I feel like religion and spirituality can be touchy subjects.
While many people have found comfort and meaning in them, many have also been traumatized by them. That includes me.
Religion has a long history of being used to erase cultural beliefs, justify genocide, control others, and divide people. It has genuinely caused so much damage.
As someone who left the high-control religion of Jehovah’s Witnesses, it definitely left its mark on me.
When I left, I was angry and bitter. I felt like my entire life had been a lie. Everything I had been taught to believe was “the Truth” suddenly became one enormous question mark, and that uncertainty ate at my very soul.
I hated Christianity. I hated the Bible. I hated anyone who believed in any of it. I was purposefully mean to people who followed any of the Abrahamic religions because I had created an us-versus-them mentality in my mind.
I dedicated a lot of time to studying other spiritual beliefs. Absolutely anything and everything. I did not hold back. I started collecting books about different philosophies and belief systems. I even joined a group that had traveled the world studying different spiritual practices and occult knowledge, and I learned from them.
Recently, I’ve realized that much of my trauma stems from my religious upbringing. Everything I’ve experienced, learned, observed, and processed, I subconsciously wrote into my Blood of the Wild Gods books. It’s everywhere.
Thirteen years after leaving, I’ve decided to face the very thing that destroyed me and accept it again.
But on my terms.
I’m allowing myself to find hope and comfort in the scriptures I grew up learning, only now without the pressure and control behind them. I’m reclaiming part of myself by wielding the very thing that once hurt me.
I refuse to let an ideology hold so much negativity over me. I refuse to let a book make me recoil into avoidance. I refuse to let my upbringing control me anymore. I refuse to let hatred settle into my heart.
And I refuse to let anyone make me feel bad about my journey of reclamation.