I am in a different dark suburban Texas room than I was in the last time I wrote, but because I like starting this entries by saying with where I am, I am in a dark room in a Texas suburb.
I had a nervous breakdown last Sunday. I don't use the phrase lightly. My diaryland friend, i-am-jack described these moments as permanent fractures. And this was that. I will write about that experience later. It's still a little too tender to even think about write now. My brain is still bleeding from the wound.
But my friend Bethany gave me a writing prompt and asked that I write something of it today, just as a means to get my brain moving again. She asked me to write about what my life would be like if my dad wasn't a pastor. All other experiences being the same, just not without the church stuff. So here goes:
If my dad were not a pastor, if I had not spent the majority of my waking moments from birth to my mid-twenties in a church, If the first book read to me as a child was not the bible, I would no doubt be different.
It has been said that one's conception of God is based, at least in part, on one's conception of their father. I don't know if that's true for everyone, but it feels true for me. But I think that's because my father was held up all my life as a representative, a messenger, a voice of God on earth.
He was already God by proxy. His authority was God's authority. His abuse was God's abuse.
If this was not the case, then maybe I could approach God now in a different way. I could see God as the father I needed but never had. I would not see God as an extension of my dad's anger; I would not see my dad as an extension of God's fist.
I could maybe be more easily enveloped into the loving care of the perfect divine. Maybe I could hear the word father without cringing. Maybe I could see past my genetic history to becoming a loving father myself.
But then what of me? Would I care so deeply for the rest of us who have felt rejected by God? Would I be so obsessed with the wrestling, the questioning, the seeking to understand spiritual things? Would I be so determined to find spiritual wholeness even if it kills me?
Or would I just be another broken man creating broken children and spreading my toxic brokenness all around? Or would I be able to move past things, find healing easier, have some nice job now and a wife and friends and board game nights?
I don't know.
As I write I feel the weight of God.
It sometimes feels like a comforting blanket. Right now, it feels like a boot.
As I write I feel the weight of the word father.
I chew on it, mash it between my teeth, roll it around on my tongue.
But then I spit it out.
I have mixed my metaphors.
weight and taste.
The heaviness of a bitter mouthfeel.
The flavor of oppression.
I look through the glass into all the parallel dimensions and the millions of different lives I've led. I see me happy and whole in some, even more damaged than now in others.
I don't have a choice to choose another life, but if I did I don't think I would go anywhere else at all.
Not because I'm happy here. But because I don't want to let the bastards win.
10:11 a.m. - 2018-11-14
Recent entries:
This Post Has All the Trigger Warnings (Seriously Though, Be Careful) - 2019-01-24
I hate feeling like this. - 2019-01-18
I am so lost right now. - 2018-12-12
brain full of static. - 2018-11-29
I don't know. I don't know. - 2018-11-16
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