Adventures In Spirituality: Xtianity

ALOHA FRIENDS,

It’s summer & that means it’s time for one of my famous Summer Series here in The Octopus Diary. And this year I’m giving you Adventures In Spirituality! We’re in the middle of a global holy war, if you didn’t notice, and everyone’s spirituality is running rampant. It’s annoying the fuck out of me, but I’m trying to handle it like a grown up because…I finally am a grown up. FINALLY.

I will be exploring — and generously sharing with you—my own forays into different religions/schools of thought and their resulting epiphanies, or lack thereof.

But, VT, you might argue, there is so much important stuff going on in the world, why would you want to talk about your own experiences instead of commenting on the state of the world like everyone else is doing??

And I’m so glad you asked. I do love to comment on what’s going on in the world, like everyone else, but I save it for Rattle Responds. (Look it up. And participate in it. Because I need more competition from other writers & poets…)

I also realize that writing essay-length blog posts is NOT in fashion anymore. We live in the age of the pithy, succinct Facebook post (or character-enforced Tweet). No one has time to read several pages worth of laborious mental/emotional synthesis by some washed up Gen X hermit. 

Give us the pith and we’ll give you 73 “likes” 5 “loves” 3 “wows” 2 “hahas” (from those emotionally immature friends who don’t get that just because you’re pithy doesn’t mean you’re not completely sincere in your backhanded, reverse-psyche way) and maybe a “flower” if there’s some overly effeminate Hallmark holiday looming.

Well…fuck that. I will blog away into my octogenarian sunset. I’m not here to find cleverer ways to say what everyone else is saying. And I definitely won’t call you on the phone & yak away. I’ve read the social contract and it does NOT allow me to speak of the kinds of big feelings I have. It also forbids us to live inside our heads as much as I do, so arrest me, or ostracize me, or pity me… I will handle it. 

I always handle it. I’m handling it right now. Yanking myself out of a GREAT DEPRESSION with only a handful of gabapentin, a keyboard full of letters, and a rusty fish hook.

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And now for our feature presentation — ADVENTURES IN SPIRITUALITY PART ONE:

XTIANITY 

I never know where to begin my stories. They all pretty much begin when I began, but I know I can’t start all stories from that point. So I’ll start this one with the Eating Disorder.

Around age 14 I became very stressed out by life—High School and all the gross shallow peer pressure that went along with it. Aside from getting good grades, being athletic (gymnastics), and all the fall-out from divorces & step-families going on at home there was this other huge responsibility I had as a female-bodied teenager:

BE SKINNY

In fact, it seemed, that was my MOST important job as a teen girl. Just. Don’t. Be. Fat.

It was the 80s, for God’s sake. We were a very unevolved and unloving race.

I’ll spare you the details, but somewhere in the middle of 9th grade I learned to vomit up everything I ate so i wouldn’t be unpleasant for my parents and peers to behold. It worked well. I went from 110# (considered “heavy” by most of the females around me) to 95# within 2 weeks of starting the binge-purge process. Then I hovered between 90 — 95# for the rest of 9th grade. Everyone commented on how much better I looked!

No one knew the nightmarish obsession I was beholden to. I felt very out of control. I cared about nothing but finding time alone to eat & eat & eat myself silly and then throw up. It isolated me from friends & family. It wrought havoc on my brain chemistry. It stopped my menstrual cycle. It eclipsed my love of gymnastics, art, writing. My teeth hurt.

But damn I looked good & everyone said so. I got more positive attention for being thin than I’d ever gotten for anything else in my life.

But I felt awful. Almost as awful as I would feel as an alcoholic later in life—that’s how addictive & controlling disordered eating can be, But I still thought of it as something I could stop if I really wanted to—it was a CHOICE and I just had to find the willpower to quit!

Sometime during the summer between 9th & 10th grades i did find that “willpower.” Summer is a less stressful time and I was able to find this monastic, ascetic headspace that allowed me to quit eating altogether.

Yeah! The very best antidote to the binge-purge grotesquery was to not eat at all! And I had found the power to do that! Jeez, i felt powerful! And the great thing was, I got even skinnier. I started 10th grade around 85# and —you guessed it—everyone showered me with praise for my “supersleek” “figure.”

While I felt very powerful I also felt vulnerable to falling back into my old pattern of desperate binge-purging. I needed to be so, so strong, stronger than I believed i could be on my own—

because once school started & all those pressures came flooding back in, the urge to overeat was returning,

so I did what anyone would do: I turned to “God.” That’s right. I “decided” to “become” a Xtian. Right there in my room, I said “God, I know I haven’t believed in you for the first 15 years of my life but now that I need your help, I do.” Or something like that. Whatever I said, it brought me immediate comfort. I felt like, wow, I have “someone” super-powerful on my side. And “he’s” going to keep me strong and skinny and acceptable and happy.

[a brief word about my early history with Xtianity, the religion America was founded upon: I had no real history with it. I was not raised in any religion. My parents could’nt’ve cared less about church, bedtime prayers, saying grace at dinner—all of that stuff was foreign to me & seemed bizarre when I’d spend the night w/ friends whose families did do those things.

I can’t remember how old I was the first time I stepped foot in a church, but I know I didn’t like it. I was a “nature kid” and church seemed to renounce anything “natural.” It was like the library in its insistence upon quiet, but there was only one book, and it seemed full of gibberish to my inquiring mind. And the smell! The smell of church was…dead paper, slowed synapses, and stale dentures. I was so glad I wasn’t made to go to church regularly like some other kids i knew.

When I was 7 or 8, a new family moved into our neighborhood & my parents befriended them. This family convinced my parents to attend their church—aren’t churches always looking for new members?—and I was forced to attend with them.

Church of The Redeemer in downtown Sarasota was (still is) a beautiful Episcopal church, much fancier than the small, humble churches I’d first been exposed to. High ceilings, elaborate stained glass, theatrical altar set up w/ yuuuge dangly Jesus on the cross tilted slightly, almost stage-diving into the congregation.

But there was no mistaking that it was a church. The smell, the gibberish, the pursed lips & minds, the clasped hands and renunciation of the natural world.

Coincidentally, it was at this age that I was becoming aware of mortality. I was flipped out about death & dying. I was starting to despair of my parents being taken from me, and most scarily of all I was aware that I was going to die. Definitely someday, but maybe tomorrow. Maybe as soon as I closed my eyes to sleep at night. You just never knew…

i know a lot of kids freak out about the whole death thing when they become aware of it, but our church attendance coinciding with my death knowledge was pretty scary because as far as I could tell…

…Church was all about death. It was all very morbid. Jesus’ death would not keep us from dying but would somehow ensure that we would stay alive in some weird place that looked … really boring & unnatural where little babies with flapping penises lived, but there were no vagina’d babies, and i really didn’t believe such a place existed but I also was terrified of “dying all the way” so i tried, I tried to believe in a place where you could stay a little bit alive even though you were dead…

We attended that church until I was about 9. Then I think my parents grew tired of it all. My brother & I had our weekend sports activities and we bowed out quietly, and I left all thoughts of Xtianity and Jesus and penis-angels behind, though I continued to flip out about death til I was about 11…

Wow, that was not brief…]

ANYWAY, back to 15-yr-old me calling on God to keep me safe from the scary eating disorder—

My intentions were completely sincere—I wanted with all my heart to feel the love of Jesus that so many others claimed to feel. I wanted to be a good Xtian. I assumed a pious style in my life. I stopped “thinking bad thoughts” whatever that means to a 15-yr-old: cuss words, budding sexuality (which was next to nil for an 85# non-menstruating waif like myself). I even started dressing differently; I ditched my usual wardrobe of black T-shirts & jeans and adopted the heinous brights of the preppy culture which ruled my school & the mid-80s in general.

I prayed constantly, obsessive-compulsively, against the urge to overeat, or eat at all.

When I told my mom I was a Xtian now, she seemed pleased. But she said I would have to go to church to be a real Xtian, because one thing she learned from her own foray into Xtianity was that you must not interpret the Bible for yourself, you must have it translated for you by a professional Xtian. She said she would be happy to take me to church on Sundays.

I didn’t like the sound of that, but I did start going to church just because…I wanted to do this right. I wanted God to notice me & love me & help me. Deep down I still thought church was bullshit, mostly because of the other people I saw attending.

I actually loved praying by myself, but I hated praying with a bunch of smiley-faced denture heads who couldn’t possibly know why I needed God’s help. It was still all about death as far as I could tell—

So & so’s mother is in the hospital dying of such & such, we lost this parishioner & that parishioner last week, the Jones’s precious little baby was born w/ a hole in its heart, let us pray—

there was no prayer for the kind of sickness I had. 

After a few trial Sundays, I told my mom I was giving up on church and that I would attend Campus Life at school instead. I thought it might be more helpful to be Xtian with Xtians my own age, and maybe meet someone who understood what I was going through… 

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Okay. This has gotten really long and I have other stuff to do. SO…stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of this story, coming in a few days!

Sorry I don't have new art for you. I’m working on a really cool, different sort of art project for the summer— syringe art!!! Be prepared for it, you won’t believe it. Also, I will release my first issue of The Octopus Review, poems by people who are not me, on Jun 21 [the summer solstice (yes I know it’s not officially summer yet, but I live in FL & school is out) so keep your submissions coming please!]

Take care my little sunbeams!