The Best Year of My Life… So Far

Good morning, world. Today is my last day of being 30 years old, and I’ve loved every last minute of it (challenges included.)

This last year has seen me having to learn to say goodbye to best friends all over again, and also making new and incredible friends that I feel like I’ve known forever. It’s seen me break down and crawl into my familiar old darkest of places to saturate in a pool of self-loathing and fear, and then turn around and decide to react differently to those feelings than I did in the past. It’s seen me decide enough is enough, I’m tired of buying into the bullshit in my head. It’s seen me be more courageous than I ever was in the past, and face fears that I used to refuse to even look in the eye. It’s seen me clean out my literal and figurative closet more than a few times.

It’s seen me break down and finally decide to change.

This last year has seen me go on an EPIC ROAD TRIP ADVENTURE with my best friend, driving from one side of the continent to the other and getting lost and running out of gas along the way. It’s seen me fall even more deeply in love with my sweetheart than ever before. It’s seen me playtest, design and build my very first board game. (Yes, you read that correctly.) It’s seen me run over FIVE HUNDRED MILES! (Cue the proclaimers.)

This last year has seen me finally shaking free the nonsense idea that I could somehow “fix” my life by strong-arming it into what I always wanted it to be. I stopped searching for a magic wand to make myself better and decided that NOT BEING OKAY was just fine. And in true Murphy’s law fashion, that was the key that unlocked the door I’ve been banging my fists on for years. But what was on the other side was absolutely nothing like I expected.

It was so much better.

Honestly? It’s been the best year of my life, by far. I feel like I’ve let go of so much, and in the process, allowed so much more in. I feel like the Tien that I always wanted to be has finally been let out of the prison in my head, and damn, freedom is sweet. And even though I still have days where I go back in that prison, my relationship with it has changed dramatically. I know that I’m not really trapped there anymore, it’s just this part of me. I feel like a butterfly, reborn… and now I have wings.

Soon I will board a flight to Utah to see my bestie and her kids and the sky truly feels wide open to me. If this year is just the beginning, I cannot wait to see what 31 holds.

I Would Like To

I would like to hide inside myself A thousand times Crawl within the folds of fear And make myself warm And cozy.

I would like to huddle up beside the fire That stokes my quaking Heart that floats in a sea of hearts And somehow still feels Lonely.

I would like to call myself the Queen Of many things unseen And revel in the dark That takes me home And knows me.

Believing is Seeing

Have you seen the movie Spotlight? Just… wow. I knew the Catholic church was corrupt, but I had no idea the utterly massive scope of pedophilia taking place. It is heartbreaking. This might sound terrible to some, but that just makes me thankful all over again that my mother never raised me with any kind of religion. The lies and hypocrisy that happen behind church doors (not just Catholic) depresses the hell out of me.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not making a blanket statement that all religion is bad. Not by any stretch. I see a lot of good in religion, especially in the support and sense of purpose and belonging that it provides to so many people. My best friend in the whole world is a devout Mormon and her religion is one of the most important things in the world to her. I have friends of many different faiths. I love the perspective that each one adds to my life. I believe that most religions, at their very core, are all so similar they could almost be the same when you whittle them down to their essence; when you start getting into detail, that’s when everything becomes convoluted. It’s the details that divide us.

The thing about religion is this: no matter how much the intention might be there to connect people with a higher power or divine energy, churches are still run by people. Human beings with fears, and flaws, and faults. And unfortunately the structure of religion is just prone to foster corruption because it often puts the wrong kind of power in the hands of those flawed human beings. No matter how often religions preach wonderful concepts like love, acceptance, faith, generosity and the like, there are certain facets of religion that are just a breeding ground for judgement, exclusion, condemnation, fear, greed, and even sometimes hate.

At least, that’s been my personal experience.

Maybe I should back up and offer a little context. I was born and raised in Utah. Yes, I grew up deep in Mormon country. While parts of my general family tree have Mormons in them, my parents and most of my family are non-religious. My parents never once dragged us to any kind of church or even remotely spiritual gathering. My mom always told me, from the very beginning: “Tien, you can believe whatever you want. No matter what you decide, I will always love you. You go learn about whatever you want and make your own choices.” And I don’t recall her ever once wavering from that stance.

I can just hear the gasps of horror now. I know there are a lot of parents that cannot fathom raising children this way. But how do you instill in your children a moral compass!? How will they ever know right from wrong? Well, let me tell you. My mom led by example. If she said she was going to do something, she did it. I don’t remember her ever lying to me (aside from that one time of course when she told me we were going to the grocery store and she drove me to the doctor to get a vaccination. But that was pure WISDOM on her part because she knew that if she told me earlier in the week that I had to go get a shot, all I would have done was live out my entire week dramatizing the sheer terror I felt and trying to figure out new ways to persuade my mom out of it. I don’t hold that one against her — she minimized my overall pain. Go mom.)

But seriously though. I learned how to be a good human being by watching her. What you do is a million times more powerful than anything you ever say. Not to mention that I felt like my mom respected me and my thoughts, feelings, and opinions. This in turn made me respect her and appreciate her. By telling me to go think my own thoughts instead of subscribing to anyone else’s, I learned very early on to think for myself. I learned to be introspective, to think critically, to question everything. I learned to watch what other people do, not what they say. And best of all, I learned to trust my own intuition. Being raised without religion was one of the BEST possible gifts my mother could have given to me. The comfort of being spoon fed answers will never compare to the thrill of looking within your own heart and feeling that chord of truth strike within you and saying, “I’m going to believe this because it resonates with every aspect of my being.”

Now, it was not without its challenges. The biggest, of course, was growing up non-religious in a largely Mormon community. There was a distinct separation between me and so many of my peers, and it sucked. I remember kids telling me they couldn’t hang out with me. I was sometimes excluded from activities because I wasn’t Mormon. I remember being told that I was a horrible person and would essentially go to hell because I wasn’t Mormon. I was told I needed to “cover up” and go to church and change my evil ways because I wore tank tops instead of t-shirts. I was far from being a perfect child but I knew in my heart that I was a good person and that I wasn’t going to hell. So naturally, it wasn’t long before I learned to resent Mormonism. It’s human nature to learn to hate that which hates us — especially when it’s for seemingly no reason.

This is all generally speaking, of course — not all Mormons were terrible to me. I had friends, and most of them were Mormon by default. But I gathered enough negative memories that I definitely got a chip off my shoulder about it. I believe I was 6 or 7 when my best friend gave me a Book of Mormon for my birthday; it really hurt my feelings at the time because it was given with the intention of helping me “be a better person”. Many years went by before I was old enough to realize that this was Brooke’s way of telling me that she really loved me and wanted to make sure she didn’t lose me. She was still a kid, too, and here was this church full of people she loved and respected telling her that I wouldn’t get into some special tier of heaven because I wasn’t Mormon. She wanted to make sure she saved me, and in retrospect all I can think is, that’s fucking adorable. I love her to death. We are adults now and are happy to agree to disagree and there really aren’t any hard feelings left on this topic between the two of us. I appreciate her because she actually practices what she preaches — love and acceptance of all people, regardless of whether they follow the path she believes in. I am so thankful to have her in my life because she helps me to see the other side more often than I would otherwise.

But the sad truth is, I had more than enough experiences where I was criticized by Mormons (children and adults) and made to believe I was some kind of evil child purely because I wasn’t Mormon.

I’m sorry, but isn’t that just a little bit fucked up? What is it about religion that fosters this kind of judgement and exclusion? For all the preaching of love and acceptance, all I see is where they draw the line. “We will love you and accept you up to a point, so long as you conform to what we think you should be, and act the way we think you should act. Just follow our rules and you will always be welcome. Oh, you don’t fit into our box? Too bad. You’re a horrible person.”

Suffice it to say, I became somewhat prejudiced against religion early on; a prejudice that has taken a lifetime to try to unravel.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe there is a line for me in terms of accepting people for who they are, and that line for me is actually harming other people or living beings. The problem with religion is they draw their lines in places and across the faces and hearts of people who are not hurting a single person or doing a damn thing wrong, that simply want love and acceptance. The way the Mormon church (and various other Christian faiths) treats those that do not conform to strict monogamous heterosexuality is just despicable, in my opinion. I know, I know; you can argue til you’re blue in the face that you believe marriage should be between a man and a woman. And I wholeheartedly shout from the mountain tops: you’re welcome to that belief as much as you please. I will argue for your freedom to choose what you believe until I am blue in the face. But homosexuality does not in any way harm other people. The only harm I see being done is by the church — to those homosexual members of their faith that are put through absolute hell simply for being who they are. I’m sorry, but it’s cruel the way the Mormon church treats gay people. The sheer number of suicides resulting from this speaks for itself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let’s back up. As a child, I was a nerdy little bookworm with my nose forever stuck in a book or head floating up in the clouds. I had selective mutism and was PAINFULLY shy at school and almost never talked. It was so, so, so, so unbelievably hard for me to talk to people I didn’t know because I was terrified of them. I always excelled at school though and got good grades. I was this weird and extremely awkward kid that would swing back and forth between being a meek little doormat and a hyperactive, mischievous and extremely annoying imp. And there was this angry little girl in me that was pissed off for being labeled “bad” so early on and for no good reason. All those disapproving eyeballs hurt a lot. I was criticized for my clothing choices (the shortest thing Mormon women are allowed to wear is cap sleeves) so I would make sure I wore them more often, just to say, “fuck you, I can do whatever I want.” It was as if I was telling them I wouldn’t conform to their standards but I could still be a good person in my heart, even if they couldn’t see it.

I carried around a grudge against religion in general until my mid teens, when I picked up a copy of Conversations with God for the first time and all at once I actually began to contemplate God as more than just a concept. It was the first time I was ever able to get over the idea that God=Religion and it changed everything for me. Since then, my idea of God and relationship with my understanding of that has shifted and morphed a lot over the years. But here is how I experience God now:

The purest presence of absolute and unconditional love. The current of energy that pulses through every atom in the universe (or multiverse, depending on which you like better.) A connection to more than your current experience of yourself. Knowing without knowing how or why. Being.

My experience of God is the connection and love I feel to the people and the world around me. It’s the insight and intuition and ideas that are constantly pouring into my mind. It’s more than just believing that I can choose to be the best version of myself — it’s wanting to and choosing to because it sets me free inside. It’s listening past words to the true meaning underneath them and seeing hearts instead of just what people project to the world. It’s giving because I feel compelled to and also knowing when not to. It’s choosing to open my heart, again and again, even in the face of fear. It’s an inner strength and conviction, not a life lived in fear of “act bad, receive bad — better be good.”

Throughout my life, I have watched science and religion locked in an epic battle, teeth-in-throat. People think they contradict each other, but they don’t. They are two halves of the same coin, two approaches to the same search for a greater understanding of life, and they sound like this:

Science: “Seeing is believing.” Spirituality: “Believing is seeing.”

Both of these philosophies are moving towards each other, where they will ultimately converge and blend their realities. It’s the infinity symbol, constantly moving back towards itself. That’s why scientists admit that they cannot observe something without changing it. That’s how so many people can coexist on the same planet, all believing such different things, and somehow each one keeps experiencing only those things which continue to validate those beliefs. We make the mistake of assuming that we are somehow smarter or shrewder than the rest, and we have figured it all out and the rest have the wool pulled over their eyes. We never stop to actually question whether that’s true. We never stop to wonder if maybe our experiences are simply echoing our convictions — just like everyone else.

I don’t believe that humans are children which need to be taught lessons and will be punished if they behave badly or burn in eternal damnation purely for existing in ways that color outside of the lines. I believe humans are compasses with an innate guiding wisdom that pulls them towards those obstacles and experiences which will allow their soul the greatest growth, for the purpose of their own fulfillment. And I believe in free will, which is why things are often such a mess.

All of that said — I hold these beliefs loosely in the palm of my hand. They are the most logical, believable combination of constructs that feel the most accurate to my heart and my gut at this point in time. In spite of everything, I still hold to my agnostic tendencies. I always remind myself that I don’t know anything. I don’t ever want to be the haunting of my past: a stern figure wagging a fat finger and insisting that they know THE TRUTH (as if there could possibly ever be just one.) The only things that I truly know are that which I feel. And those things are much more abstract than beliefs. They are inner stirrings, not ideas and ideologies and explanations — and constructs.

I believe that I cannot possibly know the nature of the universe, I can only know my own experience. To insist that one single person can have enough life experience to claim to definitely, for sure have THE “right version of things” absolutely, for certain, THEY JUST KNOW feels arrogant to me. You know because you were told so by another human being, a fallible creature who was also told so by other fallible human beings, and then you have some profound experiences of God in your life so you assume that means that all of the constructs that go along with that idea of God that you’ve been told are true. And yes, scientists do the same exact thing.

People listen to others more than they stop and actually just listen to their own personal experience of God, or life, or whatever you want to call it, because the name doesn’t matter. But you know when something isn’t right in your heart. You know it when you hear words of hatred and exclusion dipped with honey so they seem sweet and loving. You know because you feel that twinge inside of you that says, “this isn’t right.” But you squash it because you don’t want to stray from the herd, to be rejected from the pack. And so things don’t change, and hatred disguised as love keeps winning. But nothing will change until the pack starts to wake up, and says, “I know how to choose for myself that which I believe in my heart to be true.”