The Perfect Trap

Today is my birthday. It marks 33 years I've been present and alive on this rock hurdling through space. I also think it marks a good day for me to finally make a blog post on here, which I've been delaying for I think close to two years now.

But the delay has a reason. It's not necessarily a good one, but I do have one.

Perfectionism.

One of the things I've learned this last year in particular is how impactful and influential the history of your life can be and how much it can steer you beyond your knowing. There's this extremely mysterious element to it, where you know your own history (or perhaps facticity), but because you're busy living in the consequences of it day-in-and-out, you don't realize how slowly it can erode or terraform the land around you. How walking through the same patch of land, you see things change day-by-day, but you get lost in the reflection of how they've changed year-after-year. Yes, you remember how you walked through these lands 10 years ago, but you haven't noticed in those 10 years that the amount of trees are fewer and the land less fertile.

For me, there's a lot of active psychological confrontation surrounding authority, and realizing how I developed very strict pathways for navigating it as a child that I still do as an adult.

I was raised with a deeply-seated fear of God, being taught that my parents were given by God to teach me things. To question my parents authority was, in a way, questioning God's authority. To make matters a little more intense, as a young child, you're taught that "God is always watching," so you can sometimes develop this discomfort when you think God's in the room with you at all times. It's like "Big Brother is Watching," but it's the ultimate thought police, because there's nothing God doesn't know or you can hide from them.

This can be worse when you couple it with the fear and power of "Christian sin." God knows every move you make. And God, being an infinite God of goodness, is infinitely offended by your sins against him. So not only does God know everything you do, God also gets infinitely offended by the sins you do. Of course, this is where Christians speak to Jesus covering our sins and so on, but I personally never really found much comfort in that idea thinking about how no matter what I do, I'm still trying to avoid doing things that are displeasing to an infinite God.

Even if it's "okay" to make mistakes, it's very easy to still not want to. One might argue that's really how we should be: just because we can does not mean we should.

Christian theology aside, I'm sure you understand what I mean by what I'm saying: being a child who was taught such powerful ideas, raised to be fearful of a God who hated sin, and being aware that I was always being watched was extremely psychologically disturbing.

Because what I learned in all of that, being trained in the doctrine of Original Sin, and how I'm an evil sin-stained baby from birth, and God hates what I do, and God is always with me, I learned to live with an extremely crippling anxiety that I must be good, because the last thing I ever want is to do something that might upset the all-powerful creator of the universe. To me, it didn't matter if the sins were forgiven, the fact was I didn't want to screw up.

So I resolved not to. I prayed religiously. I read the Bible daily. I was active in church. I did anything and everything I could to give my spiritual life nourishment, so I wouldn't "be bad." The actual experience carried more than this, but I'm sure you get the point.

In the end, I learned substantial amount of submissive behavior to my authority structures (which were already very controlling of my life), and I had terrible anxiety about every action I ever did carrying the weight of upsetting an infinite God. For being a young teenager, it wasn't a very good or helpful foundation.

If we fast forward to myself as an adult, a lot of those same habits and anxieties persisted. I developed a lot of fear around being monitored and watched. I was always afraid to make a mistake, and when I did, the first thing I often did was turn myself into a supervisor and ask for forgiveness.

In the interest of always being truthful and honest, I always felt the need to substantiate everything I ever said or did. So I'd often ask for permission for doing anything, and often came prepared with reasons. Before I'd ever officially say anything, I had to "check in with the boss" to make sure it was okay that I do so.

I was, more or less, taught to doubt everything my whole life, unless I get it validated by an external source. So I grew up extremely dependent on others. Because Christian theology is such serious business, I was taught to be extremely careful when making definitive statements or arguments about it. (There are many mundane claims one can make that can have implications to theology). So, in many ways, I grew up feeling very stuck. Very afraid to say anything and very afraid to do anything.

But now, I'm turning a corner.

The reason I haven't been writing is because I've been afraid. I've been afraid of being challenged by people on the internet. I've been afraid of Reddit-style intellectuals coming along and making really annoying, pedantic arguments against things I say or think. I've been afraid of not saying extremely precise things that can be misconstrued.

I've been afraid of being less than perfect.

But I'm in this transitional phase of life now. I can sense it and I can see it all around me, and parts of me are finally coming alive again for the first time in 10+ years.

I'm learning the value of being proud of who I am, as I am. I'm learning to be okay with making mistakes and correcting them later. I'm learning to be okay with being vulnerable and not hedging every single thing. And holy shit does it feel freeing.

After I experienced one of the most difficult periods of my life--my deconstruction--I was left with nothing. I've had to rebuild and re-understand everything I ever knew and believed from the ground up. I've sat, and sat with this for years, wanting to express it, but always being too afraid to do so.

So, this is what's happening:

1. I am committing to writing more on this blog. I've paid too much damn money on hosting and registration fees to let this corner of the internet waste away. So I'm going to make good on it and start expressing more thoughts here. Existential Living is something I believe in to my soul's core, and I intend to see this vision through.
   

2. I'm working on a book, and I'm here to publicly commit myself to it. The current title is The Existential Paradigm, which is going to discuss the process of meaning making in life through some of my favorite authors. As an extremely ambitious deadline, I intend to finish the first rough draft in December. I expect I will use some content in blogs here periodically, as I'd like to give the content away, although I will probably sell physical copies with a small markup.
   

3. I intend to write a second book on the Deconstruction process, to help serve as a guide for those who have going or are going through it themselves. I see this second book as a somewhat connected cousin to the previous book, but they will each be their own separate entities.
   

4. I will probably share additional recent developments in my life, in the hope of providing language to experiences others may resonate with. It's probably more revealing of myself than I originally intended to be when I started this blog, but that's okay. I've learned I don't need to earn anyone's approval and I can be vulnerable on my own terms.

In closing, I'm excited for the future and what's to come. Learning to slowly break free from this mentality that has kept me down for so long has been rejuvenating. I cannot wait to return to one of my oldest passions in life: writing for the sake of enjoyment.