Stupid crap I used to believe

I used to believe so much stuff that was amazingly stupid, and dealing with the consequences of my naivete has been an appalling life-long comedy of errors.

1. I used to believe I was going to get married-- the whole fairy-tale happily ever after bullshit, flying in the face of never having had any success whatsoever with any man I liked at all. After all, he was surely going to turn up just around the corner, foaming at the bit to rescue me, right?

2. I used to believe that you went to college, majored in what you liked, and got a good job that would support you, especially since you'd be part of a two-income family with the good sir who never turned up back in stupid thing #1.

3. I used to believe that when you had your degree, you got a good job automagically when you went looking for it, and even that colleges would help you find one.

4. I used to think the government was mostly looking out for the best interests of the majority of people in this nation.

5. I used to think God actually gave a shit about each and every person and would look out for you if you believed in him, providing satisfactory conditions in each point from 1-4 of my prior stupid things I believed.

Wake up and smell the shitty life I made for myself that way, huh? Here I sit, unable to support myself without living under my parents' roof, fat and manless and stuck with one pathetic teacher's salary, with failing health, and the government wants to turn me into even more of a penniless slave.

Now I look down the barrel of weight loss surgery, and I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't, because either I can be sick and worthless from being fat or I can be sick and worthless from the side-effects of having RNY surgery.

Huzzah.

Rant follow-up

OK, that was a big blorp of serious negativity and I'm sure anyone who put up with it is wondering what I have to offer as an alternative.

I do believe that in order to be spiritually healthy, you have to find the divine; I just don't think it's what people keep trying to force me to accept/believe/think/do.

To find the divine, you have to read both inward and outward. The divine can be in your own inclination to mercy, self-improvement, kindness, etc.; it can be in your relationship with an animal or someone who loves you or in looking at a leaf or a flower or an insect or a river outside in nature. The divine exists in thought, sensation, connectedness, peace, and insight.

To build your relationship with the divine, you need to focus on the things that make you feel good and happy and healthy. You need to move away from negativity and bad patterns and unwholesome energy and focus on good ones. Do I know how to do this? No, I don't; it shows in my unhappiness in a variety of aspects of my life. But I tell you this: there are plenty of fat, skinny, WHATEVER, miserable, hate-filled people who know jack shit about the divine even though they sit in a church every time it's open and think they have all the answers.

They do not.

I'm going to try to learn how to build my own new, improved relationship to the divine in all things without going down their dead-end path of false self-righteousness.

Don't tell me about God.

Long time no post, nonexistent friends-- I've been busy and lazy by turns. Nothing has turned me on enough to make me jump up on the soapbox, though a lot of things have happened.

But today I got my order of post-bariatric success psychology self-help books, and now I'm mad as a wet hen. So prepare for one mother of a rant:

Where the HELL do these authors get off assuming that I'm fat because my relationship with God is busted and if I want to fix it, one of the biggest things I have to do is go back to God?! These preachy proselytizing biddies can take their "Go Back to God and All Your Spiritual Issues will be FIXED" message, and they can cram it, ram it, rotate it, and drive it straight up the good ol' hershey road.

NEWS FOR THESE PEOPLE: They're telling people to use God as a CRUTCH. That's right, a crutch. An evasion of self-responsibility. A big fat shiny placebo that does FUCK-ALL FOR ANYBODY.

I'll tell you one thing: I'm not going back to a one-sided, neglect-based relationship with a nonexistent spiritual partner who is a fabrication of the human mind with next to no relationship to anything that's actually divine, just because some damn holier-than-thou person who managed to crib her way to a PhD at a podunk for-shit school says I have to. And she can blame me being fat for me choosing to leave the Christian religion all she'd like; I'm NOT buying the manipulation.

While I do try to follow the teachings of Christ, that doesn't mean I have to believe in the whole figurative Santa Claus bit and all the dogmatic, oppressive, HATE-based, FEAR-based BULLSHIT that goes along with Christianity per se. As if declaring that I'm all saved and born again and renewed and holy and right with God would do fuck-all for my spirituality! It sure hasn't done SHIT for all the so-called righteous Christians out there who would cheerfully guthole anybody who didn't share all their moral views. It just gives them another kind of mask to hide behind-- from everybody, INCLUDING THEMSELVES.

ARGH. I am so damn mad I could spit sulfuric acid. If God gave a shit about me being fat, he would have helped me when I was still a teenager and I prayed desperately for help with my weight. With that, as with anything else I've swallowed the "just take it to God!" "Trust God with your problems!" "God will heal/fix/help you!" bullshit for, I GOT NO HELP.

This proverb is the best thing I can say about God: THERE MAY BE FAIRIES, THERE MAY BE ELVES, BUT THE LORD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES. Because guess what: he isn't actually OUT there burning up with eagerness to help people who believe in him. HE ISN'T OUT THERE AT ALL, and if you wait for him to take care of you, you are shit. out. of. luck.

It all boils down to this: you're all you've got, and you have to help yourself, for yourself because no damn imaginary bullshit entity based on people's fear and denial about dying is going to do it for you.