My Living Room as a Church
Listening: "Forsythia" by Veruca Salt
Reading: Severance by Ling Ma
Watching: Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Wanting: Neon eyeshadow palette
I have done an unreasonable amount of karaoke lately. Monday night, my roommate and I used my karaoke mics and improv’ed a podcast for an imaginary crowd. Last Friday night, before a party with two of my lovely friends & after painting myself infrared, one of my friends performed a rendition of Limp Bizkit’s Hot Dog with such accuracy that I started looking around my living room for Fred Durst. Saturday night, with a different trio—this time, practicing Christmas songs for this December, when we plan to go caroling at a retirement home in our hometown. One of my friends sounds just like Michael Bublé, and when paired with two higher voices, the three of us together sound absolutely wonderful to me. After the Christmas songs, we took turns drunkenly freestyle rapping (highlight: “She likes my yellow fit / she calls me No Name / dick called Giant Tiger / that’s that lion with no mane”). Sunday afternoon, by myself now, singing old church hymns for hours. Praising everything around me that was beautiful; every person that walked past my living room window, every squirrel I could hear running in the tree in my front yard, the spider that lives in the corner of my ceiling. Before I was done, my voice grew raspy and strained, and so I gulped water and cleared my throat hard between lines because it didn’t occur to me to stop.
Growing up as a “church kid” was different even than growing up just “going to church,” in the way it clings to your bones, coils around your nervous system, tight, and refuses to let go. There are dozens of “church songs” that I can still sing in their entirety, by heart, and each time they give me full-body chills. I am reminded of some lines that I thought I'd seen on tumblr but can only find on TikTok now (@/likethabug): "I believed in God as a kid bc I always felt so moved during worship songs at my megachurch and then I went to a One Direction concert and felt the same thing and realized I just like live music." Similarly, the aforementioned hymns aren't the only songs that will do this for me, lots of music produces physical chills—the Pitch Perfect riff-off scenes, for one—but these songs are the soundtrack to a period of my life during which I was consumed by blind faith. I remember them so well because of their repetition, week after week, and because I was not allowed to listen to secular music as a child, aside from a few MiniPopKids cd's and the occasional car radio (when my dad was feeling particularly lax). Blissfully ignorant, believing that my whole earthly life was but a blip in my immortal eternity, before the rug was pulled from under me, leaving me falling, falling still. I believe that my cells will always remember these songs and reproduce their effects whenever I hear them.
There’s a constant negotiation that happens when you leave religion. Trying to reconcile your parents’ loving hearts with their hateful beliefs, looking back on your childhood with both fondness and visceral anger at the seeds being planted that would inevitably result in the perpetual guilt and anxiety that you will carry with you. Seeing the religious child that was you as a victim, navigating how to apply this same empathy to those still implicated. Reminding yourself that your parents are adults who have had more time than you to unpack their beliefs, and yet here they are still. Going back in the other direction and picturing your mom as a girl seeking refuge in something bigger, picturing your dad as a little boy who just wants to see his own mom again one day. Trying to justify the distance you place between yourself and your family, trying to remember that sometimes it is a big deal. So many "We just want what's best for you"s implying the exact opposite. Remembering the way they would bandage your wounds and hold you as you cried. So much anger, all of the time, because how dare you expect me to respect your religion that hated me first? Why should I submit to the normalization of beliefs that have caused unfathomable levels of pain, of an ideology that commands my deserved, eternal torture? Devastation at the realization that they don’t want you to go to hell, either. Still, anger because it is that deep. Anger as a protection, not as a cope.
There is the negotiation between the choice of constant adjacency to the religion that you hate through the reclamation of its imagery, its symbols and characters, its sayings and holidays, or of total separation, the conscious rejection, the refusal to admire any part. I find myself leaning towards the former (though I can very well respect the latter), wearing rosaries and cross necklaces, collecting crucifixes and various Virgin Mary merch, finally exercising my ability to exclaim “Oh my god!” without a bone-deep fear of shock and scolding from my parents. There is a sort of profane elation that comes from "reclaiming" these things from an atheistic perspective (for me at least—assume that I always mean for me). Something about dismantling the absolute fear that was hammered into me as a kid, turning it fully on its head and shaking it around a bunch while its upside-down. "God bless you!" is a sarcastic remark for when my friends do something mildly helpful, "God fucking damn it" and similar phrases are lessons in how many cuss words I can arrange alongside the Lord's name, exhaling them all in one blasphemous breath that would have knocked me to the floor in repentant prayer ten years ago. It sounds petty and stupid from the outside, probably, but I am sure some fellow deconstructed folks can relate.
I'm not really sure where I was going with this one, guys, I'll be honest. And I have a lottt more I want to say about religion and my experience with deconstruction. But, I did just watch Gremlins 2, and since my last post was uploaded right after watching the original, it feels like it's time to get another one out there.
Thank you for reading & I love you guys!
Abby