My Villain Arc

How did I get here?

Well, let’s lay some groundwork, shall we?

For most of my young life, I was a Christian. I was raised conservative, Evangelical, protestant, charismatic, however many other adjectives you want here. It was a particularly American brand of Christianity–not steeped in traditions or in history so much as in setting ourselves apart as a counter to the perceived fallen from grace nature of modern American culture (which is ironic, but we’ll get to that later). The movements I grew up with defined themselves more as what they were not than as what they were, as if they were some sort of beautiful work of art that could be revealed by removing enough marble from the block of stone.

As with much of American culture, these movements also put a lot of focus on the individual experience: a relationship with God, experiencing God, basking in God’s presence, shit like that. And here is the first area in which things fell apart for me: I never experienced God. I never felt God’s presence. I could put on a good act of it–being autistic and a champion masker has its advantages–but I never really heard or experienced anything that was other enough to my rational mind that the only explanation could be a god. 

But I persisted in my belief because it wasn’t just a belief to me. It was culture. It was life. The churches to which I belonged and the movements in which I participated wouldn’t explicitly shun a person for leaving like the Amish or FLDS, but you’d absolutely be looked at differently and not trusted. The structure and support that you’d grown up with would be withdrawn, and the idea of that frightened me far more than it should have (at least in retrospect). 

I moved away from all of that as I grew older. I started delving into witchcraft when I was around 18, the second I had the freedom to do so, and have since accepted myself as a witch. I moved away from home, stopped attending church, established myself as a person who didn’t believe in God, all of this by the time I was about 30. I accepted myself as bisexual and polyamorous around the same time and eventually came to realize that most of the struggles I had in life aligned quite spectacularly with the struggles caused by undiagnosed autism; so while I don’t have an official diagnosis (that particular battle is a pain in the ass), I’ve added “autistic” to my labels as well. 

But I never really dealt with any of who I was, what I did, or what I believed during that season of my life. I don’t mean my childhood, because that’s the stuff that’s easy to untangle, at least comparatively. When it becomes stuff that you actually had a hand in, it becomes muddy. How much of this mess was my doing? How much of the shadow self was my creation? Was this version of me that I’ve left behind inevitable or was she a consequence of my choices?

And truthfully, I might never have dealt with any of this if it weren’t for the events of this week.

So let’s talk about D and the community theater.

One thing I established about myself when I was about thirteen was that I loved being onstage. I wanted to be an actress, more than anything. I wanted to be in Hollywood or Broadway, on the stage or screen. I loved it because, although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was a natural extension of the masking I did every day to make myself more socially acceptable. I could take off the “Abby at School” or “Abby at Church” masks and put on a mask that wasn’t Abby at all. It was Lady Tremaine or Mae or a woman in Victorian England or a girl in the Middle East 5000 years ago.

(that’ll be a fun one to unpack)

Because I loved theater so much, I wound up going with my dad to the Christian community theater in which he’d been participating off and on since I was seven. And I loved it there. I was only an ensemble member (as much as I love acting, I’m not that good at it), but it felt like a great community, and it soon became the part of my life that meant the most to me.

And it was where I met D.

D, at first glance, could have stood for “DAYUMMMM.” He was a beautiful man, a vibrant man. Older than I was by a decade (so of course, nothing ever happened there, as we do have some morals), but an absolute joy. It was so easy to look at him and see the absolute ideal of Christian manliness: warm and loving, responsible, loved God, the works. It took about 4.3 seconds for me to develop a crush on him and about 9.8 seconds for that crush to turn into the kind of autistic hyperfixation that’s typically reserved for celebrities. While my friends were putting posters on their walls of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Devon Sawa, I had a picture of me and D from a cast party, unintentionally huge (our printer spat out as many pixels as it could) but also perhaps symbolically so.

Talking about him that way, it can seem like it was just a one sided obsessive crush, but we were friends. We emailed each other back and forth all the time for years, and I stayed at his house with some frequency, whenever it was tech week or when I had graduate classes at the school closer to him than it was to my parents’ house. We went on pseudo friendly ish dates to see musicals and eat in downtown Boston, and we’d watch Doctor Who together. I don’t think I can say that I was a pinnacle of importance to him the way he was to me, but there was a warmth and friendship there, even if the intensity of it was stronger on my side. I grew very close with his family–his mother (a saint on earth if ever there was one), his cousins. He meant a lot to me. I hope that I meant at least something to him. 

Time passed, as it does, and I eventually reached a part in my young adult life where I had to make a choice of what my future would really be: would it remain this Christian fantasy, doing these musicals, hoping that one day, D would look my way and immediately get down on one knee? Or would I actually choose to live my life and not hang my every choice on a fantasy hyperfixation? 

I chose to live.

I didn’t completely cut ties with D and the whole world from back then, not yet, but around 2015-2016, it came time for a culling, for obvious reasons. Many of them had gone all in on the fashy shit, and I grew disgusted with it and cut them out. 

The last time I saw him was about three years ago. The Christian community theater put on this musical that was not very good, but he was in it, and my dad and I went to see it together to see how the old crew was doing. Even though I look nothing like I did the last time he saw me, he lit up immediately when I came in and pulled me into a long, loving hug. I felt no regret about leaving that life behind, but it was good to know, in that moment, that there was no real love lost between us–that I still had a friend.

Had.

Monday morning, I woke up to a message from my dad. Very brief. D was dead.

Shock starts as a tunnel, all the light and sound except for those words vanishing, and then it becomes the prickling of your skin as you come back to yourself. D was dead. Is dead. Cancer, we learned later that day. Later still, I learned that he had opted against treating the cancer with western medicine and technology, preferring to try alternative methods in hopes of a miraculous cure. 

There is a FUCKTON I am working through with this grief. There’s the whole stages of grief thing of I can’t believe I’ll never hear him laugh or smile or whoop with joy again, never have a conversation with him, never email him, never go to see a show with him in it. There’s this awkward feeling of like… he meant so much to me, which he never knew, but I don’t know what or how much I meant to him, so do I even have a right to keep feeling like I’m swallowing a house brick by brick? There is so much cheese because self medicating with dairy is a slower and less destructive path than alcohol or drugs (but fuck me, I could use a trip to a dispensary).

But the big thing that feels like it’s filling my chest and my head and every part of me is rage. So much rage.

Even before I knew that he’d gone the “let’s try not doctors” route of things, I felt angry with God, with a god I don’t even believe in, because of the fucked up nature of the thing. If you believe that God controls everything, right, then God naturally made the cancer, caused the cancer to grow, caused it to slowly drain his life. So in this case, God made his death happen, but somehow, everyone at his funeral will be thanking God for the situation. Like what an amazing scam–to do something so cruel, so callous, and then to get people to thank you for it and tell you how good you are. 

If there is a God, he’s a dick, but part of me admires the sheer gall of that.

But then knowing about the “let’s try not doctors” side of things, my anger has expanded to be against not only God but the church and its influence, the beliefs that cause someone to think that having drugs and surgeries that can actually cause cancer to go into remission isn’t miraculous enough. I know the mindset there. It’s not enough to have a normal, by the books miracle of “the doctors were excellent in my surgery, the chemo was hard but I pulled through, and now I can live the rest of my life.” He wanted–they all wanted–the kind of miracle that happened to a friend of a friend, where the scans show cancer one day and the next, it’s gone. Even though that doesn’t happen. Even though it’s probably someone misread or it wasn’t cancer to begin with. 

And that killed him. Cancer isn’t something to fuck around with, and it kills even those who seek treatment, but if you suck down whatever alternative cures you feel like wouldn’t be interfering with God’s miraculous ways instead of going with scientifically proven methods of un-cancering yourself, that’s kind of– well, no. It IS very fucked up.

I’m having to confront not only the rage of his belief playing a not insignificant part in his death, not only the rage of his mourners thanking God for his death, not only the rage of how they’re going to turn his funeral into a spectacle, but a rage that’s been building in me since I started my journey away from Christianity to begin with. Rage at God and rage at the faith as a whole. Maybe a little bit of rage at myself for how much I let it all control me. 

I’ve been seeing a lot lately about doing “shadow work” or working with your “shadow self,” and I had no idea what any of that meant. Some googling suggested that to figure out what that “shadow self” is, you should think of the most annoying person you know, identify what about them annoys you, and then recognize those traits in yourself. And admittedly, before this week, I was struggling with that because the most annoying people I can think of are Certain Orange People, and I blissfully have roughly zero in common with them. 

But all of this has made me realize that I never processed or confronted my own life in the church, the impact all of it had on me, and the kind of person it turned me into. I’ve got a lot of church related triggers, not even from trauma or abuse but because of the sheer fuckery of the faith, and it’s a lot to work through.

And, well. I thought it would also be fun to have a blog where I can talk about other shadowy-er aspects of my life, like polyamory (not terribly shadow-y, because I am very tired, but also like–being demisexual and polyamorous is such a trip, I can’t even tell you) and witchcraft (my Tarot decks, let me show you them). So here we are. My villain arc for raging against the machine that killed a friend and made my early adulthood fucky, my shadow (?) self, my very long ramblings.