Renovatio

My mind urges me to delete my two previous posts. They were outbursts, negative reactions to feelings I didn't control. I'm going to resist the urge though, there must be something to be understood from them.

It takes a lot of energy to be upset, after two days of being upset, I'm drained of energy. I'm so tired. It seems like such a waste, but it's something I have to work though. I could pretend I don't get upset, but I don't see how lying, especially to myself, would help. Ranting and pouring my feelings into silent text doesn't make a lot of sense to me either, but I decided to try this thing called a "Blog," and I'll stick with it.

Opinion-wise, I do think it's ridiculous to gush in writing publicly online. If I were a reader I would wonder why this child is writing instead of crying to his mother. Or maybe not, maybe it would seem legitimate. I'm finally understanding that I don't actually understand the things I do, not until much, much later. I feel a certain way about things, and then I try to figure out why I feel such a way. In the end, I could be completely wrong about why I feel the way I feel. I could have labeled everything, the reasons and the conclusion, wrongly.

I said I've been breaking my own rules, and I have been. I realized even though I figured out that I need to forget people and places, that I can't live in the past, I never actually stepped through the door of this idea, I was standing on one side of the door and looking through it, but never making the steps. There are places I need to forget, places in time, places I can't recreate. Time is not a loop, one does not get to relive past moments. We have memory, we remember what came before and use that to point ourselves into the future. People are not who they were, people are dynamic, they are who they are; to confine them to their past is to hold them in chains, a prisoner in the mind of another person. The Mirror of Erised in the Harry Potter books shows people what they want most in the world, in fact Erised is desirE spelled backward. Facebook and the pictures therein are my Mirror of Erised, it contains everything I want and miss, all of Europe I visited, the people I met, the friends I gained. Staring at them for any amount of time instead of remembering to live my life is my biggest mistake. So, I've deactivated my account, I won't go back online on the website until the desire to look at Facebook all the time has passed.

As for my feelings, I've felt very low and unhappy for several days. I'm not entirely sure of my belief system, I believe in science, reason, and learning, and I want to believe in God, but the two ideas often compete in my mind. Some days I believe more in one, other days I believe more in the other. (Raised Christian, how can I say that mine is the correct religion? I've never been raised with the other religions, so being raised in a religion doesn't make it the correct one. Honestly though, with all I've learned about God and the world, I think it would be funny if all three of the major world religions are correct. As Christians we believe that Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and all the other "Christian" religions have enough of the correct things in common for people of all of them to go to Heaven. I think it likely that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all share enough of the correct beliefs to send good people to Heaven. The holy books of the religions build on each other, more or less. The Torah is basically the Old Testament of the Bible, the Qu'ran is like the New New Testament. We're supposed to love our neighbors and enemies, to do to others as we would have them do to us. If we're all going to Heaven, doesn't it make sense to do these things and not fight?) Sometimes I remember "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis. In it, a Demon writes to his uncle in Hell and asks for advice, because it is the Demons that make humans do evil things. The Demons urge and make a human desire to do bad things, but can't actually force a human to do the things; in this way the guilt and blame, the fault, of bad things is the responsibility of the person who did them. On days I feel very low and depressed, I wonder if the Demon sent to influence me is doing a better job. I don't feel like myself during these days, I feel like a puppet watching himself being moved by a giant above him. If I keep my mind in the right place, after a few days I feel like myself again, but I always fear one day, one time, I won't have the strength to stay in the right place, that I will fall into a terrible hole in my life.

So, here I am, attempting Renovatio -- "a total rebirth." I will try to be the person I am, not the person I was.