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11:41 PM - Wednesday, Mar. 01, 2006
It's all in my head...
I grew up believing in so many things: Jesus Christ, The Virgin Mary, God, The Holy Spirit, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny... they were all painted in my mind like some characters from a book, except they weren't fictional. They were real.

I remember when they stopped being real to me. Of course, the Tooth Fairy, The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus were the first to go. When I think about them now, I see them as characters in a Peanuts movie - animated but not real, surrounded by the music of Bach and Mozart... all of this happening as the character Schroeder played on his piano and the twirls of color painted the TV screen. It was not a traumatic experience to lose these characters of the Holidays to reality, but the magical appeal that came with the Holidays surrounding them was a loss too great.

Christmas is supposed to be about giving rather than receiving; but why do we need a holiday to remind us to give? Why do we need a commercialized vacation full of gifts to bring out the good in all people? The tale of Scrooge, It's a Wonderful Life, and all the meanings behind the symbols of Christmas... what do they do for us? Putting lights on your house is supposed to symbolize the light of the world, but why can the light of the world only shine during this significant holiday?

Easter is a moment when we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord, the ending of a Catholic's short period of sacrifice in the 40 days of Lent, a moment to remember that Christ died on the cross to save us from our sins. But I wonder, why do we only sacrifice for 40 days and 40 nights and not longer? Why was the image of a white man on a cross painted in my mind as a child? A man with thorns wrapped around his skull and blood oozing from the cuts? Why was this man beaten severely by whips to the point where the cuts seeped deep into his skin and opened up sores? Sores that the people spit into... the same people who started the Roman Catholic Church in his honor and his name?

What I believed as a child came from the stories spun from the Bible, the myths created by the people from the past to bring spirit and joy into the lives of children like me. What they never tell you is, that as you grow older, the joy and the spirit of all of these things lose their appeal. You find that your birthdays don't matter as much. Seldom is there a thrill to opening up presents or blowing out the candles on your cake. Where is the magic that once came from growing a year older and celebrating life? As children, do we even understand that we are celebrating life, or was I one of the most naive beings to ever exist?

I used to go into church, and I would do as I was told. I would be quiet as a mouse, dressed as nice as I could be dressed. I would kneel when I was supposed to kneel, stand when I was told to stand, the words of the ceremony becoming more familiar to me than the back of my hands. I could cite the memorized words the priest spoke along with the responses; but did I ever truly understand what they meant, or did I just accept them as the way? I would go up to Communion and extend my hands after making sure they were clean and not dirty. Dirty hands were disrespectful and possibly a sin. And the priest would stand there and say, "The Body of Christ," and I would reply, "Amen." Then I would put that piece of bread into my mouth and swallow, believing that I was swallowing the body of the Lord and accepting my passage into Heaven. Then I would go back to my seat and I would kneel, closing my eyes tight and praying as hard as I could pray. Sometimes I'd become so overwhelmed with emotion that I would have to fight back tears. And I knew that what I felt inside couldn't be as painful as what that man on the cross went through. So I would say, "Dear God, do with me as you will."

I wanted to sacrifice my life for God. I wanted to make this being that I wasn't sure existed proud of me. So I prayed for the sick, and I prayed for the dying. I prayed for the children who were growing up hungry, who were beaten by their parents in unloving homes. I prayed for the homeless, and I prayed for the sinning. And I did it because I felt it was what I had to do. I was the lucky one. I didn't know suffering, even though every day I woke up I felt pain. And the entire time, I sat there saying, "Dear God, do with me as you will."

And I believed things happened for a reason. I believed there was a purpose to everything. If someone died, in my heart I knew it was just their time to go. God needed them up in Heaven for some reason or another. I didn't know for sure if that was true, or if I was just saying these things to console my aching heart. And when it came to love, I believed there was a perfect match for everyone out there and that God would bring me mine. He would have a purple star above his head that matched the purple star above mine. We would come together and it would be as it was meant to be because everything that happens is meant to be. And I had faith, and I had hope, and I had dreams. And still, I said to God, "Do with me as you will."

And when I entered high school, I became friends with certain people. For some reason I was apathetic to the people with problems, who came from homes that abused them... the students who ended up having sex and doing drugs and getting pregnant and dropping out. I counseled them. They listened to what I had to say as if I knew what I was saying. But did I really know what I was saying when I had never experienced the way they had lived? Or was everything I told them coming from some dreaming girl that still existed inside of me? I did not know. I could not know.

And then I started to experience their lives. It blew me away to know the pain of a fist smacking into my flesh. It tore me apart to know what it felt like to give myself completely to someone and not receive a bit of them in return. It ripped me up, but I didn't know it was even trying too. So I hid behind the abuse of alcohol and drugs, hiding from the shame I felt at being the victim to the livelihood I never asked to enter. And when I got hit, and when I lost myself completely, I still sat there behind the masked face of an alcoholic drugged-up teenager crying to god to "do with me as you will."

I believed, at that moment in time, that I was put in that position to experience so that I could know.
And then they started to die, and I got angry. I pushed it all inside of me because to show my anger would have been wrong. To be angry at this God was to be angry at the person whom I was to respect with the utmost honor. To ridicule his decisions in taking a life would have been like ripping the fingers off a musician or tearing up the voice box of a born singer. But I could not help but get angry at this God that had kept me from voicing my own self to the world, that bottled me up into a naive little girl who submitted herself completely to the world around her... pushed and pulled in every direction not knowing at all how to even speak up or push back. So I pulled it inside the bottle with me, a bottle created to hold everything in, and there it settled around me.

And then I lost myself, and I died completely inside... drowning in the bottle that was overflowing with the suffocating experiences of my life. And I screamed from within, but nobody could hear me. Nobody cared to listen. And I shoved God out of the bottle and I told him "I have had enough", that I was tired of him doing with me as he willed. But even with God outside of the bottle, I'm still trapped inside.

And the sad thing is, I'm not only drowning with my mind screaming in rage... I stopped screaming out because nobody would listen. Now, I'm surrounded by silence, only screaming on the inside. I'm the only one who knows my rage, anymore, because I'm the only one who can hear me.

 

 

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