Religion is an Opiate?

Some people find shelter in religion. A place of safety from the big bad world. Comfort from the chaos.

But I find it suffocating.

To different degrees, at different points in my life. In the beginning, I didn’t even realize consciously how difficult it made my life.

One could say, I would have struggled with cliques and popularity contests (which, I was never even CLOSE to winning, by the way) wherever I was.

That is likely true.

But at least I wouldn’t have been forced to be in this setting 24/7. But I grew up stuck in it every moment, because I was bound to my community not only at private religious day school but at weekly Shabbat services as well.

If I even had a unique voice, there was no way I was going to know. It would take years. It wasn’t worth the risk of standing out like a sore thumb. I saw how harsh my peers were to misfits, and I didn’t want that for myself.

Things really got tough with my all-encompassing religious lifestyle after my dad died. Not right after, but in the years after, when I started to step back. It wasn’t even the existential questions, like, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Trust me, my dad was as good as it gets, but I had accepted that.

It was more like, “How the F*** am I supposed to fit in a box, when my world has just been blown up?”

Losing one’s athletic father suddenly to a heart/brain fatal injury when one is 21, is not exactly an easy thing to deal with.

I needed space. I needed a new script. Or better yet, to write my own as I went along (it’s liberating but also hard as F***).

Religion had grown stale over time and simply left me stuck with judgmental people who seemed to never have been through the kind of sh** I had suffered. And if they had, they did a really good job at pushing it down and pretending like other things mattered more to them. I”m not very good at that. Nor do I wish to practice. Only while at my job do I commit to compartmentalizing, but that is for the sake of my livelihood, my very sustenance. Aside from that, I want to feel, to deal, to pop this bubble so surreal—yet so f***ing real. It comes with lows and highs, hellos and goodbyes (if you think it didn’t affect my relationships you are dead wrong. Dead, huh, maybe that’s not a word to be used lightly in this blog post, lol).

Anyway, that is all for now.

I’m off to do my weekend activities. Ciao, ciao. Hugs!