Abstinence and atheism

It's been awhile. I've failed to document my spiritual journey over the last several months. It's been quite the trip. I've stopped going to church - the idea of walking into a sanctuary makes me want to throw up. I've had enough of the belittling people who aren't from our tradition, inflating our own egos to how fabulous we are, and the general denial that all human beings are part of the divine.

I'm definitely not an Adventist anymore and all morality is up for grabs. I do not have time for any theology or morality debates that do not improve the state of the world or show compassion to humanity. Yes, I know I sound a little angry, but really, I respect everyone who still goes to church and firmly believes in Christianity. I wish you all the best of luck on your journey, but my path is diverging. It's time for me to seek out my peace and transformation in new pastures - like Buddhism and Atheism.

As part of that journey and with me getting back into dating again, the issue of abstinence has come up again. I've been on several dates in the last month and in the back of my mind, I keep wondering how long these guys are going to be cool with not sleeping with me. It's like there's this expectation that we'll sleep together on the 2nd or 3rd date and it freaks me out. I feel like I'm the only one out here who is still a virgin and it has nothing to do with religion anymore (I abhor abstinence only education, by the way). I feel antiquated and silly and yet it just does not seem like a psychologically healthy thing for me to do. I have enough attachment issues as it is to add the gravity of sex into the mix. And yet with every guy I go out with who believes in committed relationships but not marriage, my optimism for marriage is waning and with it, my resolve to remain abstinent. Am I the only one out here?

Is anyone dealing with the issue of abstinence from a non-religious perspective?

Breakup link and orange soda

If you know anyone who is going through a breakup right now - send them this. Now!

Ahem. But while that is interesting, it is not what I came here to write about today. I came to begin my story. Before I do that, however, there is one thing I want to note here at the very beginning because I'm a little afraid of where this might go and how I might feel about it. So before I begin, I'd like to anchor myself with one strong image I've had of myself over the course of my short lifetime. Growing up, regardless of how dark the cloud hanging overhead got, I always saw myself in my mind's eye as a laughing girl flying round and round on the merry-go-round. My hair, blowing in the breeze, the background whizzing past in a blur, and me, along for the ride laughing at it all as it passed.

That image is what I always want to come back to. Things get hard, memories can be painful, but when it's all said and done, I am that girl on the merry-go-round.

And so it begins. I was trying to recall my first memory last week. I remember a lot of stories that people have told me but my own first memory is very clear: orange soda. I remember it because I was startled by how bright it was. I remember the circumstances surrounding the orange soda but it's unclear to me how much of that I remember and how much of it are things other people have told me. For example, I know I was lost and I remember getting lost because I was looking at gum ball machines. I was obsessed with gum ball machines growing up. I had let go of my mom's hand to look at some gum ball machines in a store and when I looked up, she was gone. We were visiting family on the Eastern shore and were at the fair on the board walk so I wandered around trying to find my mom and proceeded to get myself even more lost. A police officer found me, bought me the orange soda, and we sat and waited for someone to find my parents. The stories that others have told me about this event include my dad running back to the house to see if I'd gone there and since he was gone by the next year, I must have just turned one when this happened.

Hmm. It's interesting. All of my first memories are from visiting family on the Eastern shore. I don't remember the house we lived in until I was two or moving to our new place, close to my grandparents. But I do remember a lot from that house by the ocean. With the exception of getting lost, these are happy memories. I remember getting rug burn sliding down the stairs, being fascinated by the servant's stairs in the back of the house, the antique toy room my uncle had, the smell of fresh coffee in the morning and grape soda. I remember eating ice pops and salt-water taffy constantly. And there was this big ceramic poodle in the living room. I remember the study and how much I loved to sit in there and look at the antique objects. The three balconies. Hanging the flag and singing the national anthem. Standing on the catwalk that overlooked the restaurant next door and serenading the patrons with crazy kid's songs. I remember my aunt being very sick and we would go stand by her bed and talk to her. She'd give us new bathing suits and toys. She had a cool carafe next to her bed and we would fill her cup with water from it. I remember the wallpaper in the bathroom and how pink our room was. I remember finding a starfish on the roof one day. Sand castles, buckets, sand, sand, and more sand. The patio outside in the back where we'd rinse off after spending the day at the beach.

There are stories I've been told about our summers there. Like my cousin's and I swinging the front gate open to block the sidewalk and trying to charge people $0.10 to pass. Parades and pools and curling up on my grandfather's lap as we sat on the balcony watching the sunset. One of my favorite pictures is of my grandfather and I sitting together on a wicker chair, his sweater stretched around both of us to keep me warm.

I loved that house - the way it was laid out, the ocean smell, the way the wood creaked under your feet. I loved my aunt and uncle - they were our favorite relatives reduced in name to simply "aunty" and "uncle". I don't remember how many years we went to see them but for several years we went every summer. Maybe we stopped going when my aunt finally succumbed to her illness - I don't remember. I just remember those memories and stories are filled with sunshine, laughter, silliness, fun.

Completing the circle

I have been doing a lot of soul searching in the last few weeks. That tends to happen when you go through a break up as I have just done. Part of my soul searching was reading Paulo Coelho's "the Zahir" (a novel about obsession). In that book, one thing really stood out to me was the healing power of telling your personal story/history - how it closes the circle.

"I am free, but, as I'm sure you'll understand, therein lies the secret; there are always some stories that are 'interrupted', and they are the stories that remain nearest to the surface and so still occupy the present; only when we close that story or chapter can we begin the next one.'...That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability, or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are." ~p. 185 of the Zahir by Paulo Coelho

As I have been reminiscing about my past in the last few weeks, I find a number of very disturbing feelings coming up about the general trend of my history. Most disturbing of all, the way I feel about my past triggers memories of a story my dad always tells about how he was so mistreated as a child. He was not allowed to express anger and that in turn, ruined his ability to treat people right later on in life. It's a nice story if you don't know him or his parents but the truth behind it all is that he was a spoiled child who could do whatever he wanted and the fact that he blames his parents for not allowing him to express anger is absolutely ridiculous! He's a narcissistic bastard who never had the guts to own up to anything in his life.

It's disturbing when the way I feel about my past triggers that memory of my dad. It makes me wonder if I am failing to see my past clearly. I don't want to turn into the person who internalizes everything and feels sorry for myself. I also don't want to be the narcissistic bastard who uses my past to hurt people around me and act selfishly either.

So I've decided the only way to heal, the only way to truly find the strength within myself to stand on my own two feet, comfort myself, free myself, and change what is and what will be, is to go back and revisit my past. Write it all down so I can look at it, hold it up to the light, turn it around, and put cognitive recollection behind the emotive memories. Only by doing that will I be at peace with myself, with my history, with the people in my life, and with my spirituality.

Fear and loathing

Oh my word this is so hard!!!! How do you go about separating out your identity from that special someone in your life when you've grown up in a co-dependent family? And how do you do it when you're freaking out about moving and finding a job? All of my anxiety about finances and job hunting is getting mixed up with my feelings about my boyfriend right now. And I'm having a hard time separating it all out. All things considered, I've done a hell of a good job living my life up until now and I have to remember that. Yes, I took the easy way out most of the time by relying on the Adventist community for friends instead of developing friendships with non-Adventists around me. But I've taken baby steps away from the co-dependency I was raised with. I moved to a different town, I have made a lot of hard changes already. And now, I've chosen to step completely outside of my comfort zone and stand on my own two feet. To try and find the strength within myself to create my own destiny. But it's hard! And I'm so tempted to cop out again, to turn to my boyfriend and tell him "I expect you to make it all ok again". But that's not what I want! I don't want to need him. I want to be pleasantly happy that he's in my life, and be content with what he has to offer me.

I don't want to define myself by him. I want to define myself. To have my own standards to live up to and more importantly, I want to live up to those standards! But I see the old patterns starting to emerge because of the stress. I see them emerging because when I get stressed out, I immediately see my brain looking for ways to alleviate the anxiety. And it finds that alleviation in old habits of accepting my boyfriend's standards for my own, his way of doing things replace my ideas and methods. And that's not what I want! So I fight. And it stresses me out more because I have to stop and question why I'm thinking about a situation a certain way. Is it because I think that or is it because that's how my boyfriend thinks about it? Am I questioning my spirituality because I've been convicted of something else or is it because my boyfriend is an atheist?

This is hard! But I want to do this! I want to find my own way out of this. I want to sit with this anxiety and not panic, not react, and not beg my boyfriend to fix it.

Abstinence and Marriage

It's true - I'm a upper 20s virgin. It's so odd being a virgin. Everyone around you is talking about sex. They all expect that you're having it and I rarely attempt to correct them because it becomes this major thing when I do.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how I got here and why I've never decided to sleep with anyone. I keep wanting to say it's a religious/spiritual choice and maybe it started out that way. But right now, it's more a symptom of my idealistic ideology on relationships and the fact that while more than 71% (according to this study) of my peers are sharing themselves with others, I think there is something very meaningful and sexy about being able to say you've only slept with one person.

How is this a symptom of my idealistic relationship ideology? Call me naive or an eternal optimist, but I still think marriage is more than a piece of paper. If it was only a piece of paper, I'd be out sleeping with people too. No, I still believe that I can find a man who I absolutely adore and who absolutely adores me - so much so that neither of us would want to indulge in any other attractions we might feel for other people. Marriage, then becomes the method of committing to forgoing all future love affairs with others.

But of course, there are the cynics, the problems. I was recently reading "the English Patient" (and the book is absolutely amazing and almost not comparable to the movie in my opinion) in which the English Patient reminisces about the great love of his life, the wife of a fellow explorer. The explorer and his wife had been life-long friends, married, and immediately moved to Cairo. There, the wife begins to develop a sense of self and identity that her husband does not understand but that the English Patient does. Unable to get a divorce, she and the English Patient begin a torrid love affair. They eventually break things off to protect the explorer but the message of the book is clear: true love is external to marriage (other subplots also indicate this but I won't go into them here).

And it is stories like the English Patient that make me wonder if I would be able to resist a connection that strong? What is it that makes people follow their hearts to the detriment of those they love? Is it merely lack of discipline? Is it truly that we've placed too much emphasis on a piece of paper?

Dear Anonymous

Thank you for saying exactly what I was thinking (see my post on Alcohol for anonymous' comment)!

"seek first the kingdom of God" and the rest are just details. Behaviors - not very important in comparison to seeking the kingdom of God is it?

And yet, your comment has made me start to think about why we become so preoccupied with things like alcohol and other behaviors? I think that we begin to preach that you are not seeking the kingdom of God unless you DO these twenty things. We mark our search by characteristics and outwardly apparent behaviors in order to show that we are indeed seeking the kingdom of God. And somewhere along the way we forgot that while what we DO is important, who we ARE is more important. It's the intention, the purpose that is more revealing than the action itself.

Ahhh. It's all so simple and complicated at the same time. But thank you again for reminding us all that it is indeed the search for the kingdom of God that is the most important.

One month and counting

It's hard to believe that one month ago I was single. That's right, I have finally found that ever elusive spark. Love is strange that way - you go for a long period of time with no connection, you begin to wonder if you will ever find it, and then BAM! it hits without warning.

In only one moment everything got turned upside down. And looking back, I laugh at how little confidence I had in myself to get to this point. Because the man I have met, while not an Adventist (he's actually an atheist) is the most conscientious and like-minded individual I have ever met! We drink comparable amounts of alcohol for the same reason - moderation being the key. He is unusually knowledgeable of religions given that he is an atheist and enjoys relishing in the histories, practices, and ideologies: adopting those that make sense and rejecting those that he finds meaningless. And all the while he respects every belief and behavior I have chosen for my life.

I never thought an atheist could understand or complement me so well and yet it is so.
It raises fascinating questions to me about people and reinforces my opinion that we only hurt ourselves by sticking to stereotypes - insisting that the person for us must fit into a tiny little box that we have constructed.