My own personal song of despair.

After a four hour drive, sleeping after drinking dark roast coffee, eating half a grilled cheese sandwich at a truck stop in which the cheese wasn't even melted, I've come to the conclusion that I'm just really Hippie Jesus camp hungover. I feel so mentally and physically ajifilkdkfslakdkfjalwriohjtu right now. Or, as Allan put it so delicately when I looked like I was considering strangling people in the truck stop, it's probably because I'm on my period. Thank you, Allan. Considering I never even brought that up, I think that he has too many sisters.

Hippie Jesus camp was pretty mediocre. It made me feel bad about myself as a person and realize I have absolutely no direction in my faith at all right now. Everybody else seemed to have a great, enriching time while I despaired quietly while slightly loathing myself. I even cried once, out feeling little but despair in a room full of happiness. Then I was told that maybe I was having a mediocre time because I didn't put myself out there as much as everyone else did. Which, you know, was probably a bit true, but mostly because I was being overwhelmed by everything happening. The Vineyard isn't known for their subtlety. Somehow I left with a feeling of being overall personally underwhelmed by the events of the weekend. While everyone else appears to be high on Jesus and adrenaline, I now feel terrible.

And now I try to pinpoint why I feel terrible:

I'm not doubting my religion, I'm doubting my capacity to deal with it. Whenever I try to talk about that sentiment, I just can't express it. I hate openly despairing about this because it's like when you state you have a sore throat: everybody seems to have a differing, slightly condescending sure fire suggestion to fix it for you, which in reality, none of it works. Also, I hate being venerable by saying "Hey, I haven't been digging this Jesus thing lately and can you help me in a non-judgmental way without looking down on me?" No one knows how to deal with me because I'm born and raised Christian who is slowly slipping not into a path of distinct evil, but of consistent apathy. I'm not quite to that yet, but I'm getting there and feeling appropriately shitty about it.

It's especially hard at the Vineyard because there is so much going on and I'm so underwhelmed for no particular reason. My "I'm not feeling this right now" would probably frustrate people to no end because there's also a gazillion distinctly Jesusy things always going on.

Also, I've had way too many mental/emotional breakdowns at youth group through the years and I don't like how people have dealt with them. Blog quasi-breakdowns/rants are so much less memorable. You see, usually I'm so guarded that people are really thrown off when I have a moment of vulnerability. I'm so guarded I don't know how to cope with me, I just have sudden realizations of why things seem wrong.

Almost everything religion related has made me hate things lately so I must be doing something wrong. Which, again, makes me hate myself more. I'm doing bible camp/religion wrong and have no sweet clue what to do about it. This bothers me a lot, especially as a kid who grew up in church, has parents who were missionaries for several years, has spent multiple nights a week at youth group functions through most of my teen years, and worked at a church for a summer.

The especially weird thing about this is that for the first time ever, I feel like I've pieced almost every area of my life together in a satisfactory manner. Except this, which I'm downright hopeless at right now. #Juliannedoesreligionfor17yearsandsuddenlysucks

Now I'm going to ignore people and homework, listen to Sufjan Stevens to block out the annoying drones of my family and avoid pulling too much of my hair out. I want to go to bed, but I also want clean jeans tomorrow.
Love,
-J-