Saturday, November 2, 2013

One thousand pages of erased text.

There are times in life when one has to step back into the shadows, for everyone's sake.

When I write, I open up a gaping wound in me. I don't even know where it came from, when it started, or what made it get to this level. I just know that for most of my life I have been fighting, criticizing, thinking, and butting heads with people, an action I cannot currently sustain. Every action costs something, and the cost for writing on this blog, a blog specifically made for cognitive dissonance, is too high for me right now. I am exhausted on every level possible, and something has to give.

I cannot write honestly on this blog anymore, something I swore to myself I would do when I started it. If you've read faithfully, you've seen me journey from faith into faithlessness, from Christian to atheist and, I suspect, into something else entirely. I cannot even claim atheist anymore, as it implies way too much about me that is not true. I respect my Christian friends and family, I am bad at being part of tribal groups such as the popular atheist movement, and I sometimes suspect that there is a god, when I feel like it and when I can successfully dismiss the horribleness that's happened to me from my memory for a time. I am this complex, insane, contradictory, irrational individual, and I've been able to bring about dissonance because of that. However, labels are no longer sufficient for any of that, and I think that means I'm healing. It also means that I cannot be bothered to defend anything constructive or even have a theme for writing (formerly Christianity), and that is suicide for an endeavor like this. Christianity cannot be my theme anymore because it is, for me, writing about a period of abuse. At some point, you have to stop. You have to let your decisions stand alone, you have to criticize yourself privately and with people you trust, and you have to heal in order to be objective again. Even though I stand by what I have to say about making my decisions for objective reasons, that is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and especially in writing on this level. There comes a point in life when you must make peace with the fact that you are screaming into a void, with trenches on either side filled with people with weapons pointed at each other.

I do not believe in myself anymore, I do not have the conviction that anyone should take what I have to say seriously, and I'm honestly sick of everyone pointing weapons at me. Until I can heal, it is time that I journey by myself for a while. I don't know what my next move is as a writer, but you can be assured that I am incapable of giving it up. If you enjoy reading what I have to say, watch for another update from me here at some point. Until then, from an absolute no one to all of you who have journeyed with me,



-Daniel