really believe in order to belong. Nevertheless, I have rarely set foot in a y church in the past few years.
Another thing happening at that time was the pro-Trump posture of so many Christian churches and organizations. I was unable to understand how it was possible for people to want to support someone who was so morally bad. This caused a lot of disillusionment for me. I spent some time in the "exvangelical" space, which helped me understand the nature and danger of the Christian nationalist movement. In that space, I also learned a lot about the origins and functions of patriarchy and homophobia in Christianity.
I am still, and probably always will be, deconstructing my complex feelings about the role of organized religion in my life, but the effect of all this has not been a turn to atheism. Belief in God (and Jesus) is still important to me, but I am pretty cautious with organized religion. I think the two biggest problems are: first, something about the structure of many churches that creates and reinforces a tendency toward self-righteousness; and second, a tendency to look past suffering and not take any responsibility for it. That is, waiting for the kingdom of God to be given as a gift at some unspecified time in the future and dismissing (or minimizing) suffering as an inevitable product of a sinful world.
My engagement with faith is very much at a personal level, and the drive that it creates is a drive to manifest the kingdom of god here on earth in the present moment in all the ways I can by easing suffering, promoting equality, and making space for people to find their own path through life. To be fair, there are a lot of people who participate in organized religion, Christian and otherwise, that do this as well. There are also a lot of people that reject faith or religion who work hard to make the world a better place. I don't think there's anything special about what I'm doing except that it's my journey, so its special to me.
(Cribbing the following from a previous post)
If there are people for whom this resonates, I'll share some resources that were helpful to me:
The Straight White American Jesus podcast helped me understand the rise of Christian Nationalism in the US which accounted for a large part of the gap between where I found myself personally and the direction that the Evangelical tradition I had identified with were going. In particular, the Orange Wave series helped me understand the degree to which this shift in direction has been organized and orchestrated since long before I was even born. Dan Miller's It's in the code really helped me put words to feelings I had had for years, which helped me start to unravel them. That unraveling is still a work in progress, and may always be.
SWAJ helped me understand my anger and understand the structural flaws and manipulation behind the Evangelical movement, but it was the Followers of the Way series by Stephen Backhouse at Tent Theology that helped me find a more peaceful place and understand that not all theology is the Evangelical school of thought I had been raised with. It gave me some powerful and helpful ideas that let reclaim faith out of the baggage of religion. One really important one was kenosis, the idea of "gentle spacemaking" from this podcast. Another was the idea of "principality" as an organization formed for a purpose that has forgotten its purpose and started to exist as an end unto itself. Unfortunately, Stephen is no longer doing the podcast, but the past work is still up and very worthwhile. The first season of tent theology and the sermon on the mount series are my favorites.
In January 2020, I made one small decision to try and better myself, and that set off a chain reaction that ultimately made me realize that up until that point, I was just living as a bystander of my own life. I slowly learned that, even as one small individual, I have the power to influence not only my own life, but the world around me.
I've grown so profoundly since then, and continue to grow every single day. It has involved a lot of introspection, a lot of vulnerability, and a lot of checking my own ego. I'm still just a learning computer, and still very flawed, but every so often I look back, and I'm so proud of how far I've come. I'm so grateful I made that first small choice.
Oh my god yes. I even sometimes laugh to myself about how different I am now at 31 than I was even at 26, much less 18. Nobody in my life right now would believe me if I told them, but in my early 20's, I was the quintessential right leaning atheist neckbeard. Now I'm a very left leaning woman who cringes at the very thought of who I used to be, it almost doesn't feel like that was me at all, since I'm so radically different from that person in almost every regard.
I grew up in a rural, religious, republican family. I was always a good egg, but it was pretty hard when growing up trying to reconcile my own feelings on world views, political issues, and equality vs what people around me would say and do. I don't remember ever hating minorities, LGBT people, etc. growing up nor do I remember being "pro-life" at any point or anything like that, but I think I probably did or said some racist or homophobic things without thinking much of it, considering how I was raised. Even when I went to college in a very left leaning area and started leaning more left, myself, I was still holding on to some old ideals that I want to barf about nowadays.
There was a definite and specific point where it changed for me: when I finally accepted I was transgender. That fact forced me to reconstruct my entire world view, since now I'm somebody who is discriminated against and somebody who benefits from social structures that are generally created by or associated with left leaning communities. I did a complete flip of who I was in the last 7 years, and even who I was after my first couple years of transition is completely different to who I am now, now that I sort of found my footing in the world (the first couple years of transition was a lot of overcompensating for me, since I was excited that I could finally try to be myself, though I didn't know what that meant).
So yeah, for me, it was maybe more sudden, quick, and radical changes compared to some, but it genuinely felt like opening my eyes for the first time when I started to find out who I was and what that actually means.
Life altering change? Yeah, that would describe a near fatal motorcycle accident my daughter and I had about 23 years ago.
We were out for a slow Sunday cruise, she was only 13, the passenger on my big Honda cruiser. We pulled off onto a country road shoulder to discuss where we might go next and then I pulled slowly back onto the road. As far as I recall we were turning at an intersection when we were hit by a minivan going highway speed. We were both smashed very hard on the left side and went skidding across the highway's oncoming lane and fortunately were not hit by traffic.
I was unconscious for less than a day but when I came to, my best friends and a family member I hadnt seen in years were in the room so I knew the accident must have been serious. But my daughter was in a coma for 3 days and the docs didnt know if she would make it.
This understandably scared my wife to death and the first life change was that she got deeply and intensely angry, which, combined with other longstanding friction in our marriage, led her to her handing me a divorce later that year. To be fair, she'd lost her brother in an auto accident that same year so her ability to cope with the stress was already diminished and she just couldn't handle our accident. It also meant she forbade me from ever riding a bike again which I accepted even though riding was my biggest passion in life. So externally, my life was forced to change.
But internally, the biggest change was in my outlook on life. Its hard to describe now, but I do recall overwhelming joy at just being alive. And the understanding that if it was my time to go, I would've been gone, but it wasn't my time, so everything past the accident was really a bonus. It took away the fear of dying with that profound understanding that when its your time its your time, but up til then, you have nothing to worry about.
There were many life changes after that, all cascading from the accident which precipitated the divorce. I became a single man, and had some very rough and lonely days til I got back into the dating pool. I ended up finding my wife, the new love of my life, moving 500 miles, changing careers, making quite a shift in lifestyle really.
Honestly, I wish I could recapture the absolute joy I had of just waking up alive. It was... extremely intense and invigorating, a euphoric high. Never experienced that before, probably never will. Maybe its similar to the 'high' that adrenaline junkies feel when they do crazy risky things, I dont know, but it was wonderful to live with that sense of elation, almost invincibility, every day for months and years. Life has settled down since then (thank goodness) but its definitely never going to be the same.
Epilogue: My daughter is fully healed and it was partly due to her stay in the hospital that sparked her interest in medicine. She now has a Ph.D and and is an MD prepping for her final certification exam so we joke about how the accident couldn't have damaged her brain TOO badly. Definitely a life changing moment for her too. And my ex finally got over her anger. We're amicable and do celebrate holidays and birthdays with our kids and grandkids. All's well that end's well.
Yes, it's not anything profound and I didn't have a single moment where this happened, but I changed greatly when I was about 18/19. I basically feel like I was a different person before then. Within about a year I figured out that I am gay (yet I was still very confused about this, because I am also asexual or something like that, honestly after so many years I sadly still don't really know), started growing out my hair, found my love for music, started to learn how to play guitar... I basically feel like I got a personality. Before that, I feel like I was just nothing really. I remember going to school, not really bullied, but also kind of an outcast. I was incredibly "generic", default clothes, default hairstyle, no hobbies besides playing games, friends who also did nothing besides playing games.
I am going to reminisce/word-vomit about realizing I am gay here now. Figuring out that I am gay was very difficult for me. Not due to any direct homophobia or anything, only because I didn't understand myself at all. I kind of wish I understood exactly how I came to understand, but I remember coming across various gay media, and at first just finding it to be a joke (people gay was basically just funny to me before that, a punchline, same as for all my peers), but over time I started to relate to it. I remember listening to Pansy Division, seeing gay visual novels, reading gay web comics, looking at gay memes and not really understanding them and so on. At some point I somehow accepted it.
I remember first meeting a guy I was chatting with on a local gay dating site. This wasn't Tindr, or Grindr or anything like that, but a local site that exists only in my country, that really was very much from the 2010s. It was summer and we both a free day. We went out on a short walk. And after some time we sat on a hill, and I very sheepishly somehow asked if I can touch his leg. It felt good to do it, even though it was nothing. After some time just sitting around, now not touching his leg out of embarrassment, there was a kindergarten class walking around us. I remember feeling a bit scared just that we were two men sitting so close to each other, but I also felt rebellious and free. Anyways, I went outside with this boy just once or twice again, before he decided he didn't really want to go out with me again. Sadly, I heard from a friend that he died recently. Man I feel sad again now.
Soon after (or somehow during?) that I came out to a few of my friends. I still remember the moment vividly. We were in a pub, and when I said it, I looked at my friend and she just grabbed her beer and drank, another friend just said something akin to "no, really?" and so on. I just didn't fit the mold of what my friends imagined as a gay guy. I honestly also felt like I didn't fit it. I was still on dating sites though. At some point I had my first "sexual" experience, meeting a guy who was actually from Brazil. Over two meetings nothing too big really even happened, but I realized that I enjoyed spending time with him, but that I didn't really like the sex. It felt great to sleep with another man in bed, but it didn't feel so good to sleep with a man. I kind of knew that I might be somehow asexual or something, but that confirmed it more to me.
Despite that I kept being on dating sites, and going out with basically anyone who agreed to. I met so many people, I met basically every gay guy around my age who didn't just want to hook up in my city, and no one really wanted to keep talking to me mostly after exactly meeting me once. I realized that I have to be the problem. You know -- if you run into idiots every day, you're probably the actual idiot -- I realized it was probably the same with me. I either had/have a terrible personality no one wants to deal with, or I am ugly, or they realized my vibes were off from not wanting to have sex, even though at the beginning I didn't advertise that anywhere. That sounds very self degrading, and I just want to say that I don't think I have self image issues, I am just not boyfriend material I guess. Over time being rejected so much, and so single made me sad, and I later mostly given up on dating sites, as they seemed to not be actually useful, even though I longed and still long for companionship.
Of course from all the people I met I also met some cool people. It wasn't all bad. A few of them I actually met multiple times. There were some cool experiences. Once, one boy even attempted to kiss me, but I just was so awkward that it probably put him off. I gained new friends, most of which I later lost again, but I still frequently talk with one friend for example, even after around 5 years.
Today, I still feel like I don't really fit it. I still have a lot of doubts about being gay even now, I feel kind of like an imposter, because I don't have any desire for one night stands which is what most people on dating sites feel like (I know it's not everyone). Or really any desire for sex honestly, and sex seems like a huge part of the gay community on the internet. This is now quite off topic from the original things I was writing about though... Apologies, I didn't expect that I'll write down my life story here...
Circling back, I sometimes say to my friends that I don't relate with myself before that time at all. Which none of my friends relate with. Still I feel like something like this is probably pretty common. But, that is also I am also still the same person, for example I kept my love for videogames, and I started to learn how to program before that time too and I am still just the same human being with mostly the same body and so on. I guess I'll just stop writing things here. Thanks for reading.
Yeah, I can totally get this. For me it's not so much that I didn't have a personality before I came out as it was that I wasn't allowing myself to be who I really was. I was so deep in the closet I was watching gay porn and just thought it was a fetish. The possibility of me being gay wasn't real to me until I decided to roleplay it on a MUCK. The main reason why I came out was because I was terrified of what my life would look like if I stayed in the closet; I finally understood what a happy future would look like and I realized that I couldn't attain it from where I was.
Don't worry too much about putting a label on your sexuality. I also have a very low sex drive most of the time, but I don't consider myself to be asexual. There are a lot of reasons why sexuality is at the forefront for a lot of gay people, but don't think that it means that you have to conform to that image. There are plenty of other gay men who don't have very high libido.
In the past two months, I realized that the person I considered my oldest and most loyal friend is a judgemental cunt that should have no place in my life. The "dossier" against him was built in my mind for the past 20 years or so. He is jealous and does not waste any chance to humiliate me and make me feel bad. He is egocentric, it seems that everything I do is only relevant in how it affects him. When I express my discontent, his only reaction is to make accusations. He never relaxes, is addicted to debating, and must always "win". That "friend" told me in no uncertain terms that I stole his ideas for my stories (I didn't). When I told him I would no longer discuss my writing with him, he was offended. How egocentric must one be to fail to understand the seriousness of an accusation of plagiarism to an aspiring writer? The fact that he expected me to forget about it is insane.
Since I realized that person is no longer a friend, a lot of things are rearranging in my mind. Things I thought I had forgotten, like the way he treats his wife when he's drunk, and the day when he "jokingly" slapped her in the face in front of everyone. But also things about myself -- how much of my own personality was attached to that asshole? How many insults did I convince myself that were something else? How much of my self-image is intertwined with him? An insecure moralistic asshole that resorted to diminishing me in order to feel good about himself? Also, why does he only seem to be like that with me and another former friend who is also black?
This is so much worse than ending a romantic relationship. My longer romantic relationship was 5 years! My "friendship" was 25! I look at the mirror and I don't know what I'm seeing. Every time I met him, it was like a fight to behave perfectly and avoid his harsh criticism. I now know that he is a bully, he was always a bully. I am free. That is exciting and scary.
I wouldn't know where to start. I was raised mormon and was afraid of pretty much everything as a kid. Realized religion is bullshit as a teen, went to a ton of rock concerts alone (because I didn't have any friends), at one I made a friend who became my bestfriend for thirty years. We did drugs. I loved LSD. And was no longer afraid of much and was an atheist.
I found out I have epilepsy in a shitty way. I had a grand maul while driving on the freeway, and fractured the four lowest vertebrae. And after lots of rehab, and dropping out of college. I got to where I was moving around ok. But I wound up with a lot of anxiety issues. And the meds didn't agree with me and my neurologist was an old asshole, who lied in our meetings. And even said I had epilepsy because I have 36 deadspots in my brain. I have two deadspots in my left hemisphere, one the size of a nickle the other the size of a dime. 36.
But because of that, I wound up back with lots of anxiety and the depression I had as a kid returned. I was no longer out going. And just recorded and mixed rock tunes and rotted at work for years.
The anxiety slowly got worse over time, and alcohol was the only thing that effectively dealt with it. SSRIs barely took the edge off my depression and basically did nothing for my anxiety.
I got accused of a crime I didn't commit. Which sent me spiraling. During which time I was diagnosed with PTSD. At that point I was a server and a kitchen manager at a steakhouse. And frankly, I was angry and burned the fuck out before the accusation. I had a complete nervous break down and quit. I got a new doctor and at the same time met a new girl. I went from being a huge nervous wreck to finding my spine again. Having fun and being adventurous. And she wound up proposing to me. I never thought I would get married, so it was really wierd.
We wed, and after a few years. We moved to Sunnyvale, CA for her carreer. At this point I felt on top of the world. I had quit smoking and had gotten into shape. I was with someone I loved, who very much loved me. We were a team and everything had been going our direction for quite some time. And we were living somewhere with basically perfect weather, there were seasons, but they are mild. And I got back into hockey. It was great! Some days I still miss it.
I was living my not quite but as close as I'll ever get to my ideal life, anxiety was gone again. No depression. The worste I felt was content, it was amazing. Until I had a cramp in my right calf. And I went to the hottub to work it out. Except it wasn't a cramp. It was a blod clot and I freed it. We were in the elevator going to back to our place, when I thought someone reached around me, it gave me the fucking creeps, fucking bad! It was really an awful feeling. And then I realized that it was my arm that I was reacting to. I cracked a joke about it to my now ex-wife. And she flipped out at me and told me to stop doing that. I didn't know what she was talking about. I had just cracked a joke and laughed. And then she went, 'oh fuck!'. And I said 'what? what the fuck?' and she said I needed to look into the mirror. We get to our place and she immediately drags me over to look in the mirror. And the right side of my face is drooping, it's like it wants to slide off. I'm in the middle of a stroke.
She says that I really creeped her out in the elevator because I was making grunts and snorting sounds, with weird gutteral laughter, I thought I was talking and laughing.
In the hospital, I get a bed, take some tests, and I'm lying there with an IV in my arm. I can't feel my hand. I notice that I can no longer feel it very well. I call the nurse, she comes in the room, and I voice my concern and she just says, 'it's nothing' and leaves. My hand starts feeling fuzzy and then slowly folds into a fist and my right arm slowly twists up. I'm freaked the fuck out as it's slowly becoming a fist. And since I'm guitarist, it might be the wrong hand, but I start doing the usual stim type guitarist thing of tapping fingers to my thumb in various patterns trying to keep it moving. The nurse still blows me off even though it's at half a fist and I can't open it all the way, [Fuck O'Connor Hospital in SJ].
My wife's a badass and keeps all her fear, anxiety, and sadness when around me controlled. And is hanging out cracking jokes and just trying to distract me. My best friend, from the concert, he starts texting me one joke after another, for hours. Just a constanct barage of bad jokes. Which is great, anything to not just think about where I am.
Afterwards, I get home with a tweaked arm and a hand that now has only one mode, fist. And a script for anticoagulents.
The next week my wife's job sends her to S. Korea for four weeks for some sort of China, Japan... medical regulations training. And me with a hand that doesn't work and a fucked up head, spent a month all alone. I was video conferencing with my wife. And I was completely bat shit crazy. I was a fucking mess. And at one point she asked when I ate last. It was a struggle for me to figure it out. It had been six days. And that's when I found out that my stroke destroyed my sense of hunger.
It took a few months but I got my arm back. And my hand mostly back, sadly it will never be the same. In fact, after spending months getting to where I could open my hand a not be in a fist. I no longer could make one. So I had to train myself to make a fist again too. It's permanently fucked up. And I stretch and do excersizes to keep my right hand working like it does these days. Which overall isn't too bad.
But my anxiety, my self esteem, my world collapsed. I lost my swagger. I lost my interest in life. And I became depressed. I did my best to have fun. And I love the bay area, so I did have a lot of fun. Going to Sharks games, and to Great America and shit. But my legs had been cut out from under me. And I was really struggling with finding who I was, where I always knew before that.
That ultimately led to my wife divorcing me. And doing so in a really shitty way. She wanted to redo our honeymoon for our tenth anniversary. Two weeks before she says she has a friend going on a road trip and would rather do that. So she spent our tenth anniversary on a road trip with someone else. Talk about losing my swagger, ego, confidence, and pretty much everything else. I never would have let that happen if I hadn't. But that was the end of my marriage.
And after losing my marriage. I became a lost, confused, broken man. Who needed to a reboot. I moved to Tampa, where my brother lives. Got a job as a mail carrier. With the divorce wrapping up, my exwife says I should get checked for autism. Well, the last couple years of my marriage, having lost my ego and spine with the stroke. I was no longer the person she fell in love with. Which is sad, but understandable. But instead of just accepting how she felt and moving on. We spent a couple years where she was rewriting our history so she could discard me guilt free. And I got gaslit, during the years of these revisions. It got to the point she was trying to get me to get checked out for early onset alzheimers.
So when she said I should get checked for autism. On the one hand, nobody knew me better than her. On the otherhand, I can't trust her and I don't know if she is basically calling me names.
I decide to get assessed, that way I won't waste my time debating it. At the last minute, I take on an ADHD and I don't know why. I've never even remotely had any inkling of having adhd. But I'm glad I did. My assesment came back AuDHD.
I was overly open at that work. And after being sent to help someone else out because I was done early. I got called back to the place I picked up mail from her. Paramedics had her on oxygen and strapped to the board. I supposedly had an accident with her and left the scene, and I was told the union wouldn't defend me. So I lost my job.
Then a couple weeks later I see my psych for the first time. And she gives me adderall ir. And upon taking it, I can't argue about having ADHD. for the first time ever, my head was quiet. I always have 1-3 songs playing at the same time. But there was no noise, just the constant narrator, only without all the other chaos, my brains narrator was actually whispering. It was really weird.
So I'm back to finding my legs. I hate that I have to start over in life at 48. I have pretty much nothing. That I helped my exwife push her carreer, while neglecting my shit. And now I make poverty wages and she makes over 160,000 a year. That hurts. And it's weird finding out all those years of anxiety and depression, most of that shit was caused by having ADHD and understimulation. My god I wish I had known thirty years ago.
That's one hell of a situation. Did you do physical therapy after the stroke? I hear it does wonders
Yes I have. Two main ones: no longer a Christian (after growing up conservative/baptist/etc Christian and being in the church 20-25 years) and did a 180 politically (right -> left) and both of those things are tied together pretty closely. The latter being the catalyst for the former. It was a journey, probably over a 5+ year period. And I've never felt better. Ever since, I've felt a huge sense of freedom and clarity that I've never before experienced.
Same here.
I left Christianity with a Bible in my lap. My brain finally gave in and accepted the self-contradictions were problematic.
Mine's nothing too crazy compared to most everyone else's, but I'll share anyways.
When I was a teenager in high school, I had a certain dream... granted, the appeal of $$$$$$$$$$$ was a factor. It was to be some sort of engineer, and by the time I was 25, I'd have a kid or two. Note that I was raised in a relatively conservative area, a very countryside area, and this was the early 2000's- about 2003, to be more specific.
Went off to college, and after struggling with math a ton- specifically Calculus (turns out I may have gone to shitty colleges)- being an engineer was out of my mind. But college was also when I was exposed to multiple cultures around the world, and I thought it was freakin' cool.
So I get through college, and I was hoping to NOT fall into the statistic of "your career is completely different from what you studied"... but to get a job in what I studied (geology, specifically), it required more training and more $$$$ to be spent... after I was already reeling from student loans, no good jobs where I lived, and then car payments and insurance. I was employed, but I HATED my hometown.
Now, for some reason, I REALLY wanted to see the Tokyo Olympics. Whether that was due to my love of anime in the first place (the Japan influence) or just wanting to be involved in an event that hundreds of thousands of other people (wanting to be part of something larger)... don't really know. I will admit that I was finding I had a certain preference for the kind of romantic partner I wanted about this time too... it ultimately boils down to, I was able to go to Japan as a tourist for 10 days. This was back in 2017.
THAT was my life-altering event. I went to some of the very touristy places in Japan, and it came down to two things: I knew I HAD to get out of my hometown, and that I fell in love with Japan, HARD.
One of the biggest issues that had been holding me back is I had gotten down to only a couple hundred dollars in my bank account. Meaning, that if I chose to move anywhere in the States, it would be a HUGE risk of moving... and then finding no way to get income- meaning being unable to pay rent or get groceries, etc. Meanwhile, my ticket to Japan meant that I would be hired by a company, and (at the time), making DOUBLE what I was back in my hometown. So after several failures... I found a way to move literally halfway around the world.
Now, let me be perfectly clear: it hasn't been a perfect life over here. The industry I'm in is starting to die with the rise of AI, and the salary has stagnated while everything else has increased. I also hoped that by my current age I'd have found a romantic partner... but this country has some things that aren't legal in America, and they've become a major vice of mine. I originally though that I'd be a family man back in America- my family is still in America, and I don't know how much longer my mother will be on this Earth with various health issues (my dad passed away many years ago)- and so many of the things that I thought would be my future have been completely changed.
Yet at the end of the day... I decided that I want to live as much of a hedonistic lifestyle as possible. Still try to be a good person... but life is short. So I want to enjoy it as much as I can before my own time expires, and no one can 100% tell you what happens after you die. Religions might try to do this, but religions are also based upon a time when humanity was at much smaller numbers, and they were trying to keep humanity from wiping itself out.