"NOT MY FINAL EXIT"
[21/11/2025]The chariot swung too low
Last night i met the antichrist's publicist
He told me that "a manger was for feeding pigs"
and someday my songs would make me famous
The chariot swung too low
Crying out in a final breath
I saw the angel turning wild on death
It must have not accepted Jesus yet
- "chariot" by elvis depressedly.
Every good anecdote an ex-Christian has in their repertoire, giving further context to that decision leading to the "ex" in the aforementioned title, must be about masturbation. Though it may not be a rule, I feel it surely must have some truth to it; after all, why should we feel ashamed of the act of spilling seed if it just feels so damn good? Let's discuss this over some beers... later.
My blog is not a confessional. The concept of a "confessional," or more specifically the dark box in which you talk through a screen to a pastor and to God through the pastor is not something that the Mormon religion has. I'm not even one-hundred percent sure how it exactly works. Though for some reason, I feel most Mormons will swear up and down that "confessional" in that sense of having to confess to God through his appointed disciples doesn't really exist in their religion, despite having to do this for the sake of entry to basic temple ritual and within personal prayer. I don't care if a person lies to a bishop, just don't lie to me and expect me to run with it.
Talking more specifically about these ex-Christian experiences is not something I've really dwelled on very hard since having left the south and no longer being surrounded by dogma. Even not since I've left my cult of Latter-Day Saints have I thought much about the parts of my mental wellbeing that feel burned by the experience; not in the ways that I still grapple with religious delusions and holdovers of rhetoric and hate in that sense, but more what feels more difficult to repair. I've just been thinking lately and often about how much of my burnout does come from this experience.
I hold a lot of days now that the world at large, nor any deity, owes me or holds in store any grandness of life. I'm not sure I fully believed that before but I certainly know I don't assume as much now, and no hymn will convince me otherwise. But to many people I've known in my life, not even in my denomination, so many of life's challenges are to them trials and tribulations through which suffering is noble and will be rewarded in some sense for good behavior and their show of great faith; that it means something to be faced with things like loss and grief, and that we can power through these things individually if we hold on to the notion that we all receive some goodness eventually.
I think it hurts me most to feel after having left my religious past, and even after all the good it has done me to be able to divorce myself from the delusion of the institution and feel the goodness of people more truthfully, even after being able to know that the actions I take towards whatever goal I desire are truly my actions and my pursuits, is that is all crashes up against this nihilism of experience that the literal world offers to me and to the people I love and care about most. I've tried to brand myself a positive nihilist in days past, but thinking in how awful and unkind the experiences I have faced in pursuing my goals, as well as seeing similar yet personalized misfortune for people I've known in pursuing theirs, I feel a deep dread of feeling and knowing in my heart that there is no rhyme or reason to it all. That in the end, there is no "getting off on good behavior," and that some of the most passionate people I know, full of will and love of the world as they are, will sometimes get an unlucky streak of bad days. That unlucky streak at other times becomes unsalvageable, and despite the positivity of outlook any of us may have, there is no guarantee the bad days will end nor that the good days will be given out of pity or even love.
The nihilism of being is to my detriment in those ways. It's hurt my person most especially in combination with a probable BPD I have to feel like I can't help people in a way. It's easy to beat myself up when I'm by myself and to walk away from it. It's even easier to act as though I am subject to my trauma and not object within the world.
But I kid myself when I pretend as though I am detachable thing from the world and the people in it. To withdraw into myself, into the rolling hills of the mind, and act as though I have removed my soul and its gravity from the draw of all other people, animals, plants, and things that are tossed around on the fabric of being. I may be small when compared against the grand canvas of the whole of the universe, but I'll be damned to act as though I am nothing, not on the canvas at all. It's a greater injustice then, to see my being on the picture I stand before and attempt to take in the wholeness of, and subsequently take my thumbnail to the flecks of paints in my stupor, feeling as though it would be easy to scratch out my form from the whole of the composition and declare selfishly, "the picture looks better this way; I'm sure critics would agree!"
Who am I compared to God? Not God, of course, and it's selfish to play as such. Me, a silly woman so bad at roleplay, playing at the notion that I am something other than myself, or acting as though I am only and consistently subject to that which is not myself, but can solve like I am God. Acting like I can change, or could have been different, or should have been different, or should be treated differently, or should have been treated differently. But what of now?
For now, I have probable cause to feel I have a medical condition known as Borderline Personality Disorder. For now, I am unashamed to talk on this for as long as I feel I want to. Which will not be long, but not out of a need to appeal to polite society.
I've thus far read as far as the third chapter into "Loving Someone with Borderline Personality Disorder" by Shari Y. Manning, PhD. I'd picked up this book on a whim off the suggestion of a person posting on Bluesky about it, in a reply to their own post which caught my attention.
I read this post and thought to myself, "...excuse me? That's a thing?" So I went to the replies. Yes, it's a thing. I'd been thinking for a while before that, and while having problems with my medications after (what I now believe to be a mis-) diagnosis, that I may have something closer to BPD in manifestation (potential evidence and culprit #1 being that my father had it). The poster then responded with the relevant materials. So I bit. I thought at first it'd be best for my partner, who I know for a fact was having difficulties in our relationship due to a lot of mental health related issues I was having. (Yes, he still loves me, and no, I don't feel as though he is villainizing me for them.) But I needed an understanding of the topic too, even if the book was marketed more at the partner that the person with BPD. I figured this book would be more helpful than nothing in the meantime while I waited for my government-assigned free-of-charge psychiatrist to reach out to me in six-to-eight weeks.
Well, safe to say as far as I've gotten into it, the book made me absolutely fucking miserable. At first it was miserable because she was right on every count. I listened to the audiobook version read to me out loud all the symptoms of which I'd been tacked with my whole life, like they were the terms of my sentence and I was being charged on multiple counts: "acute sensitivity to emotional stimuli, inability to maintain meaningful relationships, personal lack of a sense of self and inability to find a direction in life, and uncontrollable suicidal ideation." What say I to this determination of the court of psychiatry? Guilty on all counts, your honour.
But then came a following restlessness. A week in dark water, especially punctuated by my decision to try and ween off my meds during that same such week (a decision made with a fool's unwavering hope in personal ability). I had to have been high for at least 80% of my waking hours, and 100% of my sleeping ones. I hardly remember the specifics of the last time I'd turned so desperately to substance like that, but I know I have. I was miserable for this second reason: why, God? Why me? Why did it have to be me?
It was the familiar questions that I grappled with again, and I felt like a child again, and I felt ashamed again. I felt dumb for feeling like a child, I felt wrathful for being bestowed a difference in ability over my fellow person, I felt solemn that maybe I could have and should have corrected this error in my being earlier. I kept circling the drain in my mind, but in my pride and my ego, kept my suffering private in feeling like I should still have enough power to fish myself out of the tub before it was too late. I can still turn back, I can still make it out, I can have it be different, and I can do it all alone.
I've been doing it alone for a long time. Not recently. Recently, I've understood more that I am better surrounded by people. At least I understand and feel that notion in my lucid moments, but as previously alluded, not all my moments are lucid. So in my delusion I say to myself: I am my own. I am the one power, the one ability, the one who will get me out of this mess. And I should be the only one to make the attempt.
I imagine a lot of things when my attempt at "getting out of this mess" ultimately fails and I sink deeper in the mire where there is no foothold. In this particular instance, I picture an accident in the shower. I hear a squeak of misstep, a slip, the hand gripping shower curtains in a desperate attempt to salvage the situation in a snap-decision, and a crash. An embarrassing silence cut only by the white noise of shower sprinkling water onto a crumpled mess of inert meat under plastic Ikea-curtain tomb. And red, red swirling down the drain again.
When I slip, I think: what a traumatic thing to put someone through that grief. When I fall, I think: who should have to deal with my corpse? The coroner? My lover? All those friends I've made, and what little family I still have? When I am at my lowest, I answer in delusion: no one should, and no one will.
But in my delusion, my body is still warm and my nerves still firing with electricity. And in my delusion, I listened to the audiobook and heard what I manifested: I am the problem. According to what I heard filtered through my then-tenuous mind as it entered my ears: people will leave me, justifiably, because I am a problem, I am a timebomb, I am tiresome, and I am unable to take care of myself because I am fundamentally different than others and will attempt to solve this by throwing my woes in every-which-way without care for who they hurt and what damage they do because I don't care because I have BPD. Because, because, because. Everything signalling to me, "I am not welcome." I sat on the couch in a room full of people I laughed and cheered with in shared joy for each others' company, and I walked home thinking to myself, "there in no room for me anywhere, and I am not welcome." All I heard, all I said to myself, was how much pain I can cause others. Hadn't I done that enough already?
My blog is not a confessional. I have no need to confess here, for I feel I've already confessed and done my time for the grief I have caused people in the past, especially people I have loved and sometimes continue in doing so. But for quite a while, I felt like a sinnerwoman. I felt like I walked through the world with scarlet letter, and didn't quite know why, but that I had to continue doing so. I felt like what I did, all I did, was hurt people who got close. And that people would hurt me for it. I felt like people would be justified in hurting me for it. That all the hurt in the world that could be inflicted upon me, should be inflicted upon me, for the crime of my inability of being nothing other than myself.
I believe myself to have a one-apple. Perfect visualization and photographic memory. I've known multiple people now who have had the opposite: no mental visualization ability beyond words. I'd recently talked with my good friends who have this condition about it, saying some people would consider aphantasia to be a "mental disability" (this being untrue, of course, which I'm not going to go over here). But I'd been thinking through that line of thought to the opposite end since our conversation.
In my case, I consider my hyperphantasia a hinderance at best, and a paralyzing disability at worst, at least in conjunction with personal values, goals, and other burgeoning mental realities that I grapple with daily. On my day-to-day, as someone attempting to pen a comic, I become so easily frustrated with the gap between my inner visual concept and my tangible skills in art (the latter being unable to replicate the fancies of the mind at their perfect fidelity, let alone catch up to the frequency at which I can conjure them), that I frequently throw in the towel and admit burnout before I even begin. This is something I feel that I can work through, though. I'm learning to set aside expectation and that making bad art is okay.
So what of it then during the episodes where control feels wrested from my body, and the reality of the eyes and words of others have to compete with the tornado spun by the subconscious weaving alternate truths?
I lay in bed and the white-pockmarked ceiling is the projector screen. The mind would like to show me what it has made for me, yet I have no choice: I am watching a slideshow, whether I like it or not. Comfortably under bedsheets is where I am shown film after film depicting a new and exciting end to my life. A thousand times I am snuffed out like a candle. A thousand times is not enough to show me every possible way I could lose my existence to accident, sickness, self-intention, or murder. Grace, would you like to see another image of your best friends smiling faces as they pin you down and crush your head under cinder block? I think you would; after all, you're only being shown the truth of the matter. All these things could happen. Maybe all of them should happen. Maybe some of your loved ones would feel better if this did happen. Maybe some of them would love nothing more the honour of making this happen.
The fire alarm is going off, the sprinklers have failed, the house is burning down, and I feel I am trapped inside and there is no way out for me. All that's left to do is accept my fate. All that's left to do is accept reality, lay down, and die. I won't call for help; it's already too late for me. I've locked the front door. I don't want help because I should be able to help myself and I can't. So I won't. Maybe I'll speed up the process. Cut my wrists on exposed rusty nails and burn my thighs with the embers of burning support beams.
What is the wedge to open the door? Where is the doorstop to hold it open?
Would it be silly of me to say that after reading a good book, I am now the closest I've ever come to declaring myself "a trans born-again Christian?" It's probably silly, but not entirely untrue.
I've had "Embracing the Exile: Healing Journey of Gay Christians" by John E. Fortunato sitting idly on my shelf for almost exactly two years now. I picked it up on sale at a book store when I first visited Edmonton. I was looking for a nice read for the trip home, as I was just visiting at the time and it was going to be a long plane ride back to Idaho. I read the first chapter and cried in the airport. That was two years ago. The book, sitting on the desktop to my right, still has the orange "SALE PRICE: $3.00" sticker on the front and I'm reading it again, hopefully all the way through this time. It's helping. I needed it now more than then, I think.
I kept having quandaries and gripes I couldn't quite pin down in all my many years of therapy and occasional dips into psychological literature. Things my partner would pose to me, attempts to mirror the reality of my situational being back at me, did not make sense to me. All the logic lined up, and I felt wrong. I realized the logic lined up and that I was feeling wrong, so I tried to delve deeper. I attempted more rigid structure; in failing rigid structure collapsing, I attempted what I believed to be emotional awareness; in failing to attain release from emotional awareness, I attempted to get a job I wanted again; in collapsing art industry, I attempted to get any fucking job at all; in failing economy, I gave up; and in giving up... I gave in to complete inward collapse. I had no place in the world and it seemed like every attempt I made to fit myself with in the framework of modern civilization failed. I barely had enough therapy hours to go around, so maybe in my mind I was treating it more like rehab.
So, like, what do you call it when you're one way - an inherit way of being that is unchangeable and ultimately not a wrong method of existence within the world - and instead of accepting your inherit difference as an individual existing within the world with their own truths and gifts of talent to give, an external power muscles its way in to impose a new regime for which there is no other choice for people to "get with the program or die?" Hm, it seems like there's a few words for this. Imperialism, fascism, colonization... for this particular case of wording, I feel like going with the term "colonization."
I let my heart become colonized. I am not naive and separate from the world to believe that I would have an "equal shot" at re-entering the workforce as an openly nonbinary trans woman early on in my HRT, but I truly felt qualified at least. I am not dead to the world enough to only be able to entertain my biggest dreams as white-collar desk jobs, but I felt that was what I had to do to get by. I am anarchist enough to know that I desire to be free of those impositions of capitalism via state-enforced violence, but I am susceptible to enjoying my creature comforts where I can and I need the cash before I die out in the cold. Yet, despite all this, all the logic in the world could not fix the contradictions of the heart. I felt the "necessary evils" take precedent over my body, mind, and soul, but I was not willing to give up. If I was going to give up on fitting into the colonist's framework, in my mind, it was defeat.
Bullshit. I am a queer person. Of course I'm not going to fit into the world of the colonizer, but under that regime, it's easy to feel blown around, my ego completely at the whims of the ego of others imposed onto my body being "right" or "wrong" or "correct" or "stable." I do not need to "make sense." My body is a part of the world and I have a fucking right to exist within it, and my mind knows it.
Who are these people compared to God? Bullshit. God didn't make cops to impose Sharia Law onto the people (despite there being two pigs on the Ark). The only power is God... which I say, still believing in God as less of a literal power and more of a usefully conceptual framework based on my being raised in that environment. Whatever.
Fortunato's writings on 80's psychology is the missing piece of what I needed to hear someone say. Cut the bullshit: where is the spiritual in the therapist's office? My mind is not wrong, not in need of correction. Well, okay, I say that knowing that I am back on a lower dose of my anti-psychotic and should probably not have gone off of it despite my feeling like I need a different prescription. But not in the sense that I need to change my behavior to make myself more palatable to my peers, to polite society, and easier to understand via the framework of the DSM-5. I will talk, not out of feeling the need to explain myself or exacerbate my shame, but because I speak from my soul, and maybe people will listen.
I know what I know in my heart. As I child, I was born naked, and maybe I was afraid, but I didn't know the word "afraid" until it was taught to me. I didn't know what "shame" meant until it was taught to me. Shame especially is not a human characteristic inherit to our beings I feel, and I certainly didn't feel shame until I was beat over the head with it by other people. Who are other people? If I am not God, they're certainly not God either, yet they treated me like such Godliness of their being and my lacking of it was the dynamic at play. But guess what? I'm alive, I'm here, and I'm queer. Those are the facts.
In theory, shame stems from sin. Sin should be followed with repentance. Repentance comes with absolution. Absolution is freedom from the pain of sin. Is inflicting grief onto others sin? Not exactly, but sometimes language is weird in this way where when we recycle it, we unknowingly reinforce old concepts.
What I learned: when we do wrong, we are punished. When I do wrong, I should and will be punished. When you live in a society of Christians that all believe they can enact the will of God on behalf of God, everyone that surrounds each other is a prison warden. These man-made Christian institutions are prisons. Punishment, vitriol, loathing, retribution, violence, the vindictive and the sadistic: it's hard not to believe these things, whether adjective or verb, are the natural motions of the universe and the people in it when those images of harm continue to slam and splatter themselves on the psyche. The mental equivalent of a car crash, twisted metal and all. Or maybe more like those instances of an exploded steam locomotive, where it looks as though the machine coughed up all its vascular veins and organs out of its mouth and onto the oncoming train tracks. What is true? Only the soul.
I was not born knowing violence. I was born whole, and I continue to be such. The desires of the mind and the desires of the soul are the same: they are one, in spirit. We are our minds and bodies and hearts and words. Even the words that are untrue in a sense. But I feel now that the violent imagery is that which I feel when I cannot impose the untrue words onto the truth of the desires of the heart when they contrasted by the framework I cannot find my soul into. So then, why should I try? Why spin my mind in circles with words that are not mine? I will not colonize my soul. I will not be ashamed. I am different. I probably have BPD in a sense, but I am not any less a "person" than anyone else. And if I hear that my loved ones are not people too, implications that they are abberations of the mind, I won't take it from now on. If they don't like my needs, if they can't or don't want to listen to me, if they wish to spit the ego of psychology to invalidate the truth I know in my soul, so be it; I will surround myself by people who will heed my word. Or at the very least I'll try and make my disagreements known. I am a lamp and I will shine my gifts and love how I will to those who are willing to accept it, and even those who are not.
What of my place in the universe? What of my place in the world? What of my apartments I keep moving every two years? We are all meant to be where we are, in a sense. Earlier this year, in my grief of realizing I had truly lost someone I had loved near and dear to me years ago, I met someone who reminded me very much of that person. I felt like I was the butt of some cosmic joke. I have no grave to leave flowers at, and God, you show me new flowers and expect me to be grateful? You expect time and experience to heal my wounds? These wounds, where time has weathered them from their untreated, rancid, festering state, all the way down to bone? You want this new person to crack them open too, suck down the marrow, and leave them dry on the sand where archeologists will find those markings on what remains of my evidence of being, showing where I was cannibalized and how?
Give up. Cry it out, hang it out to dry, and move on. I figured out shame, more than previous sin, was what was hurting myself and others. It drove a wedge between my mind and my soul. Shame was the sin, and in sinning I felt shame. To hurt another is sin. To sin is to hurt another. Let go of shame, and grief - powerlessness is not always a bad thing. In accepting this, I feel I may have a better shot at getting to know myself and the new people in my life whom I can love for who they are, and not who they are not, nor who I am not, or who I was not, or what I was not able to do. I have to stand up for myself before I can let my ego go.
The body is a well. All experience fills up inside; all that trickles in slowly through the fundamental watertable, all that melts from the gentle snow, all that pours down in torrential force from sudden storms. Ultimately, a well remains the same. Sometimes the basins dries up, the watertable lowers, and left thirsting is the empty bowl. But the well remains the same. Poison and disease are quick to spill in still water, yet a tumultuous thing to purify, taking time to go down and some elbow grease to clean it all out. Yet the well remains the same. Richness of mineral the water hides inside it, and it depends on what surrounds the well. But the well is a hole. "A glass can only spill what it contains." Well, a hole is harder to fill, but a well is harder to spill as well. Without a well, a village is deserted. A community lost. When the water dries, the same is true. But until the well is emptied, people will drink. It's harder to dig a new well.
I wonder to myself sometimes: why is it that some of us are born to the richness of natural gifts of the forested places, and others to the dryness of the desert where the days are fights to survive? If this is the case, what is justice?
Justice is wanting. Justice is unachievable truly, but found only in the striving for it. What is a gift if not shared? What is equity if not the sharing in it? We are powerless to what we are faced with, but it is easier when we share our cups as we share our loads.
There is no answer to the question;
If there's no quest then it suggests no treasure.
Well, what have I been doing all this digging for?
Satisfaction.
Classic distraction.
Just some observable action.
Something to bury the past in.
But if you dig too deep you’re standing in a well.
You were questioning the police and landed in a cell.
How can one thing have no true purpose,
but at the same time feel far from worthless?
What have I been doing all this living for?
It's my proof of concept:
I’m measuring deaths onset.
At least my soul's not gone yet.
Yeah, I put my word on that.
- "September Digging" by Spencer Radcliffe.