Coming Out of the Closet: Aftermath

After I came out as an atheist, I began dealing with familiar baggage along with new problems that people deal with when they come out of the closet. It's the type of stuff that would make a Bible believer go, "If only you didn't turn your back on God." The feeling of being an outsider returned after a three-year hiatus. That's what happens when you are socially withdrawn from by sixty-plus people. I spent twelve years as an outcast during my school years, so this was nothing new. I was continuing my education at UACCB and the chancellor (who I was working for) & the staff became like an extended family to a degree, but that stop my social anxiety from gradually growing. After a year, I started playing sick to miss work days because I was getting more and more scared of making a call-screening error or interacting with chamber of commerce people.  

I also became suicidal, and Bible believers would be happy to run away with that. After seven years, I've consumed and overdosed on many chemicals and drugs, from gabapentin to air freshener, Tide pods, bug spray, Ambien, and even gasoline.  

I graduated from UACCB in the spring of 2015 and transferred to Arkansas State University to major in communications, but was medically withdrawn from there after a little over a month. My social anxiety had fully relapsed and was worse than it had ever been, and I had so much paranoia about going to court over not being able to pay off my tuition and loans. Why the paranoia?

This is one of those examples of familiar baggage. The day that I was ambushed and interrogated about my atheism felt like a court hearing, and it brought back unpleasant memories of being on the stand being interrogated by my dad's lawyer when he invaded my life during my teenage years to gain visitation rights. From having a bunch of eyes on me to being tripped up on uncomfortable questions, everything came flooding back to me, and so I've relived that court hearing since then.  

I also became overly concerned that I wouldn't be able to keep any job obtained after graduation, and everything snowballed until I was medically withdrawn. I spent the following years filing a disability case, which I finally stopped because I got tired of being strung along, but then I was medically withdrawn from the hospital I eventually obtained a custodial job at and had to report my trainer for violating HIPAA regulations after I found out she was gossiping to my co-workers about my being a patient in the hospital's mental facility.  

So yeah, I haven't exactly been a shining example of someone who has had a strong outcome from all of this. My journey to being independent, my ability to have a love life, and other things have been effected. I think back to how the preacher was going to eventually teach me how to drive, and that definitely went by the wayside with all of this.

Up to this point, counseling has been a bittersweet thing. Granted, I initially started doing it to have evidence to build on with my disability case, but it didn't take long to realize talking about the damage religion did was a lost cause. When I tried to bring up how I still fear Hell and how that's affected me, I would get stupid responses like "How can you be afraid of Hell if you're saying there's no god?" or "Well, you shouldn't have become an atheist." While having someone to talk to about other everyday baggage was fine and dandy, not being able to explore how religion screwed me up defeats the entire purpose. I'm resuming counseling with someone who was recommended on the Secular Therapy Project that's always discussed on The Atheist Experience, so we'll see where this goes.

My fear of Hell has gradually gone away over the years, but the effects it can have on one's psyche deserve more spotlight. One would think that the fact it has stopped me from completing my suicide attempts would be a good thing, but it actually makes worse. It puts me in a rock and a hard place scenario where it feels like I can either stay in this world and continue to deal with the torment, taunting, trauma, dread, etc that this life had to offer or take a gamble and end it with the possibility of facing far worse forever. Not only that, but if the attempt fails, the fear remains that the eternal torture could still happen either way. For the reputation religion has as being needed for happiness, this baggage is a very dark underbelly, and when you're coming from the Church of Christ where God has supposedly set so many super-specific rules in play and will happily torture 99.99999% of history's population for the tiniest things, this is darker than a Saw film.  

Next post, I will be going into the religious expectations I dealt with as a man, how that tied into work and my education, and the expectations of being someone any future wife of mine was supposed to submit to. Much love!