I am a woman of faith, but certainly not in the way you may believe. I grew up in a Pentecostal church with all the jumping and clapping and stomping and the occasional booty shaking. Somehow though, it has never been in my bones to do the same. I never knew the words to the songs, the speakers were always too loud and I never knew what the pastor was trying to or did say. There was something about it that didn't sit right with me no matter which Pentecostal church I went to. And I tried out a few because I wanted to stay within the faith I was born in. But before I go any further...ask me what I knew about the Bible? About the same as you my friend. Jesus died to save our sins. The end. It was the great big book of sacred mystery quite honestly.
Then one day I met a group of people who really seemed to know their stuff. It couldn't be more different from the churches I grew up in and around. These people had questions and answers, I understood what they were singing (that helped me actually learn the words), I heard the evangelist speaking and things made sense. But without going into detail of the church I found that the church gave me family and it gave me structure. It's with their help that I learned how to study on my own, how to get up early and do the hard things. This became important by the time I was diagnosed.
I needed structure and routine. I needed to do what was hard for me to do, to get up and exercise, to socialize, to learn how to not manipulate, to build friendships in a healthy way. I am by no means an expert at any of this but it's with their help that I did it.
Religion has become a soft spot for me though as I would come to learn years later that I was not in alignment with the people who helped get me on the path in the first place. I think about things so much differently than I used to. I learned Jewish literature and hermeneutics and how to properly exegesis scripture and then boom! I realized I was beyond what they could teach me. My mind has opened up so vastly on scripture and not just the Bible but other sacred works and religions as well. It hurt me so much to have to leave that church. But it was time.
How does my leaving relate to my spirituality now? You'll read a lot more about it later but know that it has impacted me greatly. I no longer follow the rules that were imposed upon me, not by tradition and not by people. The biggest issue in religion has been relationships. Being afraid of abandonment kept me attached to the church too long even when I knew it wasn't good for me and kept me dancing with communal narcissism for quite some time. The issue being BPD and NPD mix very quickly, easily and nastily together. I feel as though there was so much power and politics in the church that put me in a bad place mentally very frequently. But again, I will talk about this later. For the sake of this blog I just want to introduce you to the experience I had which sets the groundwork for part 2.
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Love,
Dat Bahamian Borderline
IG: @bahamian_borderline
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