this is also how i became a leftist after being raising very traditional/conservative/catholic tbh
hearing them break down ‘bad’ leftist ideas and i was just sitting there waiting for the bad part that didn’t come…and i’m like….yes? you should probably give free lunches to kids when their parents can’t afford to feed them dinner? why do you not want this?
trying to figure out politics was me just moving further to the left the more i learned about pretty much every single issue because of the traditional/catholic parts of my upbringing which is why i’m so baffled that so much of my family falls much more red than blue and i’ll probably never understand how that happened
i’ve had family straight up ask me why i support programs like free lunch and i had to explain that i support them because they taught me that i should care about other people and try to make the world a better place and the golden rule…they never seem to have an answer for when i ask them back why they don’t support those same programs
You want to live to see your friends and family grow old. You want to drive a car. You want to live to see yourself forget your own age. You want to live by yourself. You want to be more than a child. You want to make bad decisions. You want to learn how to do better. You want to find purpose in life. You want to know who you are before it’s all over. You don’t want it to be over. You want to live to see your last day. You want to live to fall in love. You want to live.
When I went to see Tangled with my family, I was terrified of having to talk about the movie afterwards because I related so much to Rapunzel, and I was sure my mom would hate the movie because it was so obvious that she was exactly like mother gothel. So when mom asked me afterwards if I liked it I gave a tepid non-answer. But then my mom started talking about how she loved the movie! And it slowly dawned on me that she also saw mother gothel as evil and abusive, but somehow didn’t make the connection that she and her were the same. My mom even made a comment to the effect of how, like rapunzel’s real mom, her love for me would always triumph or whatever. And she didn’t get it!
She didn’t see the similarities of how she locked me away in the house, or how she kept me under the tightest supervision under the guise of keeping me safe. I spent the entire mother knows best song stealing glances at her next to me in the theater just waiting for her to drag us out of the movie because she couldn’t stand to have her “love” portrayed as evil. And she didn’t see how the fact that she created her identity completely around being a mother and nothing else was like mother gothel’s dependency on rapunzel’s magic hair.
It was only after seeing her positive reaction to the movie, that I really understood the meaning of the phrase “everyone is the hero of their own story”. No one actually thinks they’re the villain, even if confronted with a painfully obvious rendering of their own actions done by someone they agree is rightly portrayed as evil.
“everyone is the hero of their own story”. No one actually thinks they’re the villain, even if confronted with a painfully obvious rendering of their own actions done by someone they agree is rightly portrayed as evil.
Raised Catholic things: you won’t step foot in a church but you can’t watch any fictional depiction of Mass without twitching when they use a different translation than the one you know
You are allowed to feel what you feel, even when those feelings aren’t pretty and “godly.” Anger is still and emotion. Hate is not evil. Yes, you should strive to be in control when you are in states of anger or hate, but do not shame yourself for feeling natural emotions. You wouldn’t shame yourself for happiness, so why any other feelings? You wouldn’t shame yourself for love so why the antithesis? Sometimes, you just need to let emotions run their course. Trust me. The pain, anger, and hate will fade if you allow yourself to feel it. Pushing it away will only make it stronger and more painful.
You are safe to feel. There is no being judging you for being who you are. I know it feels that way. I’m sorry my loves.
i have this overwhelming sense that i have a major trauma in my past. i spent a lot of my childhood wishing something bad would happen to me so that i could justify these feelings. and even now, i know it’s the cult, i still feel like it’s not bad enough. my trauma isn’t enough.
but not only that, i feel like i can’t blame the cult. the idea that it is good and right and that there’s no other way is so ingrained in me, that even though i know it’s wrong and traumatic and stole 16+ years of my life, i still can’t quite rationalize my feelings and responses to it.
it’s like someone told you after almost two decades of life that the sky isn’t blue, it’s been green all along, and all the facts point to that being true, and you know rationally that it is, and you know you’ve been lied to your whole life. you know the sky is green, but if someone asked you, you would still automatically say that the sky is blue.
(the sky is actually blue. not trying to trigger anything in anyone.)
so much religious belief seems to stem from a basic confusion over what emotions mean, and the fact that they provide feedback on what’s happening inside your head, not out there in the world.
so many conversion stories involve someone visiting a cathedral and feeling an emotion and concluding on that basis that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened and people go to heaven when they die, when those conclusions don’t follow from the premise at all!
and it’s not a simple oversight, a lot of apologetics even rely on it, like half of C. S. Lewis’ guff is him saying he feels a sense of dissatisfaction sometimes and this is obviously evidence that the Christian god is real and miracles described in the bible really happened blah blah blah and like dude is there no other possible reason why you might feel this emotion, or why this emotion might exist in the first place?
I can get tingly sometimes when I listen to the right music in the right frame of mind but that doesn’t constitute proof that there’s a god of nightcore dubstep remixes out there rearranging the cosmos for my personal benefit, as cool as that would be.
