I have for the longest time identified myself as agnostic. Essentially for me, it means believing a a being bigger than I am in a very non-commital fashion and especially not any religious institution's conception of this being. Here's a quick webster definition:
You might be surprised to find out that I pretty much grew up conservative and religious. I remember spending most of my teen years at church, and when I say most of my teen years, I mean that literally. Saturdays, Sundays, sometimes even Mondays and Tuesdays and we all know there are only 7 days in a week. A lot of my serious social relationships and formative view and values were developed then - unquestioned and fervently held to.
in college, everything changed for me. I was slowly coming into myself, both in terms of my views of the world and as a gay person. I started questioning my very religious world - what it meant, how it came to be, where it was going. Essentially, as I grew intellectually, my conservative religious world views couldn't keep up and I couldn't hold on to those old beliefs anymore because they no longer made sense to me. Walking away from them was really hard for me because I was walking away from a world and relationships I had grown up with.
Its probably been almost 10 years. I am older now. I have developed my own world views and yes, I am a gay person. I'd never thought I would explore that world of religion again, and as hard as it is for me to say this, I want to explore it again, but this time, from a more perceptive point of view as opposed to how Anais Nin described it - a blind adoption. And in case you're interested in her exact words, she said when we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
You're probably wondering why, or perhaps you're not, but I'll tell you anyway. My road to getting employed has been quite simply an emotional disaster. I started out great, but somehow fell behind everyone else. Everything felt beyond my control and I was constantly questioning if I had made the right choices. The overwhelming emotional toll was something I wasn't prepared for. Being here alone also meant sometimes I didn't really have anyone to talk to about it. Every close person I had was in time zone on the flip side of the world.
In perhaps what was desperation, I started thinking about God and faith. Having someone to talk to felt great, having someone to literally hand all this over to brought relief. But more than that, somehow things started to change and fall so neatly into place. People I had linked up with previously miraculously suddenly responded to me which helped me get the interview to begin with. For some reason I was reading my coursework descriptions for the upcoming semester and had at the interview specific questions relating to them. The timing of this and so much more was literally to a tee. What made everything seem so much more incredulous was the how fast everything was going and still how everything I needed just fell into place at a very specific right time. Now out of the blue I'm the one with best job with the best company.
The cynic in me brushes this off as coincidence. But another part of me wonders if this as the work of someone bigger than me perhaps. Maybe its my religious upbringing that's talking, maybe its colored glasses I'm looking through but it is driving me to a direction I'd never thought I'd want to explore or think about again. And while this is hardly a life and death story, the emotions are real, the heartaches are real, the amazement is real and the joy is real. It is pushing me to "come out" in a different way. I came out once as a gay person, now I feel like I'm coming out again, albeit as someone quite different.
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