Fun fact: I got chemo treatments while pregnant.
It’s a crazy long, gut wrenching story, and my mind has done that fun little trick I talked about in my last blog, wherein it hides a lot of the details from my conscious mind as a self-preservation technique. But it happened. I DO remember every detail of my diagnosis, which was delivered to me the day I turned eight weeks pregnant. I remember that the words my doctor was telling me seemed bafflingly incomprehensible, like she was speaking in another language, or like her words were muffled as though she were whispering from another room.
Somehow that moment in time escaped my brains well-honed repressive abilities. There are some nights when I can’t sleep, and I lay awake listening to the sounds of my home: my husband snoring next to me, my dog snoring in the other room, the sound machine in my daughter’s room crackling in over the monitor.
But then I’ll feel how cold my feet are, and my brain will sweep me away to that day in the hospital almost four years ago now, and my feet will suddenly be cold because they’re resting on the hospital floor by my bed, where I’d spent the last week undergoing tests while the doctors desperately tried to get me to stop losing weight. I’ll feel the crushing sense of despair, absolutely certain they were going to have to make me abort the child to save my life. The mass was already so big that I couldn’t eat; how the hell was I going to be able to continue my pregnancy!?
But I was able to, and all too soon, they had to do an emergency c-section because neither the baby nor I were getting enough oxygen shortly after I hit my third trimester.
You see…religion isn’t the only thing I have PTSD from. No…my life has been far too fucked up to get off that easily.
My brain has far too much to choose from on the nights when insomnia strikes. I have DECADES of repressed shit that needs to be worked through, and I no longer have religion telling me “let go and let GOD” every time my brain decides to fuck with me for a night. Or 12. I honestly don’t think “let go and let God” ever actually worked for me, anyway. I think I was an overachiever and people pleaser hell bent on being the best at anything.
So my mental health took a back seat to “make it look good,” a chronic issue in almost every church I’ve ever attended.
So some nights the wounds go far too deep, and I find myself wondering if I’m the only one out here who has ever felt like this, because sometimes I can be a bit of a narcissist when it comes to “why me” and “no one understands me” and shit like that.
I know damn well I’m not the only one. People talk to me because I DO understand, and so I haul my ass out of bed and talk to the internet, because where the hell else are we supposed to find each other these days?
So I find ways to process the trauma, and sometimes I come right back around to religion, oddly enough. None of this “pray and stop talking about it” shit though, but REAL actually soul-searching and soul-cleansing work; work that allows me to be BITTER, to be ANGRY, to have a damaged soul that I allow to be bare and raw for a night, and longer if necessary.
What I’m learning is that religion that denies the existence of the dark times is a religion that will lose its relevancy in our fucked up world.
AmeriChristianity, in the Church I was raised in, somehow became wrapped up in both a Sanctification ideology and a Theocratic ideology all at the same time. The culture wars they waged outside the church became a grotesque, intricate masquerade dance inside the church. The rules we had to live by became the steps to our dance, while our masks hid the people we truly were: empty shells of humans.
But we MUST keep up this charade, for the WHOLE WORLD was watching. It was OUR sacred duty to win the hearts and minds of the world, and therefore save their immortal souls.
The end game, in retrospect, was painfully obvious: we were foot soldiers in their culture wars.
So we were sheltered and shielded from the world, forced into a dance not of our choosing, and expected to keep up appearances AT ALL COSTS…even unto sacrificing our own health, safety, and sanity.
You need only to look at today’s headlines to see this played out for all the world to see time and time again, and in several fundamentalist traditions: the Catholic Church, the Duggar Family, any dozen Republican Politicians you can name right now, it’s EVERYWHERE.
And the more isolated the church, the worse the stories get, because the problem becomes amplified tenfold in communities where everyone knows everyone, and EVERYONE is expected to dance all the time, and the shame becomes magnified even worse because there’s nowhere to hide: even the doctors, officers, and judges are your family or friends of your family.
There are SOOOO many DEEPLY wounded people out there these days. We’re all waking up to the insanity of it all, all at the same time, and there are very few of us equipped to handle such pain (see blog about that here).
My friends, you’re not alone. Full disclosure: I had a fucking panic attack while writing this blog. THAT’S how deep these wounds go. I’m fighting it again now.
Thank GOD (or…whatever) for my fucking dog, ya’ll.
I’ve said it before: the worst thing to feel right now is ALONE. I’m only able to do this because I know you’re out there: the people I’ve already connected with, the people who NEED someone to connect with, and the people who need to hear these stories to really understand what the fuck is going on in America right now.
Stay strong. Reach out.
Blessed be, ya’ll.
The Witty Apothecary 