Spiritual Trauma

When I was a child, I had some traumatic experiences, like 99% of the world. Mine wasn't sexual, or physical or mental. Well, a bit of it was mental and emotional, but it was spiritual too.

What I am about to explain to you, I don't 100% believe had divine, or spiritual under tones as of right now, but when I was a child and a teenager, I believed wholeheartedly.

My dad flip-flopped. He would pretend to be a good Christian man one week, and the next he would watch pornography, or violent movies with cursing and nudity, or would go golfing and drinking with buddies. Eventually he lost all his friends and lost the love of a few family members. He would tell me and my mother that he would change and that he would do better. Almost immediately after, he would spend his paychecks on diet coke, movie rentals, and nice hats, shirts, and jackets for himself. My mom would tell me stories about how he wouldn't even give me baths, or how he would spend his money on his brothers, taking them out to eat and going cruising, and not his only child's food or diapers.

I saw him going to "the dark side", as I called it, all the time. He once splashed fresh, scalding coffee on my mom's breasts. He chucked a metal fan blade at her once, and he blackmailed my mom to give him the family credit card in exchange for newly bought groceries and the minivan, the only car that ran well. I saw him get incarcerated more than once, and I even caught him doing, what I can only assume were, homosexual acts on our neighbor (I heard porn and moaning through the window as I knocked on the neighbor's door, looking for my dad).

Towards the end of his life, my father was sick. My mother told me it was because he had messed with God too much. She said that He had given my dad too many second chances. My mom says the end for my dad started one day when the neighbor was over.

The neighbor was my dad's age with a wife and a child who was about five years old if my memory is still intact (which I sometimes doubt). He had asked my mom, while I was in school and my dad off wherever he was, if she could watch his kid for two or three hours while he and his wife went to the closest "big city" from my little dinky town, which is about 45-50 miles away. The kid was cute, so my mom couldn't resist.

When I got off of school, the kid was still there. A little while after that, my dad got home. For some reason I don't remember, he was already mad. The kid being there made him even angrier. He rambled on about how he was sick and tired of the neighbor asking him for favors (place any kind of sexual-tension-related assumption here). When the neighbor got back, my dad exploded. I don't remember all that was said, I was maybe 13 and I'm sure I repressed it, but the thing I do remember is my dad said something along the lines of "Get your bullsh*t face and your bullsh*t kid out of my house." The neighbor replied with, "That isn't very christian-like." "I'm not a f*cking christian." Was my dad's reply.

My mom told me that this, plus the fact that his kidneys were failing, the doctors told him that he didn't need dialysis because his kidneys were fine, and when he denied God didn't heal him, then getting put back on dialysis, was the last straw on God's back. My mother told me before my dad got worse, that he was going to get worse because of my dad's blaspheme.

My father began having black-outs, I don't recall if they were seizures or not, but he would gently shake, grunt, fall, then his eyes rolled to the back of his head. After a few moments of this, he would pass out for no longer than half an hour. Sometimes he would defecate on himself. We're pretty sure that he have himself brain damage due to the fact that he had an episode while he was getting up from the toilet. He was wiping himself and it came on. The bathroom was small, so with him bending over, he fell head first on the rim of the bath tub. After this incident, he would rock back and forth, he wouldn't eat all his food, he became more prone to anger and shouting, he would stair blankly at you while you talked to him, and he began picking his scabs until they bled all over the floor and on himself. We even got him an in-home nurse, but she quit because my dad was such an ass.

The last time I saw him was during the summer. He had given me his cell phone because he had no use for it. He told me he needed it to call him an ambulance because he had a cough. I told him I could call it for him after arguing he didn't need an ambulance. He shouted at me, telling me I needed to give the phone back because he "just needed it". He knew he wasn't coming back. He just needed an excuse. The medical professionals put my dad in a home. That home became his death.

The people at the home don't take care of the mentally disabled or the old folks there. They forget to feed them sometimes, they "discipline" them for minor things, or they do it too harshly. My dad wanted a pb&j sandwich, but he has diabetes, and he had had too much protein, so they wouldn't give it to him, but all he wanted was a damn pb&j. When they fed him the next morning, he wouldn't eat, he told them he wouldn't until they gave him a pb&j, and a diet coke. They wouldn't. A few days later, and my dad died in that home.

My dad, earlier in his life, would tell his two sisters and five brothers the opposite of what went on in our home. He would tell them that my mother abused him and that he was afraid of my mom, he also told them that I was a horrible kid. He told them I was failing all my classes, mouthed off to him and my teachers, I never did any chores and I would always stay inside, I never wanted to go to church and I would do pretty much the opposite of what I did and wanted to do. My dad's side of the family believed him, and never liked me or my mom, except for my cousins my age of course. Because of this, we weren't invited to or told where or when the funeral was. The last thing I told my dad was "I hope God deals with you."

Later on in life, my mom kind of flipped the script, where once I hated my dad and clung onto my mom, I found that I missed my dad, and I hated my mom. Of course what can you expect when you live in a secular world, your father passes away, and every fiber of your being is telling you to do and feel one thing, but your mom is trying to keep you under the light of God.

I started playing video games more (my mom had bought me an Xbox 360 the Christmas after my dad passed), hung out with friends that didn't have the same brand of morality that my mom did, I wanted tattoos, I wanted to smoke weed and drink alcohol, I wanted to start fights, there was this girl that I crushed on harder than I had ever crushed on any other girl before (that's another story), it was all a typical story for a typical teenager.

I also had deeper problems that straight up contradicted what my mom had taught me. I'm bisexual, and for the longest time, I wanted to be transgender, even before the whole SJW movement became a thing. I thought it was just cross dressing, and putting on makeup, but it was deeper than that. When I learned what a transgender was, I knew I wanted to be a woman. I still do, really, but the deep need and want isn't there. I mean, it's always in the back of my mind, but it isn't as present. The feelings come and go. Anyway, these thoughts, along with the pain my crush had left me, plus many other teenage thoughts made me want to kill myself. Especially after the suicide of a good friend, I wanted to end it all.

I've tried to drink myself to death, I've tried to cut my wrists open, I've even tried to put a bullet in my brain, but I was always stopped by a friend. A very good friend, I would like to call him my brother, once told me "Your fate does not constitute suicide." That quote has saved my life more than once.

All these experiences, whether they were fueled by religion or not, have made me doubt myself, my God, my friends, everything. I have scars that still need healing. I literally get a nervous tick when people yell in front of me.

I've battled with the thought of a God that my mom and my grandparents follow, but that God, in a few words, is harsh, cruel, and torturous. The God that my father's mom is better, but not by much. The God that my wife and her parents is strange and I don't quite understand Him.

Am I religious? No, I don't believe in organized religion anymore. I think it's a drug that lulls you into thinking that the whole world revolves around you and your way of thinking and people who think like you. Am I spiritual? I believe so. I've heard my grandparent's retelling of incidents in the woods, or in their home town, which is filled with Native Americans that practice their own spirituality. I've also heard my wife's parents retelling of their parents incidents with spirits or ghosts, which, if they're telling the truth, contradicts each other. My wife's dad told me once that "To each person, what they believe, they shall receive in the afterlife." I think that's an LDS thing, but I'm not sure. This kind of makes me think that maybe he's right.

I don't follow the doctrine of any one religion. I believe that what matters is your own personal relationship with God. I don't believe in any set rules. And It isn't cherry picking either. I do things sometimes that I think would be okay, but later feel a deep pain and conviction that it was wrong, without knowing why, only later to realize that, maybe it wasn't okay with God. I don't know for sure.

I don't exactly go out of my way for God either though, most of the time. I believe that God made you to do you. I think he understands that in this day and age we can't exactly serve him the way that the apostles did, or even people who lived 200-300 years ago did. I also think that He has a sense of humor. I too think that he isn't exactly all powerful. Maybe he made a computer program-like universe and what he has set in motion cant exactly be messed with by him

I don't know, but what I can tell you is this. Be you. Who ever is reading this; man, woman, child, 15, 35, 75, christian, muslim, atheist, black, brown, white, gay, straight, transgender, whatever you are, just be you. Try to be the best you that you can be. Just don't be a d*ck.