Putting myself in my stories.
Jul. 9th, 2019 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bladesparkI was honestly a bit hesitant to post Vertigo. (Still feeling twitchy about it, it hasn't been up long enough to know if it'll turn into one of those messes yet.) Last time I posted fanfic about something this deeply personal it went so to shit that it's no longer posted anywhere anymore. (I'm told you can find it if you know where to look. I don't care, I just don't want people to be able to contact me about it any way anymore. No comments on it, no PMs about why I deleted their comment on it, nothing.)
Vertigo takes one very specific angle on things, but it's more or less compressing the last four years of my relationship with the concept of "sin" into a single incident. I always do put "me" into my stories in some way, but a few of them are about things that are deep for me, and on those ones, people's reactions to them can also cut deep.
There's a very odd mix of feelings in realizing that things you've spent you whole fucking life fretting about, avoiding, feeling guilty about, etc. aren't actually sins and you were lied to about that and all that effort was wasted and yet they aren't actually sins and you're free now and they're there for the taking and you can drink coffee and get drunk and do weed and have sex with guys or girls or whoever without marrying them first and it's fine, you're not actually deeply sullying yourself by doing them, they're just things and they have natural consequences, but that's it, it stops there.
It's a lot, and I don't know if I could really capture how much of a lot it is in such a short story, especially as the final realization is towards the very end of the story. But still. Hopefully it'll mostly resonate with people in a good or useful way, and people who have a different experience will be able to move on without needing to sermonize at me about how wrong I am. :P
Vertigo takes one very specific angle on things, but it's more or less compressing the last four years of my relationship with the concept of "sin" into a single incident. I always do put "me" into my stories in some way, but a few of them are about things that are deep for me, and on those ones, people's reactions to them can also cut deep.
There's a very odd mix of feelings in realizing that things you've spent you whole fucking life fretting about, avoiding, feeling guilty about, etc. aren't actually sins and you were lied to about that and all that effort was wasted and yet they aren't actually sins and you're free now and they're there for the taking and you can drink coffee and get drunk and do weed and have sex with guys or girls or whoever without marrying them first and it's fine, you're not actually deeply sullying yourself by doing them, they're just things and they have natural consequences, but that's it, it stops there.
It's a lot, and I don't know if I could really capture how much of a lot it is in such a short story, especially as the final realization is towards the very end of the story. But still. Hopefully it'll mostly resonate with people in a good or useful way, and people who have a different experience will be able to move on without needing to sermonize at me about how wrong I am. :P
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 06:32 am (UTC)I AM SO GRATEFUL that I didn‘t get raised on believes like this.
No, these aren‘t sins! If you need me to repeat that every day I will gladly do.
Sins are killing and hurting and torturing people or animals and the environment. Hmm, I was going to list more but everything I could think of can be categorized under „Don‘t kill and hurt (physically and emotionally) people and there is - in 99% of the cases - no justification for it“
If only people realised it was that easy. Sigh.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 04:20 pm (UTC)My own upbringing was fortunately a much less overtly oppressive flavor of Christianity, but I really connected to Aziraphale's anger in this. The moment I "officially" discarded my faith was a very quiet one of thinking about how I handled evidence/the burden of proof with every other belief I had versus with respect to belief in the Christian god, but later, as I started to see just how much fucked up shit I'd managed to internalize despite not having much sin-related trauma, I got mad. That anger, that sense of "even if this deity does exist, they're a bloody asshole who can fuck right off" was where the real shift in my thinking and worldview came. It was painful and powerful.
I'm glad you got out of the mental/emotional cage you grew up in and are in a healthier community.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-10 05:23 pm (UTC)