Author: Jimmy

It takes time

Blog Posts, Deconstruction, Deconversion, Hell Anxiety, Religious Trauma

Say you’ve realized you no longer believe, gone through some of the typical stages of deconversion, and are ready to move on with your life, when, Whammo! You’re blindsided by some old feeling from your previous life.

“Why do I still fear Hell?” “Why am I still afraid of being Left Behind?” “Why do I still feel guilty when I stay home from church?” “Why do I still feel guilt around sex? I’m a grown-up, for crying out loud.”

This is one of the hardest things I’ve found day-to-day about being deconverted. I don’t believe any more, but my body doesn’t seem to have got the message.

There’s a lot I can say on this topic, but number one is this:

It takes time.

It takes time to deprogram what took decades to program in the first place. It takes time to get used to who you are today and who you are becoming. It takes time to figure out how to navigate a world where you don’t have a book (or a publishing industry, church, etc.) telling you how to think. It takes time to find new art, new music, new friends, new habits, and new…everything.

I don’t say these things to be overwhelming, though I know from experience it can be. For now, I hope you can be patient with yourself. Be kind. You’ve been through a lot, and it’ll take time.

It’s been several years since I realized I no longer believed, and I can tell you: it gets better. There’s a wide, wonderful world of truly incredible people, experiences, places, ideas. This whole world is now open to you.

– Jimmy

More confident than you think

Blog Posts, Deconversion

You are probably more confident than you think.

I recently heard a friend, a fellow deconvert, talking about how she’s not very confident, and my jaw fell open just a little… she always seemed confident to me. Pretty sure she wasn’t saying, “I’m never confident in any area of my life,” but still: Why did I feel the disconnect?

People have different abilities. It’s common for someone like me–one who spends most of his time in his head and sometimes making music–to be in awe of a dancer, creating beauty in a way I couldn’t with my stilted clumsiness. Similarly, I think you can have different levels of confidence in various areas of life.

In this case, my friend was talking about having the confidence to speak up in a conversation where an authority figure (A pastor, I think.) was throwing his authority around. I think I under my feeling of disconnect. It seemed like she was shortchanging herself. She had stared down the reality that what she had believed for a big chunk of her life, realized it was bogus and, more importantly, she had done something about it.

Facing reality can be hard, hard, hard. Why not stay with what’s comfortable? Why not avoid the realization that we’re wrong about some things–that we’re not the center of the universe; that the cognitive dissonance we’re feeling will be explained when we get to Heaven; that God isn’t answering our prayers?

So, be encouraged! Don’t sell yourself short. Even if you can’t face down an apologist and call his bluff; even if you don’t speak out for justice in all situations, you are probably more confident than you think, and that’s a significant step toward reconstruction.