Trippin'

It was around 6:30 in the morning, and we were sprawled about the room, giggling to ourselves. Heath lay on the couch, chewing on the keychain he'd steadily destroyed throughout the night, and Ron and Amber had flung themselves onto their bed. James and i had made a nest of cushions and pillows and blankets on the floor of Ron &

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Amber's efficiency apartment. The light were all out save the fiber optic Christmas tree (or "Hannukah bush as Amber preferred) and we laughed for ten minutes or more at the idea of what a bunch of kids standing outside at their bus stop would think if they could see the five of us. James wrapped his arms around me, and began to nibble at my ears and neck.

Electrical explosions were going off, just beneath my skin, and the soft stroking of his wet tongue along my neck made me think of fireworks. He was testing my resolve. It was early on the morning of January 2nd, and he was hoping to end my New Year's resolution to be celibate for all of 2000. He failed, but I thoroughly enjoyed his attempts to tempt me from my course. Never mind that I was coming down from my first dose of paper acid, in a room with three other people was not how I was going to go. I thought over the previous night.

James was the only one I had known already. Ron & Amber were his friends, and Heath was one of theirs. No one else in the room had a car, and I had been willing to drive Ron to Sarasota, an hour away, to meet the guy who sold it, so my acid trip was free, once they gave me $5 for gas. When we got back to Cookie Cutter Cove Apartments* where he lived with his girlfriend in a one-room apartment, Ron snipped up the tiny slip of paper into little squares and divvied them up between us. Only after they were all in our mouths did we realize that James had been left out of the occassion. Not to worry, Ron was a pot dealer and there were forty-five pounds or so of weed in his closet - he pulled out an ounce and gifted it to James as an apology for the oversight. I smiled, thinking of how the other three had periodically referred to James as "sober guy," I kept pointing out, "He's not actually sober - just more sober than us" which always brought on a new fit of giggles from the room. The giggles! Why hadn't anybody told me how wonderfully giggly you could feel? At the beginning of the night, as the drugs kicked in, we had laughed for over an hour, over nothing, through tears. I wouldn't have been able to stop if I had wanted to, but why would I want to? This felt great.

We had played with the lights and with textures and at my visual peak I had been "walking through the garden on the ceiling." I remember Ron had pulled the bush out of its stand, casting the color changing lights onto the walls and ceiling. I laid back on the couch and saw how the color played across the popcorn above me, which twisted and morphed and became a collage of leaves - every size and shape and color, big tropical ones, tiny oak leaves,palm fronds, and pine needles. I strolled through the garden in my mind, smiling at all the leaves in turn.

At one point in the evening, it had all been too much for me. The tiny apartment grew stifling, the smoke from five people dragging down a cigarette every ten minutes was crazy thick, and I just needed a moment from all the weirdness - the assault of sights and sounds in the room, so I pushed through the curtain into the corner kitchenette and towards the front door announcing, "I'll be right back. I just need to go find the real world for a moment" - breathe some of the cool January night air outside, smoke a clove without having to give away four of them, maybe just listen to the night. From behind me a voice cackled, "There IS no real world - you're tripping!"

Whoa. It was such a profound statement. My back against the wall, I slid down to the floor, thinking. After a minute or so, I became aware of the hum of the fridge, and after a few mintues more, I started to harmonize with the fridge. I wanted to commune with it, be one with it, sing with it. "Hmmmmm" I intoned, sitting on the floor, my face pressed to the fridge door and my arms hugged around it. Eventually, Heath came into the room to refill his glass of water from the tap, and he asked me what I was doing, and I rejoined the room.

I drifted off to sleep that morning, as the rising sun peaked through the bent and broken blinds, and James made my nerves sing.

Uh, drugs are bad kids. Really. This passage is necessary for the book though. I didn't just do drugs to rebel or make Baby Jesus cry - I was actually usually trying very hard not to get caught. The part they never seem to mention in after school specials or rehab is how much fun you can have. Would I do it now? No, probably not. If I was going to, it would certainly have to be planned (like, hotel room and sitter and carton of smokes planned) and frankly, I don't even have those kinds of friends anymore, and doing drugs was always an incredibly social experience for me. I got into XTC because I loved the "PLUR" (peace love unity respect) movement and wanted to be friends with the raver kids, not the other way around. Just be responsible people, okay?

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God's Plan & Free Will

Here's the briefest explanation I can give for the Christian's duplicitous divine plan vs. free will conflict.

Ahem, when something good happens, it is a sign of the benevolent hand of the Almighty in our daily lives - like when God cured grandma's cancer with the help of modern medicine and a team of doctors, for example, or that time he helped you find your keys when you were stoned & running late to work. When something bad happens, like the Challenger 8 disaster or a landslide in Mexico or Bush getting elected to a second term in office, we're given either fear-mongering & blame (God's doing this because of the liberals & feminists & queers, I tells ya!) or extreme confirmation bias noticing things like how a building full of crossed steel bars could still have a cross standing after having a plane crashed into it, killing more than 3,000 people. When you ask about the Holocaust or slavery or genocide commanded by God in the Bible, you either hear about how God was preventing a worse thing from happening (He had to kill the Amorites! They were bad, bad people & they would have corrupted the Israelites) or about how God never interferes with human free will, except for all those times he makes other people in traffic drive in such a way that I get to work on time despite being stoned and spending all morning looking for my keys.


Oh, and god also appears in pancakes, sausages, and one dog's anus.

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Prayer Bugs Me

My mother never pried. She had faults as a mother, but invasion of privacy was never one of them. She knew the importance of private thoughts. While I think her unwillingness to pry into my feelings left her unaware of the pain and mental confusion I was in for a long time, I have to say I value and respect the choice she made to let me be my own person, with my own thoughts and feelings. I could leave my diary open on the coffee table and know that she'd never read it.

Yet, I always felt better writing outside of the house, somewhere secret and quasi-magical. It was down by the blackberry patch at the creek when I was a small child, then onto a copse of trees beside a frozen golf course waterfall at the first place in Iowa, and either in a tree at the edge of a cornfield or on top of a wall holding back a hill from a parking lot at the second place in Iowa. When we first moved back to Florida, in to the apartments, I would sit beneath the willow tree on the bank of the man-made lake; once we moved into the house in the suburbs, I sat at on the dock at the riverfront park down the road.

So it shouldn't have surprised me, at 20 years old and living in my own place, that I still might feel the need to leave to write in peace. I remember crying, gasping in big tantruming toddler gulps of air, sobbing out loud to Jesus. "They say you won't give me more than I handle, but I'm telling you, I can't handle this! It's too hard. It never gets any easier and it never gets any better. Every time I think it's gonna get better, it just gets worse, and I'm tired of fighting all the damn time!" At the time, I was crying about money and how there just didn't seem to be enough of it. At other times, I cried nearly the exact same script, at the end of my rope, utterly desperate, crying heavenward and begging for mercy. Sometimes things would seem to get a little bit better following one of these break downs, but I didn't seem to be getting spiritual fruit or reaping any benefit for the trials I was going through. I was under the impression that when God tested you, when He gave you all that you could handle, when you survived it, you were rewarded for remaining faithful. Wasn't that the whole point of Job?

I feel sad and betrayed when I look back on those times. I knew that I needed help to carry life's burdens, but because I thought God was going to do that - and when there were only one set of footprints in the sand, that meant He was carrying me - I didn't look hard enough at the resources around me. Two weeks later, one night instead of calling on God, I called the suicide hotline. I'm typing this today because that was the right choice. It would still be another year till I got my first mental health diagnosis, and another five years till I found the right combination of diet, exercise, sleep, and medication, but it was a start. I was beginning to deal with my problems, instead of waiting on God to fix my breakfast.

Because God was nothing more than a voice in a head, He could never offer any comfort I wasn't capable of giving myself, or any insight I was incapable of having. Reliance on God, in mental and emotional anguish as in all things, caused me more pain. When I depend on God, when I say "It's all in His hands", I stop taking positive actions in my own life.

I would have gotten a therapist, a diagnosis, and medication sooner if I hadn't been raised in a faith healing cult, certainly. But I think I would have got them sooner still if I hadn't been raised a believer. I hate prayer now. It actively infuriates me when people bow before an imaginary construct, grovel and beg NOTHING, to fix their problems instead of working to fix them themselves.

I still struggle with money and I still struggle with a list of mental disorders. I am still crazy. But I don't have to beg any god to make me sane now - I can take medications, make alterations to my lifestyle, avoid certain foods. I can manage my life without a higher power. Believing in one hindered my drive for self-sufficiency and kept me dependent and child-like long past the time the world expected me to behave as an adult.

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Free Will and Suicide

"Please, please God," I sobbed and begged, in torn jeans and a tank top, huddled on my purple bed clutching a pillow. "Why can't I ever get anything right?" Grief, guilt, and shame - the emotional cocktail of my faith - haunted me. I had failed to live up to His commands, His rules, His dictates yet again. I was a 19-year-old girl, and a sinner. I smoked weed, drank alcohol with my friends, and on rare, lucky occasions even managed to have sex. So of course I thought that I was worthless garbage, not fit to sit at the feet of my Lord.

I sobbed aloud, crying to my God in heaven to just make the pain of it stop. "Please God, just take my freewill. I don't want it!" I howled, tearing my throat to ribbons as anvils of grief pressed against my chest. "I'll only use it to screw up more. I can't not sin. I can't, I can't." My throat was hot and raw with anguish.

"Just take it. Here! It's an offering - a sacrifice! I give you my free will of my free will." My face red, blotchy, and tear-stained, I begged my moral savior. "I promise I don't want to sin. If you needed me to turn from it, I will. I won't listen to music or watch TV or date. Just please make it stop." My crying slowed down as my voice broke.

"Just take away the want to do bad things. You're all powerful! Why won't you do this one thing for me so I won't ever displease you again?"

I sobbed myself to stillness, like a child, face buried into my pillow. "God?" I whispered, hardly daring to voice this secret, burning, shameful desire. "If you won't take my free will, or you can't because of the plan or something, please, please God - can't I just go to heaven now? I wanna come home and be with you. It's too hard here, and it hurts too much and I keep screwing up. Wouldn't it be okay for me to just go be with you?"



Episodes of overwhelming grief like this weren't uncommon. I had similar breakdowns, or crises of faith if you will, at the ages of 24, 21, 20, 18, 17, 16, 14, 11, 8, and 5. From almost the earliest days of my belief in an eternal God who cared what I ate or wore, or how I treated others, or whether or not I brushed my teeth, I was overwhelmed with the feeling that I was letting this celestial parent down somehow. I wasn't living up to my end of the bargain. More liberal branches of Christianity, which I delved into during my final years of faith, propose that the primary message of the Gospel is one of grace - that even though we are miserable, wretched sinners, God loves us and wants us to be in heaven with him anyway. The more hard line denominations and non-denominations I was raised under in my early years suggested a much heavier load for the created one in the relationship. We were to have faith, worship, follow, and obey. Failing to meet God's standards of perfection was failure to be grateful, to show reverence, and to properly honor both our Maker and Savior. And so I found myself, again and again, crying my eyes out in my bedroom, hating myself for ever having been born, alternately begging for God to take away my free will and to end my life. Religion never offered me any form of comfort. Believing in an eternal, all-powerful God made me feel insignificant, unwanted, unclean, and detestable. And I though the world would be better off without me.

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