I need so desperately to write this down somewhere. I’m drawing verbal blanks, but my mind is racing faster than anything I’ve ever experienced before; my thoughts are so—they’re on rapid-fire right now and what’s being so accurately, and so precisely divulged doesn’t even begin to sum up my nervousness? jittery-ness? I’m having a really hard time writing.

So on my drive home, I was thinking (sort-of)—I was being slightly delusional, for lack of a better term. Sleeplessness, fuck. But it occurred to me that I should really be wary of religious institutions. What I mean is…

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My mom tried to get me to go to church with the family on Easter. My family’s Roman Catholic, they’re part of the Diocese of Metuchen, they attend mass every Sunday (or Saturday, depending on when they can make it), and I can honestly say, they are true believers in the principles (moral, or otherwise) of Catholicism.

Now, I’m not saying it’s all poppy-cock, bullshit, meant to feed your external ideals, but something she said awhile ago, still bothers me. She was talking about her friend, who, to her knowledge, is not indicted to any type of religious institution. She said that her friend (as well as her friend’s family) has no moral groundset to which she lives her life by because they don’t “belong” to any specific “officialized” religion. Now that’s slightly condescending. How can you so positively claim that just because someone doesn’t belong to a religious institution, that they lack morals, no less faith required to pursue these morals?

How can you claim—how can you believe that you’re this model human being just because you follow a dictation of principles, imposed on you since birth? That’s the reality you live in. You know no other. You don’t realize the hypocrisy of going to church every Sunday, listening to the sermons—the priests that preach to every individual of that congregation, and you—you assume no active role as a Christian on this vast and struggling planet. In our society, for chrissakes. Have you done anything with the time you’ve spent sitting around the house anally cleaning every nook and cranny to satisfy your obsessive needs? Have you?! You haven’t done squat. There’s so many people out there who need help, and all you can think about is, “Wow, so-and-so has no morals because they don’t go to church; I denounce their lifestyle.”

You shouldn’t detest my choice not to attend mass. This is me; you might as well have been talking to me as though I was your friend who chose not to concern herself with any specific religious institution. The thing is, I have morals. I have faith in the ability of the human being to care, to love, to empathize. To do all they can to help others. To help themselves. To think not as a cynic, but as an optimist. That’s the true test of faith; it comes from what you believe in. Your internal sanctity; not this bubble, this petty excuse for a principled life that you lead. Show me you have faith in God, not principle.

And that’s another thing. I’d be a hypocrite to attend an institution that denounces homosexuality as a crime against morality. That is absolutely blasphemous. I’m a human being, not a robot, not a rock, not a furby, or some inanimate tool used to fuel your antagonizing decrees. You can’t live your life by following dictations set aside by like human beings. Because we’re all on the same playing field; we’re all humans; we go through struggles just like everyone else, we have fears, doubts, anxieties… We feel.

Which is why I don’t understand why Principle is such a superseding entity. There’s more to life than making other people’s lives miserable for the sake of some written code of conduct, that consequently disengenders a group of people. People who see through all this bullshit brought on by the upheaval of rigidity and social construct. And since birth you’ve been taught to see the world in a way that blinds your senses, that restrains you from actually seeing the beauty, the fluidity of life. Driving you into this hegemonic society of standards and principle and gender binaries, competitive exclusion, materialism, an ambiguous reality that’s no more of a reality than what’s inside your head.

I was thinking about this idea of marriage the other day. Yet again, another institution. I mean, you either love someone with all your heart that you can’t bear living without them. To make a promise to be with your spouse till-death-do-us-part, and I can believe that people truly love each other unconditionally, but the fact of the matter is, you don’t need to seal it with marriage (clarification: I’m not against marriage, all I’m saying is that it’s not something that’s 100% mandatory; aka marriage isn’t for everyone). There are some people who marry by Principle. Like I said, an institution. It’s just boundaries are so extremely blurred sometimes, that Love deforms into a Principle: On one hand you’ve got Love, like the true uninhibited I’ll-do-anything-for-you-lets-get-married type of Love, and on the far extremist (or conservative, rather) end, you’ve got the principle of getting married, which leaves no room for Love, essentially.

But here’s the kicker: Love as a principle. It could well be possible that 2 seemingly compatible people are together because they believe in Love as a Principle. That again has to do with the attention that our minds are so unconsciously and subconsciously geared to. The abysmal depths of the media. The things people tell us—your parents, your friends, your friends via their parents via their parents via their friends, etc. It’s a bit cyclical and… tiring. The redundancy of being bombarded with the ideal guy or the ideal gal. Movies. Storybooks. Music. Talk shows. Dr. Phil. It becomes so unnoticeably warped that sometimes, I look at my parents, and I can’t help but think, “Are they still together because they love each other? Or because it’s Principle that drives them to view Love and marriage as a mere social construct?” But that’s just me spewing hypotheticals; they get along just fine. It’s just that the communication aspect of our family unit, though there wasn’t much to begin with, has kindof depressingly imploded.

Back to the root of my deferred writing-strike, I can’t bring myself to go to Church anymore. I’d be lying to myself, lying to everyone around me. I’d be relegated to a mere facade of reality, I’d be pouring fuel into fire. Breast-feeding hegemony. I would become a squandering, obsessive-compulsive cleaning-lady who’d find no self-motivation to break unjust and dehumanizing principles. I’d be doing exactly what she would be doing because she can’t seem to break that sanctuary-of-a-bubble that she lives in. But I totally agree with her, the world is a scary place. But not because of what you see or hear on the news. And not because of the reality of what’s out there, or what’s already been said, done, or discovered. Settling with what’s already been given to you, that’s the easy part. The hard part—the hard part is finding and uncovering what hasn’t been discovered.