The Perversion of Being Oneself

The danger of being a target because of who you are is something that I’ve found myself having to grapple with more and more over recent years.

Growing up removes the shields from your eyes. You start to see the truth you never even thought to have to wrap your head around when you were so young and innocent, the dangerous and miserable realities people are subjected to just because of who they are.

The country I live in is a very patriarchal and, as what it always goes hand-in-hand with, a very religious one. But with one peculiarity: dominated not by one religion, but by two. Christianity and Islam.

I grew up in the former. Being raised by a Christian mother — who only seemed to grow more devout as time went on — and growing up around her entirely Christian family (as far as I know), it was all I knew. It was what I was taught to strive to be and live my life by. Read the bible. Pray everyday. Seek God’s will.

I never imagined I’d become an atheist. It never crossed my mind to give it even a passing thought, because of course I was going to be a Christian all my life. I was born and bred into this thing. Of course that was what I was always going to be. That was the choice that had always been there. Belief isn’t something you choose. And neither is a lack of belief. I chose to identify as an atheist, but the deconversion, that, I did not choose.

Something started to shift somewhere down the line. Small things began to change, and then those small changes began to merge into something that kept growing until it was staring me right in the face. Washing the fog out of my eyes so it could look straight into them, and welcome me into the world. Into myself. No god. No bible. Just me. It happened to me. The only choice I had was what to do about it after the fact.

It’s been almost exactly 16 months since then, and I remember feeling so many things during those first weeks. Freedom. Anger. Resentment. But also fear. Save for my father, who I was never really close to, I never knew any atheists growing up. Everyone I knew was either a Christian or a Muslim. Atheists and atheism never came up much, but on the rare occasion they did, all I ever heard about them was that they were all evil, arrogant, and doomed and deserving of eternal suffering and torment.

And that’s where the fear came from. Becoming the very thing I was taught to hate. I had been blindsided by the awakening, and now I had no idea what to do with it. For a few weeks, I was terrified, waiting to become evil and callous and arrogant. Waiting to become a walking devil. I suffered for weeks, until I realized that even though my eyes had been opened, I was still being programmed, and I had to work to break it.

I’m a woman, and I’ve been an LGBTQ+ ally for years. Speaking up against the struggles these communities face, even when I was still a Christian. But it’s only as I write this that I’ve really begun to see the parallels within all these communities. All different communities, with different struggles. But one thing in common: being something you didn’t choose to be, and becoming a mark because of it. You’re seen as corrupt. Corrosive. Perverse. The thing that needs to either be quieted, or snuffed out completely.

So you subdue yourself, living miserably having to pretend to be something you’re not, but being maligned and oppressed when you decide to not pretend.

It’s not normal, and it will never be.

Related posts:

Welcome to Impact Hub Austin’s Workforce Development Accelerator conversation. Here, our spring 2018 cohort will share their discoveries, challenges, and growth over the course of the next three…

Modular construction company Search marketing provides a customer base for any website owner who cares to do it properly. Search marketing combines products and services to create a unique marketing…

Employees are at the heart of an organization’s work operations. While recruitment is the backbone of global enterprises, getting new staff into a company is complex. When the recruitment process is…