From the archives. 2017.

In 2016, I started my thesis project. One of the most fulfilling experiences I ever went through was my research residency in Montreal.

In Montreal, I spent a lot of time alone. The solitude brought to the surface questions that once troubled me: Am I a good person?

Attending Jehovah’s Witnesses’ meetings for over 25 years, listening to the speaker repeat that we were sinful human beings benefiting from God’s undeserved grace, had led me to think that I did not deserve the good things life had to offer me, and that I did not measure up to the word “good”.

At times, I didn’t ask the question to myself in a direct manner but I noticed, time and again, that my determination to ensure a faultless rendering in every task I started, was very evocative of an aspiration to do good. It was a conclusion that I disavowed because I was extremely convinced that I was not “good”, mainly due the teachings of the Witnesses.

One time, I was brushing my teeth and I thought, “Am I a good person? Am I doing things the right way? Do I have to be part of an organised religious group to be on the right path? And then I asked myself, what is the right way, anyway?”

I came to the conclusion that no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough; I was always falling short. I was aiming at perfection according to standards that weren’t my own anymore. I almost always crossed forbidden lines. We each live in our own conflict zone, and so always cross these same enemy lines. We set up our own weapons against ourselves.

We all have empathy, somewhere inside us. We do not admit it to ourselves because of guilt. We think and become convinced we are not enough. We allow the idea that we are so under-derserving to creep and settle inside us.

Distancing myself from [god] was aggressive. It was mortal. It was a long due mourning. I was literally tearing apart the walls that I built myself, that I lived in, that I fed on, that ended up feeding on me. The [god] I worshipped had no empathy; the easiest way he generated guilt in a person was in constantly reminding them they were “bought” by bloodshed.

Once [god] existed no more, I was free.

The sweet realisation that I broke free came upon me like the dew of the morning that settles on the green grass right before the sun peaks out behind the mountains––like the grass that sprouts from the hardest of soils, that which cracks the thirsty sand to burst life in it in all forms; like the first snow I witnessed from the window pane of my ground-floor apartment in Montreal, that made me forget how black the asphalt on the road was; like the breeze of the wind on a hot summer day, swirling in the palm of my hand as I slipped it out of the car window.

I was hurt, but I hurt no longer.

Writing this text, I am conscious it is all behind me now.

Love, R. ♡