An introduction

Hello world. I have opened this blog primarily to rant about stuff, because I have many things about which I rant.

The story begins four short years ago. I was an over-zealous evangelical protestant Christian, which is praiseworthy in my hometown. I had memorized the vast majority of the New Testament, and I still know passages by heart. Nevertheless, I was secretly fascinated with evolution. I was pro-comprehensive sex ed, and was flip-flopping between radical pro-life and more-or-less pro-choice. Many of my friends were sexually active, closet gay, drank, smoked weed, and so on, essentially people with which I was always taught not to make my inner friend group, but nevertheless the people with whom I connected. It bothered me that I never "felt" anything when I prayed, but I was so devoted to God with my emotions, I ignored my rational doubts. Desperate to "feel God's leading" and "follow God's will" for my life, I then deceived myself into thinking God had spoken to me and told me to marry my boyfriend at the time (it honestly might have been a self-inflicted auditory hallucination), and all was well and good in the world. That is, until I moved away from home.

Then, I started taking science, psychology, and philosophy classes. I fell in love with evolution, geologic time, and rational thinking. I had a bout of clinical depression, which shook the very core of my belief system. I began to realize my youth pastor boyfriend (almost my fiance) and I weren't meant to be after all, but the relationship ultimately broke over a year later when I found out he slept with one of my friends. As he faded out of the picture, I found myself finally free.

I tried church once or twice after he was gone, but I found it empty and sorrowful. Organized religion, I began to see for the first time, is based on total, constant, irreconcilable guilt combined with a need to make right with the creator or face eternity in hell. Certainly, such guilt should be felt for things like murder, theft, rape, etc., but for having romantic feelings someone of the same gender? For killing a bundle of cells in the womb that happen to have different DNA, but can feel no pain and have no self-knowledge? For having sexual relations with someone you love and to whom you are committed, but have not married? For believing in the Big Bang and the inorganic arrival of life by pure chance over an estimated time of 500 million years, and the evolution from the simplest prokaryotes to modern humans over the next 4 billion years by a combination of natural selection and species sorting?

So here I am today, a Recovering Christian as one friend called me once, on the verge of really embarking on my own for the first time, yet still struggling with the remnants from my old life and old faith. I'm going to move somewhere- no clue where- to pursue graduate study. I want to do a thesis in abiogenesis in academia as a career, something I'm sure my parents won't enjoy, but it's pretty much the coolest mystery of all time. I think I have what it takes to make it in astrobiology and Hadean/Archean geology, but the conflict with my family and my roots is ever-present.

Soon after the split with Mr. Youth Pastor, I began a new relationship with a science major who is the son of hippies. He loves me sincerely and unconditionally, and he thinks much like I do. Unlike my own family, I can be honest and open with his family; I can let down my guard and be myself. I can open a beer with his mom and talk politics, science, clothes, music, or whatever. Moreover, this guy respects me, something I have found to be very rare  in young men. When I move again in the summer, I want him to move in with me, something my parents have made it very clear is utterly impermissible. When I was very young and a close relative "came out of the closet" about her sexual orientation, my parents prohibited her from seeing me except on major holidays. I fear that, if they find out I'm "living in sin," they will distance me from my siblings, who are still minors. Yet,  he will not marry me before he lives with me and before he establishes his own scientific career, and I, frankly, have no desire for a wedding at this stage.

At the same time as all this inner turmoil, my Facebook homepage is littered with photos of my exes and my acquaintances with fuzzy little puppies, or wearing big ol' diamond rings, or walking down the aisle in white, or showing off their new apartments and rental homes, or, worst of all, ultrasounds and baby pictures of their newest additions. Honest to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, seeing all this (and knowing all my cousins were engaged by the time they were my age) makes me feel like a bit of a failure in my tiny apartment that won't even let me have a cat. With no immediate prospect of a spouse and no church attendance for the past year and a half, I wonder if my parents think me a heathen too. Sometimes I do.