It’s Okay to Be Fragile

One of the most difficult things about being faithless is all the fortitude required to sustain it. It’s just us and the passage of time.

Yikes.

Without faith, it’s hard to give anything meaning or clarity. We carry wounds around like stones in our pockets. We keep making the same mistakes, because a lack of faith makes it difficult to believe life will be better beyond new choices and self-preservation.

One of the most interesting repercussions of developing and maintaining faith is another one of faith’s great paradoxes. I feel both stronger and weaker at the same time, and both are better than my previous masquerade of hypocritical horse-BLEEP. 

I can only see it now, and that’s because my perspective has changed. I might still be making a lot of destructive, self-immolating choices had I not chosen to pursue faith no matter what. But now that I am operating from a relatively safe-distance from a former self, I can see the motivation for previous choices and give myself some grace. 

For me, a lack of faith (and probably some potent messages from our culture), made me feel like I had a heckuva lot to prove. I put myself through HELL trying to prove myself to me and to others. I considered myself a “relentless extrovert” and an “experiential learner” but maybe I was none of those things. I know I was lost, insecure, and lacking a lot of answers. 

The opposite of insecurity, by the way, is not confidence. At all. It is security. It is, in other words, safety. Many faithless people, who can’t bring themselves to believe in Good, let alone God, feel totally unsafe. I know I did. And I felt that way because I was not protecting myself. 

I compromised my own values, my own well being, my own choices, my own goals, my own education, my own body, my own heart, my own mind - everything - for the benefit of others. Everyone seemed to have an influence over me except for myself. It was exhausting and I was angry all the time, and I didn’t know why. 

Have you ever seen a wild animal trapped somewhere? You know how frantic they become? That’s because they feel unsafe. I suspect that’s how many faithless people are operating and feeling in their day-to-day lives, either internally or externally or both.

They are very much at the mercy of others, terrified, and feel like there is no way to save themselves from imminent harm, because they have never been allowed or allowed themselves to put themselves first.

There is a lot of talk about boundaries in our culture right now. I find that a rather nebulous and confusing topic. I get hung up on the nomenclature. I always imagined a boundary as a permanent wall between me and someone else, and sometimes it has to be. I don’t think it’s a particularly useful word for anyone trying to have relationships with other people. 

What I think the word or principle behind the word “boundary” is trying to capture is sticking up for ourselves. Protecting ourselves. Choosing ourselves. Refusing to participate in patterns that harm us. Leaving abusers. It is an act of self-protection or self-preservation, and I think taking that action is really difficult when we lack faith. 

Faith, for me, has been very grounding. It has created an environment in which I know and trust in my own self-worth. It helps me have hope for the future, trust my past, and stay calm in the present. And I mean faith in the broadest sense of the word. This journey, again, has just been about me choosing to believe in Good and occasionally calling it God, no matter what, just as an experiment. The experiment has paid off in ways I couldn’t possibly have imagined when I started. 

But back to fragility. I have been walking around in life for many years like a bull in a socio-emotional china shop, smashing around trying to prove how awesome, brave, beautiful, or interesting I am. Meanwhile, that bull was just an act. I was in fact the china itself, and all that strength and bravado without any faith left me feeling shattered. 

In reality, I am rather fragile and I need protection, and I finally feel like I am allowed to admit that and therefore protect myself. That’s because of faith, I think. I am finally operating within the conditions where it is important to protect myself in the name of a better future.