I have spent the last two years, decompressing my exit from the church, an exit that occurred over a decade ago. Prior to that, I lived a largely oblivious life. Keep your head down, try and stay off everyone’s radar so you won’t send or receive trouble, and just get on with it, day by day.
I still live day by day, and my life is far from perfect yet. (Yeah yeah. Define “perfect” I know I know.) Recent events on the ex-member blogosphere have got me thinking, and I realize that I may be doing the same thing with the previous 10+ years of my life, that I had done with the 20+ years prior to it. Blanking it out and dropping it out in a black hole. Always moving forward, never looking behind, and dismissing everything that happened, good, bad, or indifferent, just because I have a different perspective now.
My fugue years were far from exciting, and were mostly run-of-the-mill ordinary. But I still learned a lot, and gained the emotional maturity (or maybe it’s just encroaching old age) that afflicts everyone, once you get off the twentysomething roller-coaster. (Being in your twenties sucks. Regardless of circumstances. That’s just the way it is. Brain chemistry, hormones, whatever.) It was an interesting time in its own way, though. There are things I probably would have changed, but I couldn’t have done things any differently than I did them at the time, so that’s it.
I think I have re-examined the bulk of what I need to re-examine, WRT being born and raised in the church (although there will always be shit that will always trip me up, now and forever), and having re-examined what got me to the place of examining my past, I don’t want to spend the next ten years in a fugue state, either.
Am I going to make some radical change to my lifestyle? Oh hell, no. It’s not about circumstances or environment or the bottom line of your bank account, anyway. Those things are good or bad, depending only on how you interpret them. There will probably be things that I could do differently, or better, but I hope I will be able to reach equanimity about them, the way I have with my past now.
Whatever the next ten years brings, I don’t want to move through them in another fugue state. I don’t think I will, but it’s easy to slip back into that mindlessness, if I’m not careful. I’m still anti-social. No getting around that, anymore, although I like to think that I am getting marginally better. (Not likely.) Just one of those character traits that have to be worked around. Like being too tall or too short.
I hope that I will continue to lead an interesting life, although not interesting in the sense of “Look at the freak!” interesting. Just slightly-off-the-beaten-path interesting. Maybe I need to beat the path a little further afield than I have been. We shall see, and time will tell.
May we all have interesting lives.





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