(Still) Finding Myself

This is pretty much stream-of-consciousness. Please don’t expect much.

It’s become somewhat of a joke, the idea of taking time off to find oneself, an excuse not to go to school or get a job. I wasn’t able to take any time off to do it, but I think the idea is sound. But I don’t think the process ends. I think a person should be constantly striving to know himself or herself better, so he or she can be the best person possible, and that process lasts until death.

I grew up in the Church of Christ, and although my parents never discouraged me from thinking for myself, I never did. It was a lot easier to go with the flow. I went to a CoC school and church, and my friends were CoC and my family was CoC and we all agreed on the important things and life was good.

But life wasn’t good.

I’ve suffered from depression for as long as I can remember. I realized that for someone who was supposed to be alive in Christ, I was awfully miserable. I was also becoming more and more uncomfortable with my passive role in my faith. I never intended to leave the faith, or even Christianity. My goal was to become so sure of my own faith that I could successfully defend it. What happened is that I realized I didn’t know myself at all; I only knew that what I thought was Christ either wasn’t Christ, or that Christ wasn’t enough to overcome what was wrong with me. (I later had a couple of major manic episodes and realized that lithium is what it takes to overcome what’s wrong with me. )

I’ve also been an extremely sensitive, sympathetic person for as long as I can remember. I found it harder and harder to accept that the God we called “loving” and “just” could reject people who had never heard of him, or who hadn’t correctly followed a book written in dynamic languages and compiled and translated by fallible humans. And why would he make some people so inclined toward behavior that made either him or them unhappy?

Only very recently have I begun to see glimmers of things I might like about myself. Only recently have I begun not to constantly (and I do mean constantly) worry about what every single other person was thinking and just be myself. This didn’t happen until I decided that people weren’t sinful or bad or wrong because they were Muslim or gay or atheist or single parents or…lots of other things.

Not all Christians are blind followers. Not all are hypocrites. Not all are judgmental. But I was, and now I’m not. And I didn’t like myself, and now I’m starting to. I like that I’ve gone from being a hypocritical, judgmental, blind follower to being someone who is accepting and open-minded and tries to practice what she preaches. And I plan to keep bettering myself. And I find it highly illogical that the real God–whoever or whatever it is–would have a problem with that.