I was raised without religion. I understand that my grandmother was raised an atheist, as in “this family does not believe in God” type of organized atheism. She just didn’t take a stand one way or the other with me because she wanted me to have my own opinion, and she opposed my Mexican grandparents when they wanted to baptize me in the catholic church.
There were times when I hated the fact that I wasn’t religious, just because it was one more thing that set me and my crazy family apart from the rest of the Country, and I felt I was already different enough. Now I’m glad that she didn’t force religion onto me. I’ve seen how it messed with my friends and I’m already messed up enough.
I did go to Sunday school with my best friend sometimes and I remember once there was a work sheet handed out that had this scenario: “Emily’s mommy is in the hospital. Emily prayed really hard for her mom to get better and God made her better. In response to God’s kindness, Emily should A. Go have fun with her mom, god brought her back for a reason B. Go straight to church and pray to God to thank him” C and D were obviously wrong. I answered A, probably because the picture of A was Emily smiling in a park or something with her mom and B was Emily all alone in a dark, empty, church. I was told I was wrong, and of course I objected because it was stupid that God would want a little girl to be alone in a church while her sick mom was unable to spend some of her (possibly) last moments with her child. I was incensed and there was some sort of fight, which is when I decided that Christians are morons.
I was probably more effected by it since my own mom was indisposed (read: streets homeless drug addict) and I came to the conclusion that if there was a god that would give her back to me, that meant that he could have done that the whole fucking time she was gone, and that he wouldn’t have ever had to take her away in the first place, and that meant that he was just playing with me like you would play with a cat with a string except that instead if a cat I was a little girl and instead of a string, it was my mom who I hadn’t yet learned to hate and distrust and who I worshiped and who left me with my grandma and a douche bag that hit me so she could continue to live a life unfettered by the responsibilities of parenthood.
Needless to say, I was violently atheist for a few years early in my tweens/teens, only to realize that I hated the christian god so much it was like a religion in its own right, and I calmed down a little bit.
Around this time (12/13) my mom was around and she was really into eastern religion. And by that I mean to say she would appropriate the most attractive parts of foreign spiritualist traditions, claim that they were without the faults of the judeo-christian traditions and use the bullshit tropes of said vague spiritualist amalgamation in order to justify misbehavior and self-righteousness.
It seemed like a good idea, so I did the same until about age 15/16 when I began to notice how any structured belief system could lead to hypocrisy and moronic behavior, not just judeo-christian ones. I came to realize that there were bastards in spiritualism the same as in christianity and moved away from eastern spiritualism, and towards a stark theory of ethics, built on evidence, examination and conclusion.
Later on around 18, after my mom went back to drugs and I moved into Kate’s garage, and found myself struggling with how to treat a woman who was a good mom for at least 7 years of my tweens and teens, until she left AA, and everything fell apart. After years of fighting and resentment, we had finally got a good relationship, and then she started to say little things, that wormed their way into my head because I trusted her completely. She told me she was worried about how I would be able to support myself as an adult. She criticized the things I was most proud of. Because I wasn’t expecting anything, because I had thought that we were fine, that I was fine, she wore my self esteem down to where I was an A student, high achiever etc who thought that I couldn’t do the simplest task by myself since I was such a moron. I felt like I couldn’t make logical conclusions, that I had no ethical basis for valuing myself. I couldn’t conceive of a life where my mother wasn’t cell for cell a part of me.
At that point, I needed something that would be a constant in my life even when I was completely lost. Being in a 12 step program myself, I had a ‘higher power’ but this is when it really came into being more tangible to me than vague. I felt that not only was there a power greater that myself, but it cared for me specifically and wanted me to get out from under the depression and self doubt I found myself in. It had love for me like my own parents never would or could.
This worked until after college graduation when I realized that everything I had worked so hard for and felt so intensely about was for shit and I had an english degree and 40k in college loan debt with no job prospects at all, with little hope of them being in a related field.
I managed to get a job in my field, but it paid me less than I needed to be able to pay my bills. I felt like a failure. What little savings I had was going down the drain while I worked at a dead end company with no sign of an upturn. I wondered what this could mean, asked myself why I had even bothered to go to college. It wasn’t fun for me like it was for so many of my more privileged classmates. I worked all the time, slept very little and ate shitty food. By the time college was over, there wasn’t much left of me and I badly needed to slow down. I was driving an hour each way when gas prices were over $4 a gallon, then working as a tutor after work and on the weekends. I was totally drained, lost, and convinced that college had been a mistake. Then a man I looked up to, who I felt was an example of the type of high-achieving self made individual I would want to grow into killed himself. That combined with the debt, and the perceived failure of my young life left me feeling completely abandoned by a god I thought had cared for me. I wondered what the purpose was to life if not achievements, money, friends and family. I realized that it had to be something else that I didn’t think I possessed.
Looking back, I was right where I needed to be. I had lived my entire life chasing one hollow, materialistic token after another, thinking each time that ‘this one’ would be the one to fix the massive list of shit that’s wrong with me. If I just proved I was smart enough, I wouldn’t feel so stupid, if I could just prove that I was worthwhile, I wouldn’t feel so worthless. And of course, each thing I did was good for awhile, but the glory faded because the truth is that when a person feels like that, nothing is enough, nothing ever will be enough because the problem isn’t quantifiable. I needed to be enough for me, by myself with shit or without it, sane or insane, educated or ignorant, attractive or repulsive etc. There had to be an inherent value inside of me, and while it was nice to believe in a higher power that believed I had value, I needed to believe I had value directly, completely and without hesitation.
My relationship with my higher power is much more quiet than it was in college, maybe even subdued. Maybe I don’t feel like I need my god as much as I did then, or maybe I feel like it’s not as artificial as it was. Either way, I think that people forget that with or without God, horrible things will happen, nothing is sacred (pun intended). The advantage that I feel I have is that I at least feel like god is a constant for me. When everything is different, when there’s no frame of reference for me, I have a god that is always nearby. My belief in a higher power is a good companion in hard times and good ones, but during the hard times I also have to keep hold of my self worth, and the knowledge that I do have inherent value, independent from anything I will ever do, be, say, or feel.