So I’m turning 30 on Thursday!
It’s the big 3 0. I kind of feel a mix of things. I feel a bit like I might wake up on Thursday morning and have shed my skin and be a different species of human or something strange.
I actually feel like I am entering a new phase of my life which is kind of cool. I haven’t felt like this before at any other stage of my life.
My 20’s have been a god damn roller coaster! I feel they were a sort of ‘mini life’ within a life. So much happened, it could of all been spaced out over an entire life time and it would still have made for a full life.
Turning 30 is coinciding nicely with the end of all that chaos in my life which is nice. I’m kind of wondering what else there is for me? I feel a bit like it’s the end of the movie but the credits won’t start rolling, so I guess…more stuff will happen?
My 20’s were not a typical experience. During this time I got married and separated, had 2 kids, bought a house that I have just put on the market for sale, lived in many, many different towns. There have been so many people come and go that I lost count 5 years ago. All of the ones I started my 20’s with have left my life except my family in Canberra.
Emotionally parting with so many people has been the hardest thing I’ve experienced in life. To be 30 now and not have a friend I’ve known for any more than a few years is hard I think. I have no “old friends” possibly with the exception of 2 ladies that I still love and occasionally speak to.
I have come to terms with this strange isolation from people. In the last few years I’ve kind of been adopted into Neil’s lifelong circle of friends who I love dearly. This is enough for me.
Things have been intense. I guess it’s hard to maintain relationships when everything in life is intense. Friendships don’t seem to do well under intense circumstances.
I guess that’s not a very romantic thing to say but I think it’s true. Being an intense person doesn’t help either. Sometimes I wonder why Neil and I are so perfectly happy together. He is the world’s most passive, easy going human ever and I am…intense, hyperactive, extremely passionate, unfiltered…
I think the biggest shift during my 20’s was my experience with religion in the world and within myself. I have thought for a long time about how I can share this with people in a way that might help others. I have thought about writing a book.
Maybe it’s a story for another time (or a book…) but in a nut shell I went from being raised as a Christian in a very cultish like church, to becoming a full blown religious extremist, to eventually being set free by what I can only describe as the power of my independent and intelligent mind (sorry about that Abrahamic God, I know how you hate women like me and it’s my honest pleasure, on behalf of all women to tell you to fuck yourself up the arse (you might like it! Ps: You should stop hating gay’s)).
This experience of being suppressed by the church, extreme religious men, religion and eventually what all of that had become in my very unwell mind was hugely traumatic. I believe it was the cause of a huge amount of mental instability in my life.
To go from such a dark place to one day deciding that I would walk away from it all and not look back was the single, outstandingly best thing I have ever done in my life. Better than even having my children! This is because I believe that abandoning the toxic, abusive belief system I was so desperately trying to drag life from has been the healing power that has allowed me to raise my children as healthy, happy, well adjusted, independent human beings.
I have been born again and saved, for fucking real! Not because some book written and re written and used to abuse human beings for centuries told me that I was a filthy, spiritually one dimensional being who deserved to be tortured to death (thanks but no thanks).
I was saved from that belief system that tried to rob me of my life and what I have to offer the world. It’s ironic that Christianity professes to save you from the very thing it will drag you into.
I chose to walk away. To say no. I gave ‘god’ a real challenge to actually DO SOMETHING real. I refused to stop playing the game of grovelling to some imaginary guilt tripper. And what do you know! my whole life exploded into colour, life, true love and happiness and contentment that I believe will sustain me for the rest of my life.
None of this had anything to do with anyone else except the person I realised that I actually was inside. Underneath all of the complex personality layers I had developed to cope with what was going on in my head was actually…me. I’m still excited about this.
Christianity professes to give you a knowing that there is a god (and yes, I purposely use a lower case G when I spell god). Well I can tell you that walking away from it all if you have been part of an extreme cult or religious sect, will give you all the inner clarification you need to know that there is no Abrahamic god of the bible looking down on you, no divine Jesus Christ the saviour and no hell other than the one you might get locked in by believing all this stuff.
You might doubt the existence of god even if you believe in him (and yes, he is very much a he that represents all of the patriarchal bull shit we all love so much) but I have not once doubted the NON existence of this god since the day I turned my life away from "him".
Since I made this decision to fuck god off and out of my life (just another relationship that didn’t survive haha), my life has healed and I have healed. It’s too much to put into words. I’m so overwhelmed with gratefulness for my new life that to try and write it all now would be a serious injustice.
And so here I am, about to turn 30 and wondering what else is going to happen?
Bring on the next decade is all I can say. I’m ready for it! I am truly myself and it brings me much joy to be a trouble making yet kind of level and sort of sensible rat bag…
Adios amigos!