I recently moved to a new house, and as is often the case when big life changes arrive, my mental health collapsed. It doesn’t matter that it’s a good change – my deep reptile brain doesn’t understand the difference between positive and negative change, it just feels the disruption and responds with panic.
Continue reading “Terrible Things Evangelicals Say About Mental Illness”
I’ve been fairly vocal about my journey into nontheistic religion, and the response from fellow Christians has been a tremendous amount of anxiety. I’ve found myself in twitter disputes over faith, and I’ve had more awkward coffee dates with concerned Christians than I’d prefer.
Continue reading “Nontheism and Anxiety”
I was recently having breakfast with a dear friend visiting from out of town. Like many of my old friends, we found ourselves in an awkward place: a great chasm opening between us. He is still firmly situated in evangelical Christianity, and I’m unmoored and drifting away from my old faith. We still love each other, but it’s difficult. The anxiety, on their part, is palpable, and I feel anxiety, too, because I recoil from conflict, and the fear of getting hurt.
Continue reading “What my Depression Feels Like, and How I Survive It”
When people ask me how I am, I usual say, “I’m alright,” or simply, “ok,” and some people respond with concern or condescension: “/just/ alright?” As if being manically exultant is not living a full life. I hate that response: “just ok?” To me, just ok is heaven. For me, just ok is hard earned fulfillment.
Continue reading “How Depression has Made Me a Happier Person”
Several months ago, I went to a family gathering. I’d worked all week, and I was exhausted. The event was miserable, and I felt incapable – truly, utterly incapable – of talking to anyone. I felt like I’d been drugged, the paralysis of exhaustion and family and socializing was so great. On the drive home, all I could think about was suicide. Fantasies of death filled my being.
Continue reading “What I’ve Learned From Living with Suicide”
Several weeks ago I made a decision: that I would drastically reduce my time on social media. It was an attempt to drain the shallows from my life – reducing the meaningless, easy-to-replicate tasks to give more time and space to the activities that create meaning and fulfillment in my life.
Last week I wrote about my sexual compulsion which flourished in grief, despair, and self-loathing. Most of all, the sex addiction was watered by the unwillingness to allow myself to love and be loved in a distinctly erotic way.
Continue reading “Homosexuality and the Coffin of Lovelessness”
In 2013, I was sick with heartbreak. My boyfriend, on a sunny January day in Baltimore, broke up with me.
He was a conservative Christian, and so was I. We both believed that homosexuality was not God’s best for humanity, and that it would be a sin to act on it. And yet, here we were: deeply in love, and now deeply heartbroken. We had lived in a horrible in-between place, unable to change our beliefs and unable to stop loving each other. The dissonance drove us mad, and it ended in him breaking up with me. I’d never known such rending emotional pain.
