Faith. Inspired by 'If I Believe You' by The 1975. It got me thinking about stuff. Faith is sometimes good. Faith is sometimes bad. Faith is overly fickle. It can be built up over years, you get raised to believe in a specific thing, but it can totally collapse at one tiny incident - one moment can break it for the rest of your life. Researching the sciences or some other higher power - when you convert from believing in Jehovah to Allah, a person close to yourself's death, the list goes on and on and on. It's one big common machine that's turned the cogs of all civilisation since before civilisation even began - if so many people through so many thousands of years have believed, why do I question it so? There was a time when I thought I believed. Catholic Irish and Catholic Spanish ancestry, parents raised in religious environments - what did I do to lose the faith my predecessors had held so dearly? I don't even remember. I prayed often, thinking - no, knowing - for my Catholic school had said so - there was a God listening to me. I asked for things. Feasible things. Things within reason. I thought maybe he could get my family out of some shitty situations, help my family to love eachother once again, to propel me to do what I want. My results were nought. And so I hit the ripe age of eleven, and I thought 'I don't need a God in my life. For all that he's done for me and his effort in stopping famines, mass murder, disease, he might as well not exist.' I was met with shunning from the older members of my family. 'You better believe' my nan had said, 'or else you'll be a bad person and go where the bad people go'. Of course, she meant Hell, I can only presume - would I really go to Hell? Would I burn in the same flames as the likes of Adolf Hitler and serial killers, just because I reject the notion of one of many higher powers? The comment changed me - 'religion has a toxicity rivalled by nothing else' I would tell myself. 'You're too young to have an opinion like that', I was told by my religious school teachers and grandparents - really? My age invalidated opinions I had formed on my own, stemming from comments of people close to me who were acting like I, an eleven year old child, was some kind of physical manifestation of the Antichrist? My viewpoints changed again, sometime around the end of my fifteenth year on the Earth. I look at religious people, and my veins run green with envy. They have something to believe in, and it's beautiful. They believe that after all of this - this weird ball of blue and green that not everyone gets blessed with ideal conditions to live in with - there's... something else. They fear the deathbed, yes, but they feel there's something beyond that - maybe they'll see a light, they'll get dragged through to white pearly gates, or whatever else they believe. They'll be immortals, they'll be with their loved ones. Fear of the deathbed is this haunting thing for me. If the universe is as cruel as how I think it is, I'm going to be on my deathbed, feeling a wave of fear wash over me, thinking 'this is it'. There will be nothing waiting for me afterwards. My loved ones will be forever lost, I will never speak to my mother or father or siblings again. I'll never see the girl I love or loved again. The only degree of immortality I have is my immortality complex, and it makes my mind feel black as charcoal - like I'm a thing, floating through the world, this big bundle of organs and hormones dwelling within a skin, and that's all I'm ever going to be. 'Why would a God let me become an atheist if this is how I feel about my life, if he wants me to be his sheep?' I ask myself. I ask myself if I am to completely renounce my faith, or do I convert to something less extreme than Catholicism, 'just in case'. I ask myself if he really does hate the gays, is that why I'm an atheist - I'm not homosexual, I don't even know what I am, but I'm not the straightest person alive and I'm comfortable with that - if a God isn't, he's not my God. There's hope for me yet. I want to see the world. All of its people, all of its sights and smells and sounds - its architectural structures, its immense and deepening and wonderful history, its sadness and its happiness. There's things in my way, yes, but I'm sure as Hell not going to let them stop me. I'm feeling a plethora of feelings about the world and my life right now, and I think it's amazing - years of my life being a daily grind of 'wake up, do the same shit again, go to sleep, repeat' and some thinly veiled depression hanging behind a curtain... is gone, just like that, and I view the world with some amount of hope - that it can be better, that it's beautiful, that I can maybe put aside its artificial flaws and appreciate life for what it is... a miracle. My life is a combination of defying the impossibles - the fact I am not dead or severely physically and mentally handicapped, or that I didn't kill myself 'just because' years back, is a miracle. I can feel what I think is a genuine love towards someone outside of my family who is many, many miles away from me, and I'm in love with that. And that's why there's hope for me. Life is a miracle. I can't explain its incomprehensibly complex existence. Why does it exist, how does it exist - I can't answer that. There's an answer somewhere, somehow, and I don't know it - the most logical thing would be that a higher power created it, but physics is a subject unintelligible to the human mind that could explain how life exists but nobody understands that yet... but that could also explain the existence of a higher being. I find myself stuck between two worlds. The faithful world, and the atheist world. I try to deny it, to swing one way or the other. I was once completely in the white as an atheist. I was once in the black as a believer. It's took me this long to realise that your faith isn't black and white - it's a rainbow.
Faith just isn't religion. Faith takes many forms, many we have yet to understand. I don't follow religion yet I still have faith.
Gonna give a shot at an Onion type article thing. BREAKING NEWS: Jeremy Corbyn, the Member of Parliament for Islington North (serving since 1983) and current leader of the Labour Party, has revealed himself as a Welshwoman. The revelation comes after this tweet, in which he reveals he is a 'proud Welshwoman' after congratulating Jo Stevens on her new position as Shadow Welsh Secretary. On September 24th Jeremy Corbyn - a man loved by millenials, nicknamed a Communist dictator by the elderly middle class - defeated Owen Smith - a snooty Welsh Labour MP nobody has ever heard of with utterly poor debating skills in a leadership contest called after a vote of no confidence in the 'radical' opposition leader during post-referendum fallout. After a landslide victory in said leadership contest, Corbyn has reshuffled his shadow cabinet for the trillionth time. The statement is sure to garner Labour votes in areas with high populations of Welshwomen and people who want to be Welshwomen in the 2020 general election. When Jeremy says he's going to radically change something in the name of equality and Socialist values, he will do so - just ask the officers who arrested him during anti-apartheid protests. 'British Bernie Sanders' is set to break new voting records if he keeps up his Welsh nationalistic comments and words of transgender - and transculture - equality. Also in the news, Theresa May - Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since July 2016, all-around authoritarian - has announced she plans to allow European Union doctors (actually, she just said 'foreign') to stay until she can 'home-grow more'. Beyond this being an unacceptable comment in the 21st century, she doesn't seem to realise her own party is the reason the NHS is collapsing, Universities now cost £9000 a year - and only set to rise, and those people who actually get qualified to become doctors leave the country as they are now smart enough to realise doctors are overworked and underpaid in the 'United' Kingdom. Mrs. May seems more and more interested in simulating a Trump United States, and is not going down with the damn Millenials.
I chuckled a bit, but the details of the UK's political environment are lost on me, so I'm afraid I probably missed most of the more humorous nuances.
I gave this a little bit of a rewrite and added some kind of plot to it. Thinking of throwing it up on my Wattpad - where there is a very real chance the girl I wrote this about could see it. I have no idea how she'd react or if she'd even realise I was thinking of her and even based it off a picture of her. I tried to make it a bit more ambiguous and remove the influences of her picture on the writing. At the same time I'd hope she connects the dots and realise that this is some kind of confession of my feelings and all that sappy shit, because I feel like time is running out for me and I don't have the guts to straight up tell her. Send me your thoughts. Now, onto the rewritten thing! She stands there among red roses and green bushes; hands in front of her waist, one leg in front of the other, high heels making her look taller than she actually is. Her hair flows beyond her shoulders - the lighting makes it difficult to view her face, but pigs will fly before that isn't beautiful. She wears a purple dress - the colour of royalty, wealth, power and glory. "Do you think I look good for the dance?" she yells at me. Though at a loss for words, I manage to muster a 'you look more than good'. I can make out a smile on her face. She puts her head down, appears to giggle, and looks back up - she gives me a 'thank you very much'. The sky - decorated with clouds - glows a perfect orange haze behind her, the sun taking its last bow for the day behind tree-covered green hills - making way for the Moon to take the throne of the sky. The clear blue lake in front of her shows reflections; reflections of the sunset, the moonrise, the hills, the trees, herself. It looks perfectly still - a safe haven. Yet not even that compares to the perfect girl who stands before it. She has her flaws and insecurities, but they also make her an icon of such magnificence. I long to put an arm around her shoulders or to share a laugh with her - but the lake denies me that. There is no way around the lake - try to swim through it, and I will drown - or be torn up by sharks, but neither option is particularly appealing to me. Our islands have no way off them and aren't connected at all. We're pretty screwed. And so we sit, shouting at eachother over the lake - connecting and bonding, day after day, yet never able to even touch. I silently curse the situations we've been placed in. I wonder if I'd ever be able to tell her how I feel - would she think me stupid for getting such a connection over such a long distance? I hope not. I have to wonder if she feels the same.
Welp. This is on Wattpad now. I reworded some parts to make it more open to interpretation... but, yeah. I'm sure it's likely very obvious to 'her' what it's about. I just don't think I don't have anything to lose anymore.
Opening up about some bullcrap. I like writing about this stuff. It helps. I just hate putting this stuff here lol. ------------------------------------------ There's a little dark shadow that follows me everywhere I go. It's not my own. It belongs to her. She follows me everywhere I go. I call her anxiety, and she is awful. I don't remember when I first noticed her - I don't know if she's always been there or not. All I know is she's here now, and that's what matters. I know that she's watched me grow up, and I know that I loathe her existence. She sits in the corner of every room I'm in, taunting me and giggling at me. She first touched me outside of my home - not just anywhere, only ever around people. I found it difficult to talk to people in class, as I'd already been rejected anyway, but she just made it worse. "These people don't like you," she'd say, and I would believe her. So I kept quiet. And then she would put her hand on my shoulder when I was even within the vicinity of strangers, and so just a simple visit to the shop around the corner of my house would make my mind run amok with different scenarios. Being taunted by kids my own age, somebody judging me from afar, somebody mocking my appearance - the latter and the former happened multiple times, and as far as I can assume the middle did too. Soon, I was unable to talk to people. She pokes me with her stupid little finger when somebody even says 'hello' to me, or holds the door open for me. I mumble my answers because it feels comfortable for me to do. I remember my SATs exams I sat at eleven years of age, when my right side began to experience almost unbearable pain and I began vomiting everything I ate back up. I was off school for two weeks, and no doctor could figure out what was physically wrong with me - likely because they didn't deal with mental health alongside, and because that was linked to some kind of thing to do with my anxieties. When I got into secondary school, I'd always consign myself to the back of the class, away from everybody else. That changed when my special educational needs supervisor decided I wasn't paying attention in the back of the class, and that I would have to speak up (which I found difficult to find the courage to do) to get help. Nobody cared that I wouldn't - no, couldn't - talk, besides one of my mum's friends daughters who paired herself with me in Spanish class and asked me why I didn't talk. I explained my suspicions to her, and... I don't remember what happened next. Nothing, I assume. I'm going to skip a whole bunch of years spent with this witch taunting me, from mid-2013 to... mid-2016, when stuff started to get worse. I'd just sat my GCSEs, I was worried about those. I was worried about someone close to me leaving me again, even though that never came - but there was always that incessant fear she would. She wouldn't talk to me for a few hours and I would go crazy, thinking things like 'she's doing this again'. My sister even got diagnosed with a disorder relating to my same situations, but when I asked to get 'tested' for this stuff my mum said no, and then when I asked a few years later I was told to stop being a pussy and be a man. I remember one night where I just thought way too into something with my exams, my friends, my life, and I nearly broke down into tears for the second time in a few months. Nearly. I can't cry. At this point I hadn't properly cried in years. I can get my eyes slightly wet, but that emotional release and the actual tears don't come down. That idiot little girl was stood right next to me - no, more like behind me, like an itch I couldn't scratch. I started questioning if she'd ever leave me the Hell alone. I remembered my mum flipping out at me for being unable to talk to people. I remembered all those times I've passed stuff up because I was too afraid of social interaction. "Leave me alone," I begged. She didn't. She never does. I'm still the child she insists on having. Little faceless nemesis, I hate you. Whenever she does that little thing, that little poke - when somebody I love is having a tough time, when I'm having a tough time, oftentimes it's stupid things, she does it. It makes me cease to exist within my own head. The person I am in school, out in public - that's not me. The person I am when I sit in my bedroom up late trying to think over stuff, that's not me. I've gotten drunk twice now. I love it. The little girl leaves me alone for once. I just let everything go. It's like the person who is my release, except the alcohol doesn't add to that stress sometimes. It's beautiful. I've done second hand smoking, and that's a slight release too - the little girl fades away slightly. I've seriously considered cigarettes and other things - let's leave it at that - but I don't want to become something I hate. I don't want to become something that the people I love hate. That isn't me. I'm not putting myself at risk, I'm not going to do something that would be slightly uncharacteristic of me, just for the sake of getting rid of her. I wonder how I'm ever going to escape the one who haunts me. At this point, I don't think I ever can.
Oh, wow. That's rough. You've been going through very tough times throughout your life and it is still far from possible for your life to be called 'stable' or 'predictable' or 'easy'. But you're doing great, Jamie. I'll try to keep you in my prayers. I usually forget, but I think I care enough about you to remember.
I really like the way you write. It might be what you write about, but wow. I thought I was good at expressing things but I don't understand how to show my thoughts on this. I like reading the things you've posted here so far. I think that's the best I can say. ~~~~~ How would you say someone could 'be there' for someone else dealing with her?
First of all, thank you. Genuinely made me smile On the second note: I haven't quite figured that out myself yet and I'm not too sure how to answer this one. I guess all I can really say is be a good friend to them, make sure they know you're their friend and not someone who's going to run away the first chance they get, and maybe be with them as much as possible - in all honesty, it doesn't do much (for me), but it definitely does give you a small confidence boost when you have people you're comfortable with around you. It's weird though. I'm not entirely comfortable around my real life friends. I'm comfortable around three-four people, and they're internet friends. The one I talk to the most is in the same position as me - that's where my importance of friends thing comes in. Her friends don't listen to her when she's having problems. I try to be that ear as much as possible. She does the same thing for me.
Hm, let's give this a try. Jack Winter leaned against his balcony, a lit cigarette in hand. His half-undone and untucked shirt billowed gently in the wind. He guided the cigarette to his lips, breathing in the concoction of nicotine and cancer deep into his lungs. He looked over the city - the bright, shining beacon of a city that lit up the night. Reds and yellows and blues and whites shone through buildings, cars, and the city's Ferris Wheel. His eyes were fixated on the airport, far away from him, yet it felt so close. He watched as a plane took off into the air, elegantly and expertly. He breathed out. "Hey you," a female voice said from behind him. He turned to face her. The brown-haired girl, dressed in her white night dress, was halfway through the frame of the door. She walked towards him, and wrapped her arms around him. "It's cold out here." "It is." Jack replied, returning the hug. "I'm just... thinking about things." They stood there for a moment; revelling in the bliss, the lack of care they had in that moment, in each other's warmth. "I don't want you to leave, Jack." she whispered, nestling her head deeper into him, like she was scratching an itch in her hair. "I can't." They pulled away from their hug, and he pulled out a second cigarette and his lighter. He placed it between the woman's lips, flicked the lighter's top, and set her tobacco stick aflame. She breathed in, pulled it away, and opened her mouth to speak. "Why's that?" "I'm going back home. Eventually. We have some extra days together. I just... can't go home right now. I made a mistake." She placed her hand against his shoulder, and looked deep into his sea green eyes. "You can tell me anything. I love you, Jack. Nothing you say to me is going to change that. I promise." He brought his eyes to meet hers, taking another puff of his cigarette. "I like to put myself above others, you know that. You're the only person I put above myself - I love you too. I just... can't bring myself to do it. To get on that plane in the morning. I feel sorry for the people on it." "Why, Jack? Why can't you fly away tomor-" "I was flying with United." Jack said, gritting his teeth, cutting her sentence off. "Oh, my Love..." She brought him in for another hug, and planted a kiss on his cheek. "Come to bed." She pulled away, stubbed her cigarette, tossed it over the balcony, and walked back inside. Jack stood there for several moments, watching as another plane took off. His nicotine stick ran out of things to burn, and he tossed it over the balcony, before following the woman back inside.
I've been on this rant many times before, I guess I'll be on it many times more, Each time hurts more than the last, And words are the only way to get these feelings out, I can't talk to you because I don't know how to, But there's a problem between us that I don't know any other way to fix, The feeling in my stomach tells me this is the last, Maybe you belong in the past, With your one sided replies and lack of interest, You told me you'd sell yourself to somebody else, Let them hold you and touch you in a way that I no longer think I ever can, In exchange for a wealth jobless college boys can't provide, I can't even afford a guitar to drown out my noise, Maybe one day you'll be telling 'all the drinks are on me', We could go to a hotel room and we'd have a two person party, Budweiser and a French letter or two, Kiss goodbye and you'd fly back home, Happily ever after in the making, We'd holiday under the Balkan Sun for years to come, Sometimes I see a little baby girl and baby boy, The dreams used to make me laugh, They were thinking too far ahead, Yet they made me wake with hope, I could spring out of bed and send a good morning text, Now I'm scared to sleep, I get visions of loneliness and a future without you, Dreams of other's success while I end it by hanging myself, The ceiling fan spins on and on and on, I feel this a realistic reality, It weighs me into my bed until my legs can't take it anymore, And I love you too much to just let go, And I hate myself too much to know what's good And while I may be jumping the gun, I'm really not feeling fun, How do I say 'I love you' without making you run? //Ｉｎｓｐｉｒｅｄ ｂｙ ｒｅｃｅｎｔ ｒｅａｌ ｌｉｆｅ ｅｖｅｎｔｓ ａｎｄ ａ ｒｅｃｕｒｒｉｎｇ ｎｉｇｈｔｍａｒｅ ｔｈａｔ'ｓ ｈａｕｎｔｉｎｇ ｍｙ ｈｅａｄ.// I might do a line by line breakdown of what everything in whatever this is means, not sure yet. Feedback is appreciated. Don't know if this is best left open to interpretation or if it'd be nice to explain what some of the stuff means. Also weird, every time I write something like this the problem goes away.
I would really love to see an explanation for all of that. Feedback is not something I'm great at, but I'm kinda failing to find flaws with that thing. Loved the way it sounded, but I'm sorry that you had to write it
