You think you guys can help me out with a paper (of all religions/non-religion)?

[Angrboda]

I'm also supposed to interview my parents to get their points of view to be considered when writing the essay. The problem is that I can't have a civil discourse with my parents about religion. They don't like that I'm an atheist and I'm convinced my father thinks it's a 'phase'.

Perhaps you could ask them to write out their responses to a short list of questions. (Unbiased ones.) Or if you and they live near a church they still attend, ask the pastor to assist/referee.

Here's where I need the help. I was wondering if you guys would like to share some of your experiences with religion and how it shaped you growing up.

I don't know that I can help much, though I'm at your service if I can.

My growing up stories are complicated by the fact that early on, I developed severe delusions. While they're not strictly religious, my growing up stories are plagued by there being two sets of them. The one, the side I showed to the world, and didn't include the crazy elements (I had paranoid delusions, and this was my way of avoiding detection). The other reaches deep into my madness, in which God and I were on first name basis, and he was clearly my second, yet I owed him for favors given. Somewhere between my early childhood and adolescence, the 'sane' track lost the religious, Christian elements it had. I don't know how or when I lost my faith, but by my early teens, it wasn't there. I always believed that my parents didn't love me, and that after my sisters were born, four years before me, my arrival was greeted as a mistake. I don't think this was the signal event, but once my sisters were confirmed, my mother lost all interest in church and my religious education. Needless to say, I saw this as simply one more example of how I didn't matter to them. If God hadn't been completely gone by then, he was fading quickly. The ice had already frozen by my mid-teens. In the middle of a screaming match with my mother, I made it plain. She told me to go to hell, and I retorted that she could go to hell herself, but that I didn't believe in any of that "God shit."

And so it went, and high school came. I was an extremely shy and retiring person, but strangely enormously popular. I can't count the number of cliques that counted me as one of their own, from jocks to dirts to brains and everything in between. I managed by being witty and weird, using enigmatic presentations to hide my anxiety and insecurity. And I nearly flunked out of high school, as I started having regular depressions my second year. So my final year I had to pour myself into my studies to make up the ground lost the year before or I wouldn't graduate. One of the classes I loved best of my entire high school experience was a class in Asian history. When we came to discussion of China, the teacher read some selections from the Tao Te Ching. After class, I asked him if I could look at the book. I don't recall what initially sparked my curiosity, but he offered to loan it to me, and I accepted. That night, I went home and read it cover to cover, completely absorbed by it. Everything in it struck deep chords in me. Things that I had felt, but had not words for, suddenly had words. I became a Taoist that night.

I'm perhaps not the ideal candidate for Taoism, being both cold and intellectual, in a faith that emphasizes compassion and near anti-intellectual mysticism, but I've never been tempted in the least to choose another path. After flunking out of college, I moved to the big city, Minneapolis. I don't recall the dates, but there was a period of 12-13 years in which I considered myself apostatic. Not so much disbelieving as being puzzled by something I didn't feel could be reconciled with my understanding of Taoism. After 12 or so years pondering the matter, I hit upon a way to patch things up by drawing on parts of Buddhism and parts of Sun Tzu. I'm not sure in hindsight whether my solution was valid, or whether I had just wanted it so badly that I let myself believe it was. You might have noticed that I have not talked about my Hinduism. Part of that is intentional. I'm very insecure about my Hinduism, and parts of it intersect with my madness in ways I'm not willing to share. But what I can share is that my Hinduism began in college. At first, it was just recognizing something essential in poetry and art, something that spoke to a part of me that needed to be acknowledged. Perhaps it's simply my split between being cold as ice and being rageful and uncontrolled. Perhaps it's something more complex. As time went on, and I learned more about the goddess, the more it struck me as something essentially right, just as my Taoism had, but also wholly other. An other that I had been missing. Looking back on things, I think I might have settled my conflict with the Tao by acknowledging the goddess, but at the time, that path wasn't open to me. It's only been recently I've been even minimally open with others about my Hinduism. And there is much I don't know. I feel so ignorant. Perhaps I am reaching back in time to that shy high schooler. Or perhaps I'm just looking for a poetic way to end this.

Maybe I should just end it thus.