Fatigue

Image courtesy of Stockvault.

A lot of things have been fraying my nerves lately, generating a fatigue that probably isn’t healthy. My current habits online are dramatically different than they were even a year ago. My habits IRL have also changed, involving more things that show I’m not making progress like I should be with my mental health.

Standing up for yourself takes effort.
I don’t look for things to disagree with, as they have a very uncanny ability to find me whether I like it or not. Unsubscribing to religious teachings – the kind that I’m around here in the South – necessarily involves a process of establishing healthy boundaries with people. These two things, when taken together, means that in order to promote a healthy life outside of faith, one is invariably going to disagree with the faithful on necessary principles.

Naturally, there is this part of me that can still hear the usual criticisms of Christians who want to subdue people who refuse to be agreeable. The focus changes as to why there’s disagreement to having disagreement itself. People who wish to assert their own agency and take responsibility for themselves are simply being willful, sinful beings who improperly wish to hear THE TRUTH(TM).

This process is an automatic one in evangelical circles. To be sure, it makes sense from their perspective. People are social animals, and so we actually do try to find ways to get along with the group. It’s just that in this case, the group wants me to believe things it can’t substantiate. Oh, and it wants to feed depressive thinking to dangerous levels.

And yeah, it sometimes makes me angry.
It’s taken a lot for me to accept the fact that a person’s decision to believe that singing at walls or talking to their food will help them out in life (and kill bacteria that survived the cooking process) really belongs to themselves, and that I should let them figure that stuff out on their own. Since it’s what I’d like from them, there is a certain moral symmetry to it. At the end of the day, the person you have to live with is yourself.

All of that gets thrown out the window when they start exhorting people to live their lives a certain way for no other reason than they believe their right and everyone else is wrong. And then they get hurt in the butt when you point out their special beliefs have no bearing on the rightness of their position. The retreat to just wearing people down is yet another sickening tactic in a long list of sickening tactics.

Sometimes, you just have to stop and catch your breath.
That’s really where I’m at right now. I’m tired of arguing about the existence of deities or other random crap like that. There are real problems facing real people that actually exist, and I don’t want to ignore them. But one cannot run all the time, and intellectually it’s no different.

I just wish that there were places that served more punch and cookies, because I could use that right now.