Hey, medication is cool

I predict not much content to this post. 

I am here to announce that I finally caved, got a diagnosis of ADHD and started stimulant medication for it. One person on the Internet described it as putting glasses on for the first time, and I find this to be totally accurate. It's like the tiny room my conscious self inhabited in my brain suddenly became a cathedral in which I could move and breathe freely. I would go so far as to say that I feel like myself for maybe the first time in my life. 

But, things are new. The afternoon crashes are not fun, and it seems like my body and mind haven't figured out quite how they want to handle this daily slam of dopamine and norepinephrine.

The other weird thing about feeling like myself for the first time ever, is that I can also feel (on the more depressed side of the crash) like no one in my life has ever really met me. I feel I have interests I have never had a chance to explore, and express, and integrate into my personality. I don't know how real this feeling is. But I can feel some anxiety at the idea that I might struggle to find enough time and quiet to develop these interests without pressures from previous role expectations. The freedom of childhood is long gone, and I squandered all that time being interested in nothing. The thought can make me pretty sad.

But anyway, overall, this is impacting me as a huge and almost unbelievable improvement in my overall prognosis of life and happiness. So let's see how this goes.

Just stream of consciousness

I suppose the initial spurt of creativity that brought this blog into being has lost its steam, and this URL will soon point to just one more member in the piles of little dead blogs that have gathered like old sea foam in the abandoned corners of the Internet. That's fine.

So I'll use it now to write something unimportant. There's something more important I want to write, but I can't seem to grow it sufficiently into the full-fledged thought it ought to be. 

Just a general update, I feel pretty different now. I'm not only definitely not Catholic, but can say the word "atheist" and feel that it's true about me. I seem to be some sort of "hopeful atheist" -- it seems there is little to no evidence that God exists, but I continue to hope I'm wrong.

Things with my family did not heal. Either we will find a way to a new relationship somehow, or we'll stay on two different planets, dealing with each other politely. I think the latter may be the case for a very long time.

Recently, I gave the eulogy for my Dad that I really wanted to give. I wish everyone could hear it, because I want everyone to know the gift my Dad gave me in the form of a concept of God that allowed me to feel almost infinitely safe in the world, and how hard he worked to give me that gift. 

After I did that, according to a certain, older version of me, I completed my reason to live and could feel it. According to the strongly-developed paradigm that had kept me behind the grate, after losing Carmel, I had felt that my only purpose left in life must be to bury my parents and die. I've already failed to accompany my mother to the grave, inasmuch as I'm dead to her and there seems to be no path toward getting her medicated. (I even abandoned my cat: Mom finally ran out of patience maintaining him and sent him to a farm.) That left Dad, who was still taking comfort in me. And having buried him -- says the old Kathleen -- there's nothing left to do but die.

Thankfully, I gave up on her assessment of things. I logged off that profile by permitting myself to consider my dismissal an obedience to go seek joy in the world despite my own preference. This gave me the option to continue to live, and even work hard to keep growing in better and richer happiness, just for the heck of it.

Religion and religious sentiments, things designed to pull me down toward a more traditionally mystical mindset, can sometimes seem like a lullaby crafted to ease me into a sleep that would never end, like Temple Grandin's invention for soothing cows on the way to slaughter. Not always, I think; I'm not sure. 

Often I can retrieve a sense of death being alright and quite natural, and not necessarily feel like I'm in a freefall toward the void when considering it. But I do feel the loss of being able to believe wholeheartedly in the Resurrection, and its effect of removing of the primal fear of death. It's back; or at least, it's something I have to battle with in a more honest way, in a way that makes me feel much less powerful. But the honesty is refreshing, and makes me hope I may actually be better prepared for facing the real thing.

I still feel weird about that last post

Like I look at the title and immediately go, "but, oh no, I'm not rejecting Catholicism; goodness no." And then right away a smaller voice pops up and says, "except that I definitely am in a fundamental way."

It's as if Catholicism were a sort of playground or game field in which I observed most of my friends running around, many of them having a genuinely great time. The game gives them fun ways to interact with each other and things to talk about. The rules of the game are, in the view of many, flexible enough to allow creative interpretations to further enrich the lived experience of the game. There is even an interpretation that allows you to participate while breaking practically all the rules. At which point, such freewheeling participants might conclude, the only thing preventing someone from joining would be if they just didn't want to play with us.

The thing is, I really, really want to play. I miss my friends. I miss having a game that helped me interact with them, and with strangers too. It was so wonderful. And I feel so happy for the ones who continue to enjoy it.

But contrary to what I had hoped for a long time, I can't just wish myself back into the game. If one of these friends were to come up to me, smiling like the old days, and throw me one of those well-worn balls -- something about a turn of events being God's will, or another thing being a sign of God's love, or another about Jesus understanding me -- it would smack me in the face. I just can't emotionally catch that ball anymore, and it's a real strain to fake it. Because my trust in the Church to speak true things has evaporated and been replaced by suspicion that it's all stories intended to keep this game going, it feels just exactly like talking about fairies. I can't undo it, I can't go back, I can't speak words given to me by the Church and mean them.

I remember several months toward the end of my being Catholic where I called up devout friends as a kind of lunge toward the clear, deep, refreshing pool of conversing about Jesus. I wanted that comfort and sense of connection so bad. But every time, I felt myself smack into the bottom of a pool that was only six inches deep, betrayed over and over by instincts that promised it would be bottomless as it always had been. I might end by feeling a little connected, but only with a strong, nagging sense that I had lied to do so.

It's deeper than that though. The reality is that I'm truly split inside. There is a part of my visceral landscape that still attends to the same living person I had identified as Jesus, someone who exists inside me, represents the power driving the whole universe, and collaborates with me. I can't turn that part off, any more than I can turn off the sense of distaste described above. But speaking about it as if it was something that could be parameterized according to Church dogma still feels like lying. It feels deeply resistant to words. So really, it's as if I'm standing eagerly outside the playground, holding a ball that I want to throw but no one would know how to catch, any more than I know how to catch theirs.

But anyway, it feels good to at least try to explain it a little.

Why I'm not practicing Catholicism, for general audiences

Or, for the 3 or so followers of this blog: "RIP, Catholic.sh".

(Originally written towards a selection of Facebook peeps)

The general "why" or "what changed":

As some of you know, my spiritual life has been in a kind of chrysalis state since I was dismissed from Carmel almost seven years ago. It's as if the many Catholic labels stuck onto my interior goods lost their stickiness, a very gradual and quiet process I've been observing since then, ending in my losing basically all conviction in and taste for the things of formalized religion. This seems to have been a pretty natural outcome psychologically, given what went down at that time. (Unpacking that is handled below.) I acknowledge broken trust in itself has nothing to do directly with whether God exists or the Church is true, but it does have a lot to do with my capacity to freely submit my intellect to the Church's say-so as if it were God's. So although I do hope Christ rose from the dead, I'm sure I can't say that he certainly did, out of obedience. Perhaps predictably, this shift also bestowed a new gravity upon how arguments for Scripture and the historical Church as coherently inspired by one God only seem to work when proceeding backwards from that conclusion. 

Insofar as some may define "Catholic" as requiring that intellectual submission, I actually haven't been that for a while. I'd kept on sincerely identifying as Catholic at first, having no particular desire to be anything else, and I greatly benefited from the cultural closeness with some of my dearer Catholic friends, whose love and understanding I really needed in those early days. But the process of healing and standing on my own two feet again came to the point where my inner attitude has had to own its role as the force carrying me forward, and so it began to shape my outer practice as well. I can't say the Apostle's Creed and mean it, so attending Sunday Mass has lost its point. This also means I can't make all the promises necessary for marrying in the Church. So I haven't considered myself a member of the Catholic faith since around the beginning of this year.

The "what happened," the events in Carmel alluded to above:

(Please excuse the stuffy/legalese tone sprinkled below; I think it's useful to at least try to be precise in this regard.)

The Church proved itself untrustworthy when it broke a promise to me, which had been made in its official name, with all due form, and toward my specific person, when I took my vows. By "the Church", I mean the aspect of the Church I was directed to consider the conduit of God's authority and obey as binding upon my conscience: my superiors, with respect to whatever part of their will that was presented to me as an obedience. The promise that was broken was that the protection of my rights and obligations as a religious by means of due process in the event of a dismissal, which according to Canon law, requires such steps as documenting a religious' delicts, warning them, and acquiring the validation of the relevant extra-claustral authority, in my case the bishop. Although these delicts must be more serious in the case of a solemn professed, the rule also applies for one in temporary vows, as I was. An immediate superior doesn't normally have sufficient standing to dismiss an unwilling religious on their own initiative. 

The docility I had cultivated toward my immediate superior's will was, with respect to my rights as a religious, abused: I was told it was God's will that I should leave, and ordered not to tell the bishop the dismissal was against my will, with the warning that doing otherwise may make me appear obstinate and leave me unable to pursue religious life ever again. It was not revealed to me that the Prioress was unaware of this order, and I found out later that she had been misled about this being my choice.

It's easy for a reputable institution to decree with a seemingly divine level of force. The Church has issued rules in the name of God as binding upon the eternal welfare of a particular person's soul: an extreme amount of power, exerted on the scope of a single person's life. But, it seems to me, and even seems decently self-evident, that's not sufficient for authority. Authority would seem to presuppose a capacity for responsibility proportionate to the claimed force. So we should expect the Church to be able to keep its promises in that same name of God, issued in a fully valid legal process to even one person. As even one member of the Church bears the full threat of an officially-promised damnation, it seems that person should expect also to enjoy the full security of an officially-promised protection: a marriage vow, no less. I found out beyond any personal doubt that the Church is unable to maintain the latter. So it seems to me the Church's claim to a supernatural degree of institutional authority to "bind and loose" must be empty.

There's another way to explain the same event. While my trust in "the system" was well and duly broken, my trust in my superior's goodwill toward me never really was. As Carmelites, we were taught not to obey just the letter of an obedience, but our superior's intention for us, as best we could. I did as my superior told me out of a genuine belief that she must love me and be willing my good, so I should try to follow the spirit of what she was saying to me. Still to this day, I think I discerned rightly that her message to me was: "Go out and live: it's not really worth losing your whole life over this after all." That was the last command presented to me as an obedience, and I've been doing my best to follow it ever since.

I believe my superior, Sr. Teresa of Jesus, who is now the Prioress at Buffalo, mistreated my vows because she herself was suffering badly and needed to leave, but could not overcome the sunk cost and cognitive dissonance involved. When she saw I was also significantly struggling under the psychological pressure of the cloister, and because she loved me better than she loved herself, I think she deliberately tricked me out of the promise I would have never let go of on my own. Mother Teresa has since expelled two other sisters by similarly illegal means, with one canonical battle continuing til today.

I still love the sisters of Buffalo very much, and cherish the fact that they've taught me some of the greatest things I know. Only, I couldn't have predicted what the entire content or fallout of that knowledge would turn out to be.

The Tree, or why words suck

Things are better now. I seem to be on a path to repairing things with my family, and my identity freefall seems to have slowed. It feels like lot of parts that had been moving in me are aligning again around a center. Not perfect peace, but much better.

But that's hardly an interesting update, let's throw in one of those languishing draft posts:

---

I have things I want to say to rationalists. I think I currently suck at genuinely explaining rather than persuading, and exposing how I arrived at a given conclusion ahead of why I think the conclusion is right. 

But, one can dream. I hope one day I can have learned enough to write something awesome that has something to do with this:

I have a strong desire, on the level of a life's goal, to explain something I consider key to securing an understanding of the full extent of our biases. It seems to be something often, and paradoxically, and ironically missed by those who'd most want that understanding, due to their identifying strongly with their rationality. 

It's good to identify with your rationality, because then you'll love it and perfect it, and cultivate a taste for uncovering influences that could secretly hurt it. But it can be bad, inasmuch as the more you identify with your inner warrior against irrational biases, the deeper the horror implied if you should ever come to recognize your target's location within the center of your actual beating heart. I might begin to wonder how much my warriorship was motivated by avoiding the worst truth of all, myself as an irrational actor. But if this is truth, it's a really important one to update on.

I think what I perceive, if true, could make this discovery easier, by showing how it makes sense for us to be in this predicament. As it seems to me, the Moloch behind the curtain is the origin of words, which results in their unconsciously dual purpose and dual effect.

To illustrate this, please picture a tree, which is the human soul. (Or "human brain-and-heart", "human thoughts-and-emotions" -- whatever you like.) 

The tree's form consists in the trace of two motivations, two flows of energy: one goes up, one goes down. The upward energy is our motivation to absorb the light of truth, to grow (inwardly) loftier and more diverse through meaningful contact with the outside world. The downward energy is our motivation to stay alive, strengthen pathways to basic survival needs, and wax peaceful and secure among our dearest tribe: the people we most rely on to locate or orient our identity and role in the world. 

We rely on words to make progress in both realms. The tree forms branches by means of words: words implement the distinctions necessary to understand and predict the world. The tree also forms roots by means of words: they allow us to implement the connections necessary to identify with and communicate with our tribe. 

"Implementing distinctions" and "implementing connections" are opposites. That's the first problem.

Worse, the connection impetus of the roots has a certain power advantage over the distinctions impetus of the branches. The world of roots -- paths of connection, emotional experience, purpose, and desire -- are the context in which each of us came upon our most foundational words, in addition to just being the "proper" purpose of words from the perspective of human evolution. The connection impetus is both where our words' heartfelt meaning comes from, and their primary concern. The roots are necessary to the branches; the branches much less so to the roots.

The way we form our concepts and beliefs with these words reflects this. For all our conscious reaching toward the correct, objective distinctions and associations between concepts, the words we use to do this remained pinned (in proportion to their meaningfulness to us) in their subconscious origin, the emotional power that bestows their turgor. It's to this extent our words are at the mercy of those associations with which we acquired them.

It doesn't have to be hopeless. If our branches succeed in finding sunlight, that energy can be used to feed the roots, growing new ones and deepening them in a better place. Our love of real knowledge in the world can and must enlighten our emotional territory, to make it more aligned with reality and its more accurate distinctions. We should do the hard, slow work to evolve our whole root system into a structure better than the default, one that maximizes both sunlight access and water access, according to a proper understanding of the constraints bestowed by the terrain -- wherever it was our seed happened to drop. 

The way in which I think this process usually fails is through horror at recognizing the sheer level of irrationality we'd be uncovering within ourselves, particularly in those words, phrases, concepts and associations that run deep into our childhood. To succeed, we must learn to understand that this is actually a signal of the power these words contain, enough to become motivated to uncover that power so as to bring it under our conscious sway. We can also be motivated by a different fear: the quest to control that power is ignored to our peril. That's the force that will go right on controlling our path whether we like or not. It must be recognized, respected, cooperated with, and won over just as some massive wild animal would be made tame. 

As messy as our start may have been, this is the energy allotted to us -- perhaps in the form of a religion, or some other way love was conveyed to us that we may recognize as false or having false elements -- and we must respect it for what it is. 

Probably the inevitable example is the word God. If you once believed in God and are now an atheist, and you still find yourself feeling any bit of disturbed emotional reaction to that word, you should invest a decent effort to find out why. That disturbance isn't due simply to some inherent falseness in the word, unless you also feel the same disturbance at the word flurfleboopagetti. There is energy trapped behind that word that once fueled you, but now is working against you. Part of you may be assuming something like, "God once existed and was there for me; but now, he does not exist and is not there for me."  

But this is false, because whatever was true then is true now. Find a way to release any such energy and let it flow toward you again, because it's yours and belongs to you.

Atop a sad pile of post-drafts: an update

I need to tell you more things now. 

Mainly, it's because I'm in a very different state from where I was in the last post, and I want to correct the record. Incidentally, there are some mechanisms I want to try to map out about my interior life, and I find that takes place a lot better in written rather than spoken form.

Recently, three things have happened:

• my Dad died suddenly just before Thanksgiving,
• I lost my faith, and
• my immediate family and I are basically emotionally estranged. 

These are all related. In particular, the second is closely bound to the first. The third is like the icing on the bummer-cake -- not a lot to unpack there, but it makes me feel really sad and so it seems worth listing.

But anyway, starting with Dad seems like the right place. Losing him turns out to have changed my inner landscape in unexpected ways. 

Though gentle and joyful at heart, Dad, a mechanical engineer at the same oil refinery for 40 years, was in many ways the stereotypical old-school, old-church, repressed British Protestant. Long ago, as a tiny child, I once had a genuine emotional connection with him but then lost it forever one day -- a typical event in family life (cf. the demise of Goofball Island in Pixar's Inside Out) very much in keeping with his inability to acknowledge his own emotions. I'm pretty sure one major cause of my religiosity was that little girl's enormous store of pained, thwarted desire for connection with her religious Dad, since that would please him so much. (Also, good grades.) 

Although I was aware of this causality while Dad was alive, I don't think I would have predicted his death would cause me to lose my faith. But I think it's safe to say that's what happened. 

I since have begun to recognize certain key concepts like faith in Jesus Christ and Church membership as so many APIs cemented in my interface with my dad. So long as he was alive, if I budged those APIs -- if I were to bring them "to the surface" to examine them objectively -- I would see that their position in my mind was outdated, the position would move, and by the same action I would lose a connection to my dad. This I simply could not do -- I could never abandon my dad. Our mutual reliance on each other's support and spiritual-pseudo-affection was too foundational. I could hardly lift a finger to push one of those concepts up toward the light before a pang of terror that originated in a roughly two-years-old (and therefore stupidly strong) version of my emotions stopped the procedure. 

This strikes me as in keeping with the deeply relational origin of words -- words as communication -- an origin so drastically (and tragically, and infuriatingly) at odds with the nature of reality, the thing they purport to describe. When as a child I went about setting down the whole irreversible edifice of my knowledge of all things, I wasn't building a picture of the world that my dad fit into: I was building a picture of my dad. I learned about the world inasmuch as it helped me reconstruct the thing I most longed to see, the affectionate version of his face.

When he died, the experience was almost mystical. It may sound odd, but in my search for a proper "goodbye" the evening of his death, I considered myself to behold him again the way I did a few moments after I was born (I had been told we'd given each other a big long stare). And from that place, I said goodbye, with all the enormous joy and sorrow, and much longer period of loss and longing, accounted for. And I at last felt closure. The two-year-old gripping those words so tightly, so that she could catch a glimpse of her Dad, finally loosed her grip.

And so it seems to me I lost my faith and saw the stakes involved in the same stroke. 

What I actually mean by "I lost my faith" is difficult to encompass. In those first few weeks, I had thought my felt-connection to God had died with him. But I think now, that doesn't seem true; there still seems to be some sort of sense of God in my emotional landscape. 

Nonetheless, his death did cause an odd sense of relief that had very much to do with religion. The relief felt due to the end of the semi-subconscious mental process that was expending an extraordinary amount of energy stretching my identity across a version that could maximally interact with James, and one that could maximally interact with Dad. 

Of those two rivers of truth-intuition I spoke of earlier, it appears that when Dad died one's "lowest point" began to vanish,  eventually leaving one river much plainer to my heart and mind. So although I currently feel more interior peace as an agnostic, the experience of having seen those two rivers has left me in deep skepticism of the validity of any river at all. I don't feel myself to know more now that this happened; I may know even less.

But knowledge of these rivers does have a certain usefulness that I can work with. I can embrace the relational aspect of this river, and be true to its flow. After all, the presence of another human being in one's life is a sort of truth, if of a different kind, which can be respected for its own rules.

Although there remains in me a contradiction -- the emotional part of me still senses what I've called God, while the rational part acknowledges little to no evidence he really exists -- I know now for sure that "agnostic" is more true of me than "Catholic". I'm agnostic in my gut feeling because I'm with James. I'm with James because I assess his influence in my life to be deeply healing and positive. If it weren't for that, I would have likely called myself a Catholic if it meant I could have stayed in the same tribe as my mother and brother. But this is not possible -- My efforts to communicate failed in a definitive way after Dad's mediating powers no longer applied, and they've made plain they consider my current state to constitute a betrayal of God. I'm so emotionally kicked-out-of-the-nest I'm not to even mention my upcoming wedding. So I find my membership in the agnostic tribe to be an accomplished fact.

This surely comes off poorly, to admit that I'm liable to switch teams whenever it happens to suit me. But I can now clearly see the process of my self-labeling, whatever that may imply about me. 

It's freeing -- it would even have freed Carmelite-me years ago, realizing (in a moment in the library one summer evening I clearly remember) that for all my appearance of holiness, swathed in toque and veil, I was actually -- no, really actually for real -- nothing but a sinner. Even as far as my deepest convictions, I was never doing anything but looking out for myself. I even remember trying to think up a scheme for manifesting my sinfulness if I were dismissed: the leading idea was to spend all the rest of my days as a Wal-Mart cashier wearing a T-shirt that said "SINNER". Pretty brilliant, eh? 

But it seems the surfacing has happened in a much more authentic way, and I can't help but appreciate that. Can't really expect any kickback of virtue-signaling credit upon becoming an agnostic. It even nullifies that enormous pile of Carmel-credit that I was most definitely attached to. Elegant, really.

I have to add -- for whatever the above is worth -- things are still confusing. 

In which Kathleen vacillates

I have a social media post I need to write, and I don't know how to write it. So I'll blog all the thoughts flitting around that post and maybe that will help it take shape.

It's a post intended to publish the fact that James and I won't be getting married in the Church. It is something James has asked me to write, and which I think I'm still only partially on board about, although I think his reasoning makes sense. 

I'm partially not on board because I dislike kowtowing to the narrative that this is a big deal. As previously noted on this blog -- true off my chest, what matters to me is the commitment, not the religious flavor, since (in terms of a broad average of feelings) I have no particular taste or distaste for Catholicism at the moment, nor a fear that God would punish me for lacking it. But I'm also partially on board, in that my marriage is not something I particularly want to a) hide or b) have blow up in my face socially when revealed as a fait accompli.

Not marrying in the Church makes sense for us as a couple, because neither of us are set to accept the rights and obligations of a Catholic marriage. James is an atheist and, at the moment, I actually have no clue what will come out of my mouth when my kids ask me about God, so -- this has been a change -- I now think it would be likely dishonest to swear it will definitely be what the Church teaches. Meanwhile, seeing as we are both mentally healthy and have liked each other a whole lot for a very long time, marrying does check out.

But I've already experimented with one dear Catholic friend in trying to explain how it could make sense to choose to marry a good person I love very much, while acknowledging that it might not make sense to marry in the Church, and found it didn't really work. So I need to try to anticipate this reaction on a broader scale.

What are the reactions I need to anticipate in my audience of firmly-ensconced Catholics? Let me try to imagine myself reacting as if I were one of them, as indeed I was a relatively short while ago.

...It would feel as if something had possessed her, some primal need to be with her lover had robbed her of her better reason. She had been seduced or taken advantage of and, in her shame, turned away from the vision of Catholic teaching as the energy pulsing through and binding together the great mandala of interior and exterior harmony, the great sacramental, the equilibrium of love and obedience. I would be making guesses at what had broken her deep inside, or if she had always been broken. I would immediately be sniffing out the story that she had built to make this action excusable to her mind so as to call her out on it, to show her the worst dissonance between this story, this jagged outgrowth, and that lovely (but essentially centripetal) mandala. 

My response to this has to be something like: a) my lack of inner conformity to Catholicism is demonstrably traceable to Carmel, not James, b) I'm not playing along with the story expectation because I'm not interested in stories ahead of making life decisions that make sense and c) if I were to play along: when forced to choose, should we really see that mandala of God's will for our lives as essentially centripetal and constrictive ("don't do things that step out of bounds"), or centrifugal and expansive ("do things that increase happiness and peace")? 

Considering c), James would probably prefer I preach a bold epic of purity and freedom from stories. I do agree this is more like truth, but I still see value in tracing those old lines, for the sake of communicating the good things I've perceived in a language my friends can understand. Without bridging that gap, many would not be able to hear a bold epic at all, only something scary and cold, possibly evil.

But..it's not really just for them. I want to tell myself this story and allow myself to believe it on some level. It's part desire to feel the joy and peace of it, and part fear of the alienation and despair I feel when it's missing. I could call it my subconscious, or some other name, but it's the part of me that craves stories that justify my actions as pursuing a higher degree of communal life. When not fed, that part of me, thug-like, holds my inner peace hostage. And especially in Covid isolation, that part isn't going anywhere soon. 

By speaking in a Catholic voice about our marriage, I would enjoy the heck out of myself. But what sort of game am I really playing? It feels good because, as a Catholic, I'd become a goddamn black belt at canonizing my emotions and justifying my actions. It's hard to resist picking up that familiar old sword when facing the great yawning mass of potential-judgment that is my whole Catholic network. I'm just so good at it. The urge to flourish it just a little feels slightly crave-y.

Where is this really coming from? 

I want to downplay the implicit cult switch cemented by my marriage because I don't want this event to present to the world as a rupture between the old Kathleen and a new one. I don't like this idea that James changed me. Somehow, women should change men, but men shouldn't change women. 

This isn't entirely nonsensical. Women are the ones with an inherited instinct to keep a centered stance, all samurai-like, on the role they have ascertained would provide them the most sheltered possible position within their community because -- you know, child-bearing and all that. If I were to substantially budge from this stance due to a man, that means the flighty, male seed-spreading instinct has trumped the stable, female child-nurturing instinct, and we all figured out a few thousand years ago that the latter should generally win in order for society to develop in a positive way. But taking our breeding instincts as a guide for how almost everything should work (as we seem to do a lot) is a pernicious fallacy indeed.

The truth is James did cause change in me, and still is. Carmel drained me of affection for Catholicism. But if James hadn't persistently hacked away at some doublethinks in my underlying beliefs, they would have moldered in a deep corner of my mind, too load-bearing of my Catholic way of life to ever be touched again. 

This process of changing me wasn't as clean as I'd have liked. I haven't always felt happy about it. I often wished James could just lay off being so opposed to the Church, my main source of security, particularly at those moments when marriage wasn't on the table. Assailing my relationship to the Church at that time felt, honestly, rather ridiculously futile on my end. 

But as marriage began to emerge as a possibility, this unleashed the potential for change in me as well as a fair bit of chaos. I felt angry and scared as my instincts grew schizophrenic in their assessment of who was the better source of security, and whether I needed to suppress thoughts that contravened one, or the other, in order to be safer. My integrity proved rather sucky: I learned at least to check myself along the way as to whether I wouldn't really go back to acting and thinking a certain way if James dropped dead. (I've also lately started wondering how I'd start acting and thinking if the Catholic Church were to go extinct.)

In general, this does mean one of the nastiest-sounding versions of my story checks out: a good Catholic girl lost her grip on her faith because she fell in love with an atheist. Blugh, I hate typing that. At the risk of splitting hairs though, I feel this doesn't quite convey the right image. My love for James has not been a great wall sealing off a spiritual center I no longer enter, but the window through which grenades continuously drop into it, right on my now rather uncomfortable head. James has made me at turns furiously defensive of a right to hope God exists, and terrified of my desire to speak to Him. 

Meanwhile, I had a chance to observe something new in myself, not without disgust though. It was how my sense of what was true acted exactly like a river whose shape, location and speed depended quite simply on the path of least resistance to the lowest topographical point; in this case, the point of maximum personal safety. I began to be able to flip back and forth between my two centers of gravity and feel two different rivers, each covering their own stretch of land: their own allotment of allowed thoughts.

I like that I can now see this about myself. 

I dislike that my sense of self is now the weakest it's ever been. Although I grant this is not objectively bad, I do remain concerned about its prognosis. I always seem to be making another guess at what my points of reference ought to be, only to watch them slip out of focus shortly after. I don't feel entirely sure that my changing is actually evidence that James has helped me see the truth more, or simply that James has stronger convictions than I, and that I'll keep slowly sliding toward his worldview while he stays more or less the same. A part of this concern is that I'm not perfectly certain of James' potential to be legitimately updated by me in turn. Perhaps, as the party more lenient toward emotional semantics (sc. one of those touchy-feely types), I will always rate as a second-class source of information that a true rationalist would never really countenance. I don't know.

That's about the shape of it. There's no sense in pretending that I'm more sure of myself than I really am, though old habits are hard to break. So I'm finding it wholesome to try to embrace more fully my mother's assessment that I've gone off the rails.

In one sense, I really have gone off the rails. In another sense, I've chosen to assume the risk of using a different method to discern the existence and direction of the rails. This doesn't really work in the physical world, or in the world of fundamentalism, so I'd rather not get overly defensive about my rails being the real ones. There's no real rails: rails, too, are a story. Reality, the experience of my life, is far better than any story I could tell.

That seems a good place to end: the part where I tell you that what I'm really talking about and really invested in is something words weren't built to communicate.