So I have a confession to make. I hate church.
No, I don't mean THE Church or churches in general or whatever (and I actually still love my small group). I mean that I hate Sunday service, aka the place where most people get their first exposure to church anyway. Enough so to the point where I not only find it difficult to actually show up, but I also have days like today, where I actually made it to service (albeit 20 minutes late) but then wound up leaving at the end of it in tears.
It's not so much something that I have against the whole concept of Sunday service, though; I just personally don't feel cut out for it. Speaking as someone who has long struggled with trying to fit into most social situations and groups, church on Sundays often feels like just another one of those places. If you don't already have friends who you're regularly in contact with there anyway, it can become rather impersonal and a source of awkwardness, being forced to either say hi to or ignore people who you recognize but aren't particularly close with, and the brief conversations you do have to catch up with such people often peter out just as fast as they start (because one of you doesn't have anything else to say and then starts looking to bounce to the next person or location).
And if you don't have anyone else to turn to, or are someone like me who often just isn't in the right state of mind to be talking to people casually on a Sunday morning (often because of pre-existing mental issues or because the sermon this morning forced me to confront something personal) and finds it difficult to feign interest in conversation or maintain an air of social propriety or even just try to reach out to people who I don't talk to often, it can become very isolating. I have never felt more lonely than in the presence of other people.
I think part of my problem is that I heavily dislike small talk, and I often prefer to be more vulnerable or open about my issues or ongoing state of mind with people, even if I don't know them as well. But this doesn't really work with acquaintances or most people I run into on Sunday (...in an environment that somehow tries to be both conducive for reflection and still upbeat, because "Praise Jesus!"). In being hyper-self-conscious of that, I often end up just standing around aimlessly at the end of service, not knowing what to do with myself. I usually feel like someone who still needs people to reach out to him even though he's been around for years.
And then I have a day like today, where I push it a little bit and force myself into a position where I'll have to interact with people sooner or later. But a lack of acknowledgment or even a simple "hey, it's been a while!" (because really, I've been around, and we just haven't talked because there isn't a pressing reason to still be in each other's lives and it's probably mutual), and sometimes receiving an awkward look instead is enough to crush me on the inside and remind me of how much I don't feel like I fit in with this larger community and why I stopped bothering to come out as much in the first place.
It's hard to fit in when you don't fit into the typical mold of what an average attendee at this church service looks like (straight, married or in a relationship, God-fearing, good with kids, wakes up in time for 9 AM service, drinks coffee, etc). Even more so when you're still in a place of questioning whether or not you really believe in this anymore, and find it difficult to take the words spoken or sung in front of you seriously sometimes but still have to put on some air of reverence for it anyway.
But these kinds of problems aren't just limited to church for me. I have them with any and all kinds of social situations that force me to interact with people who I don't see all the time. And even with those I do hang out with semi-regularly, I think about often I shut down in front of them after a while because I just don't have the mental energy to be present anymore, or in other cases, how long it took me to even get to a place of feeling comfortable enough to be around them in the first place, and how these days I still don't feel entirely comfortable or perhaps even less so than I used to.
How if it weren't for other factors of situational placement or convenience, we wouldn't even be talking in the first place, because I am not the type of person easily inclined towards forming or maintaining relationships with people. Every interaction I have feels like a toll, and it takes just one misstep these days to turn my otherwise functional mental state into a mess and make me go fuck-people-fuck-social-norms-fuck-propriety-fuck-everything-fuck-living-(but-I'm-not-suicidal-yet).
And I hate it. I hate how volatile I am.
I hate how long it takes me to recover from one night's worth of bad sleep, one day's worth of committed social activity, one week's worth of back-to-back blocked-out-calendar engagements and errands, one year's worth of events that I can't remember happening anymore, one decade's worth of stagnation in my state of being emotionally and spiritually.
How it took me almost two decades to come out to myself and acknowledge that I can't keep going on like this anymore.
How this life I'm living isn't really sustainable.
How I have no healthy models from others of what it really looks like to truly "live," because no one else around me "looks like me" in the same sense, even though I've been conditioned for most of my life to look up to others: parents, peers, friends, authority, absolute truth, God, myself, anything else what-have-you, only to have my confidence in all of these to be shattered once I finally realized that I didn't trust in any of them anymore, because at the end of the day I was still stuck in the same place anyway because I couldn't live up to the ideals or models or molds placed in front of me of what a Christian or what an adult or what a straight-bi-homo-whatever or what a sane human being or even what a friend really looks like (and I never really fully identified with any of my home cultures so eff that). I don't really know who or what I am anymore.
All I have now are just waylaid plans for how to spend time in the meantime since I have other shit I need to worry about. And I've been so dissatisfied with the conversations I've been having lately (even the "good" conversations) that I don't feel like talking to anyone anymore, no small talk no random lol comments no whatever. I know something isn't right with me, but part of me doesn't want to do anything about it, other than perhaps acknowledging that something exists and leaving it there for now.
Dear friends and people who like to fix problems: I'm sorry for being so frustrating. I'm frustrated with myself right now, and I don't even know why, or perhaps I just don't want to admit it and I'm really in denial about whatever my true problems are, or perhaps all of this is just me blatantly overreacting to something really mild because I'm ultimately insecure with myself and my own state of being to the point where just about anything will trigger me these days, or perhaps I really was mostly okay until I started writing this because "I just had to" and then just unwittingly opened up a giant can of worms/subconscious-thought-vomit from my mind.
Pardon me while I try to cool myself off for the rest of the day instead of being productive like I was planning to do. I'm probably going to come back to this later and wonder wtf I was thinking, as usual.
Here's a song from The National that I like a lot.
(on another note... two hours to write. I think that's a record for me.)
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