February 4

Pittsburgh was a party phase, to be blunt. I’m not saying I whipped off my top at Dave Matthews concerts, but I sort of came close to that. It was an experimental time for me. To paint a picture for you, Reader, I had been a holier than thou goody-goody in my high school days. I think I uttered a swear word a total of five times in my entire teenage career, and the only time I said the F-word was when he (the guy I fell in love with) was in a heated debate with me and used it in something he said to me. I had turned around what he said with a passionately angry point by repeating what he had said, coincidently using the F-word. My room of friends gasped, and a group of very happy fingers were pointing at me crowing, “You just said the F-word! I can’t believe you just said the F-word!” I did it so accidently that I denied it profusely for a good ten minutes before I realized that I was outnumbered by at least four witnesses who all heard the same thing come out of my mouth. That, Reader, is how much of a goody-goody I was. Picture that, and then see me five years later getting toasted in a bachelor pad in a Pittsburgh ghetto, and the contrast is a little alarming.

It was the religion factor that kept me separated from him. Religion? I had always hated the word “religion”, Reader. I really did. I never considered myself “religious”. I considered myself a “Christian”. But now even that word has lost so much of its original meaning. You can be a drug dealing racist and call yourself a Christian just because you “believe in God”. For me, in high school, my faith was my lifestyle. I was tormented because according to the doctrine that was taught to me, no two people should be “unequally yoked”. For those who aren’t familiar with scripture, this was interpreted to me as: Christians should not date or marry non-Christians. This, can I just say, is just as asinine as saying a woman can’t fall in love with a woman or a man can’t fall in love with a man. This is where my bitterness began to wedge itself in. Unequally yoked? I had never felt more equally yoked to anyone than I did with him. Outside what the church had taught me, and going against all doctrines, I truly felt in my heart that the God I worshiped had made him for me, that He wanted me to be with him. But I was so afraid of breaking the rules and so scared of the consequences that I never fully pursued what I should have. Regret is an awful taste that never leaves the tongue, I tell you. I began to feel bitter and angry and empathetic for all those who wanted to liberally love who they loved without having a church tell them that it was a sin to. Explain to me how acting upon love is sinful, will you? I’m pretty sure Satan doesn’t temp us to love. So. This drew me from “Christianity” pretty swiftly (amongst other things irrelevant).

There were times, too, when I was convinced I was getting the okay from God. Scripture would pop up in my devotions in my favor. I had heard a voice in my head out of nowhere telling me to, “Love him”. I knew exactly who “him” was, no questions asked. I was also having dreams that were guiding me into the direction that all of this was my fate, my destiny. The dreams were the hardest to ignore. They were very realistic, quite unlike a fantasy, and there was always the undeniable feeling of being touched or spoken to by God when I would wake up shaking in my sheets. And then I would cry, unable to understand what was happening to me. I pushed aside the shady, spiritual evidence and viewed all these so-called signs as misunderstandings. “You’re only seeing what you want to see,” I would pep talk to myself. I was convinced that I was simply blinded by hormones, confusion, a comfort zone I craved, and an incredibly misguided infatuation. Emotions are not reliable, and I’m over aware that I’m an intensely emotional person (it goes along with that temperamental artist personality of mine-cliché number two), and being consciously aware of my instability and frequent mood changes, I was in utter denial. I re-told myself a hundred times that I needed to get the hell over it, and there was no way that God would really give the okay for something I had been taught my whole life was wrong.

Pittsburgh? I sort of snapped.

My goody-goodness wasn’t going to cost me love again. I was apparently going to make sure of that. So, I sort of went on a bit of a sin binge. Well, pretty sinful for me anyhow. I’m not about to confess throwing myself into random men’s arms and letting them have their way with me. No. Ha! That’s actually comical if you knew me at all… No. It was more like boozing every weekend, finding my voice in the world of swear words, funny looking pipes, Camel Lights, and not going to church. It was crying every time I tried to pray, and then embracing the idea that everything I had been taught growing up was, indeed, wrong.

See? My life just becomes more and more cliché the more I share it: Good little church girl goes bad. Good grief.

My rebellion with men? Hmm. I don’t know if that’s what you want to call it: a rebellion. This makes me sound like a sixteen year old trying to show up her parents by sneaking out of her bedroom at night with a boy waiting on the corner of 10th and Pine. It wasn’t a rebellion. It was needing to fix how I felt with a substitute. The unexpected outcome of this was that I didn’t date; I didn’t go after anything I couldn’t have (well, not yet at least); I didn’t have any one night stands; I barely kissed anyone… (with the exception of that one dude in that one club – a story for tomorrow). No. I pined. I was confused. I found fellowship and belonging in the most unlikely of contenders, and I pined from afar. I made up fantasies about these men who in all reality would have never made a descent match whatsoever, but I wanted so very badly to move on from how I felt. The fantasies supplied a sort of false hope that seemed to get me through it. I wanted so desperately not to think of myself as someone who was so weak, so pathetic, to have become so intensely filled with sap and infatuation with someone I had only thought that I loved. It couldn’t be love. I truly believed that if I found someone else, I’d realize that everything I felt was nothing more than a silly delusion, a madness that needed a cure. This? Backfired big time. Using delusions to rid yourself of what really ends up being a reality after all, isn’t the right way to go. In other words: the love was a reality that I thought was a delusion, and I tried to get rid of the delusion with the reality of other men. But the reality of other men, as it turned out, was the delusion. Make sense yet? My head hurts too.