49 lines
4.9 KiB
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49 lines
4.9 KiB
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<h1>Zk | 60</h1>
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<p>I was not able to do it.</p>
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<p>Kay just went to bed after we spent much of the night talking over text, and I just wasn’t able to bring myself to bring up the way I feel about her.</p>
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<p>It’s maddening. I’ve never been so frustrated by the fact that I felt I was putting on a charade. It is not dissimilar from masking, which I do often during therapy with clients, but have never had to do with Kay until recently. Why would I have to pretend to be some sort of normal around a friend? And yet here I am, pretending I’m not falling asleep thinking about holding her paw every night.</p>
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<p>Holding her paw! What garbage.</p>
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<p>I talk with her like I talk with strangers, at least whenever we near this topic. I make a stranger out of myself, it seems, though she has not said anything about the way I have been acting. I reread each message countless times before sending it just to make sure that it is plausibly normal, that I am not in some way tipping my hand, that I am being kind without being intrusive, that I am being invested without being obsessed.</p>
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<p>I am not comfortable with this change in myself, but I will continue to work on it.</p>
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<p>What we did talk about, however, was much of what I spoke about with Jeremy yesterday, about how I left Saint John’s. She knew this fact, of course. I am not secretive about my spirituality, of course, just as she is not shy about her lack thereof.</p>
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<p>What she did not know, however, was that I had left willingly. At some point along the way, she had picked up on the idea that perhaps I had been ushered out unwillingly. When pressed as to why, she said, “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose I had guessed that you were gay or into out-species relationships or something.”</p>
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<p>My reply: “Oh goodness, no. Not something I particularly have a problem, but I can confirm that my preferences remain quite straight and quite coyote.” This probably would have been the best time for me to broach the topic, but I can point to this spot definitively as where I chickened out. Instead, I continued, “What lead to that assessment? I’m curious.”</p>
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<p>“I’m not sure. You’re a bit hard to read, perhaps, and so I took that as there being some sort of internal conflict.”</p>
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<p>“I think I’m just terrible at communicating,” I replied.</p>
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<p>“Also a possibility!”</p>
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<p>From there I explained much of what I had talked about earlier, about how I started to doubt the church, rather than my faith or scriptures, and yet how my decision to leave had come suddenly enough to surprise even myself.</p>
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<p>Now that I write this and think about her comment, though, I do wonder: the administration let me go with surprising ease. The attempts to keep me along the path to the clergy were faint at best, and I was able to simply walk away from the vocation with little impact to my standing within my own congregation and essentially no strife from the school itself.</p>
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<p>Why was this? In a church whose adherents continue to dwindle, why was there so little attempt to keep me around? Was it because I strove to reassure them that there were no hints of apostasy? Was it because they, on some level, agreed with me?</p>
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<p>Or was it because of me? Was it because they did not see a fit for me? For someone neurodivergent, outside the narrow spectrum of neurotypicality that they themselves held to so strongly? Was it because I was a pest? Were I to reapply, would I be welcomed back, even if I have better learned to function within society through whatever masking they might appreciate?</p>
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<p>Was I preempting them asking me to leave by leaving, myself?</p>
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<p>I don’t know how I feel about this thought. I will pray on it, of course, but as much as the church is in service of God, I do not think that this is necessarily his domain.</p>
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<p>Perhaps I should get in touch with the school, or maybe some of my old classmates.</p>
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<p>I suppose this is just what I needed: another impossible social problem. At thirty, I would think that I ought to have grown out of these by now.</p>
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