Things in my head were still very foggy at this point. Yes, I was now on life-changing medications for my depression, and they were beginning to enable me to leave the mire of desolation I had felt for so long, but I really wasn’t sure where to go from here. I was mentally and emotionally drained, and I really wasn’t in any place to start working again right away, but I had to. I needed income, if for no other reason than to continue filling the medications that were literally keeping me alive.

I had no choice but to look at my situation as a fresh start. The bottom had fallen out of my life, and I literally had nowhere to go but up.

One of the first things I did was I started going back to church. Not to that Baptist-turned-nondenominational-to-hide-their-bigotry-and-judgmentalism church I went to before, though. Instead, I found a Methodist church to attend (after shopping around a handful of other churches that failed to even acknowledge my existence when I showed up at their doors). I was looking for something different than what I was raised under, something more liberal and progressive, and I thought the Methodist church might be that place to help me rekindle my faith.

And I attended there pretty consistently for several months. I sang the songs, I made new friends and connections, I even tried attending a Sunday School class there. The pastor invited me to coffee, which I accepted, and I ended up spending a couple of hours pouring out to him everything I’d been through recently. He was compassionate and empathetic, and we even discussed some theology nuanced to the Methodist church that I was unfamiliar with. And for a while I was hopeful.

But after a while, I stopped attending as regularly. My depression was still present, partially because I was still working to regulate my brain chemistry and partially because my life circumstances were themselves depressing. In time, I stopped going altogether. The faith I had hoped to find simply failed to coalesce. I wasn’t really surprised, nor was I really all that disappointed.

During the months I went to church there, I was continuing to grow on my own. I was working to find my feet again, and in so doing, I was starting to come to accept my atheism. I was beginning to actually identify as an atheist, though quietly, covertly. I was terrified that anyone I knew would find out. I was afraid of the judgment and the disappointment I knew I would receive. So I kept it to myself. I knew eventually I’d come out as an atheist, but at that point in my life, I simply wasn’t ready.

But by then, I was ready to admit, at least to myself, that Christian faith no longer had any part in my life. I no longer believed in the Christian God, and I found that that knowledge actually brought me more peace and contentment than any time in my life as a believer. I was free of the stranglehold that Christianity brought, free of the arbitrary restrictions and unnecessary guilt that is inherent to that religion.

I’ve come a long way since then. It’s been a little over a decade since that devastating week of my life, and while my life now isn’t entirely what I would like it to be, I can say that I’m far happier now than I was then. I’ve grown and learned and expanded into a person I like far better now, and I plan to continue to push forward to larger horizons in the future.

The post That Time I Tried to Reclaim My Faith appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

But I can literally go wherever I want. And that’s a weird but liberating place to suddenly find myself in. Which of course is a thing I’ve had all along and just didn’t realize it until now. I mean, I’ve been working toward this understanding for some time. You can see it in the last several things I’ve written on this topic. But the full impact, the clarity of this knowledge, it didn’t really hit me until I put yesterday’s post up. I’d already found more personal freedom in being an atheist, but in finding myself where I am right this minute, I feel like the final set of shackles have fallen off. Breakthroughs are strange sometimes.

So now I’ve been walking around since then with this newfound sense of wonder. I feel like my mind has opened up into a much bigger space — because basically it has. The whole universe of spirituality has opened up to me, and I’m free to go where I like, free to explore in any direction that captures my mind, heart, and interest. My spirituality is no longer confined to the rules of Christianity or not-Christianity. Do I believe in the Christian God? No, not really, and certainly not in the way I was raised. But that doesn’t prohibit me from exploring other gods, other deities, or other entirely different avenues of spirituality as it suits me.

I think this might be the first time in my life I’ve actually had my mind well and truly blown. My partner says I’m in the midst of a significant transformation, and honestly, I can’t argue with their assessment. There’s a lot going on inside of me right now. I’m going to have to sit with this a moment and process it because the implications are enormous for me going forward.

More on this to come.

The post I Am a Changeling appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

I never wanted to be an atheist. It was never something that I chose. It was something that happened to me, over the course of more than a decade. The irony of this is that it was my post-secondary education at a Midwestern Conservative Christian university that started me down the path of deconstructing my faith.

It wasn’t just one thing that caused me to start questioning my faith. There were several things that happened in close proximity to each other that caused me to have questions in a few different areas.

All Scripture Is Inspired

During my undergraduate education, every student was required to take a certain number of Bible credits in order to graduate. They were considered something akin to general education requirements, and when you graduated, you did so with a minor in Bible. And me being me, I wanted to learn as much as I could about as much as I could, so I took a couple of Bible classes beyond what was required.

One of the very first things I can remember causing a true crack in the veneer of my faith was sitting in class one day and hearing that what is now considered the canon of the modern-day Protestant Bible was actually compiled by a group of men nearly more than 300 years after Jesus walked the Earth. There was an entire council dedicated to deciding which documents would comprise the whole of the biblical text. I didn’t know as much about what this process involved then, sitting in that class, as I do now, but I remember being floored that this took place hundreds of years after Jesus’s life and ministry, hundreds of years after Paul, hundreds of years after any of the writers of what is now the New Testament. And this didn’t even include the even more ancient texts of what is now the Old Testament. These men added documents to the canon, disregarded others, and Martin Luther a thousand years later removed some (e.g. the Apocrypha) that the Catholic Church still includes.

Why this blew my mind was because all my life I had been taught that all Scripture was inspired by God, through the Holy Spirit. But here were men deciding, after the fact, what documents were, in fact, inspired. (Supposedly. I know more now and know this is not actually the process the Council of Nicaea used.) So, what I realized in that moment, in that classroom, was that while the documents themselves may have been inspired, the process of selecting the canon was itself most certainly not.

And that cast a shadow on the entirety of the Bible for me, that it was, in fact, almost certainly not 100% inspired, that mistakes were made (because people make mistakes and misjudgments), that the Bible I knew was probably flawed. That little crack appeared in my faith, and what were mere doubts or questions before became uncertainties about things I had always been sure about.

Where Everything Came From

Origins became the second crack in my faith armor. By Origins, I specifically mean the origins of the universe, of life, of everything. It took me a long time to discover that, in the science community, the origins of the universe and the development (evolution) of life are two entirely separate theories. But where I stood at the beginning of my deconstruction, they were one and the same. And the reason for that is because of Genesis 1, where God commands everything into existence over the course of six days, where the universe and life as we know it now were created at the same time, in the same event.

But the more I learned about science, the more I began to suspect that there was actually something to this whole evolution thing. And let’s be clear — the Big Bang and evolution were absolutely not taught at my school. For all the places where the scientific community differed from the Bible — and there were many — the professors had some biblical explanation for why Creationists believe the way they do.

But the more I heard some of these explanations, the more they rang hollow, or at least insufficient. We were presented with “theories” from Scripture that simply couldn’t explain all the things science was finding. For instance, carbon dating was basically the devil because it consistently found that fossils held ages way beyond the 6,000-10,000 years of age the Earth was believed to be. One professor from our university actually got caught trying to submit a “dinosaur” bone for carbon dating as proof that dinosaurs lived during the age of humans, only to be revealed that the bone he used was from an entirely different and more modern species. He had submitted something like an elephant bone and hoped he wouldn’t get caught.

And there started to pile up a list of things like this that undermined my confidence in the biblical origins stories I had long been taught and held onto. Each one sent me to off to search outside sources for more information, sources both Christian and secular, and what I found steadily eroded everything I’d grown up believing in.

At some point I recognized that I now accepted evolution as the explanation for how a species develops and adapts. I now accepted the Big Bang Theory as a possible explanation for how the universe came into being. I recognized that Mankind was still learning and discovering new things and changing its views of the universe and life accordingly. This was world-shaking for me.

Christian Apologetics

One of the reasons I chose to take additional Bible courses in college was to increase my knowledge and skill at Christian apologetics — defending faith and biblical positions using Scripture, logic, philosophy, and other tools. I wanted to be able to defend what I believed from the strongest place possible, and I felt that taking additional Bible courses would enable me to do that.

Instead, I started to see arguments from a Christian perspective that felt shallow and contrived. Most argued using the Bible as a position of authority, of course, and we were taught that the Bible has all the answers you need for life. Except that the more I learned, the more I realized this was simply not the case. There were gaps, in certain necessary details and in logic itself. Many arguments became almost recursive, referring back on themselves for support. If A, then B, then A, and so on. And that was something I began to find less than fulfilling. But I still had faith in the process.

Shortly after university, I launched a website called Open Dialogue. I designed it as a safe place for Christians and non-Christians to come together to discuss their views, have debates and arguments, all without dissolving into the kind of hatred and vitriol we commonly see on the Internet now. And for the most part it worked. I moderated with a steady hand, and many excellent discussions were had there over several years.

And those discussions continued to erode my faith. For every argument I had for Christianity, for biblical “truth,” my counterparts had arguments for science and philosophy. Many of those arguments were ones I had no ready rebuttal for, and when I researched for Christian responses, I frequently came up with only the arguments I had already used. I was beginning to realize that secularism had better, more thought out, more cohesive, and more evidence-based answers than Christianity did. And I began to be swayed by those arguments as a result.

LGBTQIA+

Given all of the above, it came as little surprise to me when I realized that my views on homosexuality had essentially flipped. I saw the biology and evolution of same-sex attraction and understood it. It made sense to me that variety in sexual attraction would exist as a species develops in complexity.

So, it was with not a little wonder that I realized I was accepting of homosexual relationships. I didn’t personally know anyone who was gay (that I was aware of), but I now had this weird dichotomy where I knew with absolute certainty that homosexuality was natural and normal but where I also still had to figure out how I was going to come to terms with what the Bible said about this subject. To say the cognitive dissonance was strong would be a major understatement.

It would be many years yet before I would learn that the Bible is actually entirely silent on the subject of homosexuality. It would also be some time before my concepts of gender and sexuality would broaden to encompass the spectrums we know now. But this was my starting point. This is where I began to understand.

Fear and Trembling

If my telling of this gives you the impression that this was an easy process, well, nothing could be further from the truth. This whole shift in my thinking, in my beliefs, took place over most of two decades. And for the first decade, at least, I fought it with every fiber of my being.

I began as a Christian who realized that his faith could be broader than the narrow evangelicalism he grew up with. I adopted the term “progressive” because I knew that was the way forward. Not long after, I added “skeptic” to my identity. I questioned everything. I looked for answers everywhere. And all during this process, I saw myself losing my grip on my faith.

And I was terrified.

Bit by bit, I was losing the identity that had defined me for the first 25, 30 years of my life. I was losing my God. I was losing my hope for a better place after I die. I was losing my life’s meaning. I was at risk of losing my friends, my family, my entire community. And it scared the ever-living shit out of me.

Eventually, I became agnostic. Grudgingly. I wasn’t sure anymore that God existed, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he did exist, he didn’t look anything like the God of the Bible, or at least nothing like the God I was raised to believe in.

For years I was lost, adrift in an ocean of uncertainty. I couldn’t talk to anyone I knew about what I was going through — not my wife, not my pastors, not my parents, not anyone. I didn’t know how. But I knew the reactions I would get. I knew the “sermons” I would receive. I grew up with them. I studied them in college. I had lived them. Hell, I had delivered most of them myself. I knew them by heart. And I didn’t need or want anyone spouting them back at me.

So I floundered in the dark. I was scared, terrified. Nearly everything that held meaning for me was gone, and I had no idea what to replace it with.

My mental health took a nosedive. I became increasingly depressed and anxious. And I couldn’t talk to anyone about that, either. You didn’t discuss mental illness in evangelical Christian circles. Because there, mental illness was a sin issue, a depravity of the heart, and failure to have relationship with God.

There was nowhere for me to turn. So this void I’d found myself in swallowed me alive.

Forging a New Identity

In April 2016, everything came to a head. I was so depressed, I was seriously contemplating suicide. My marriage was coming apart at the seams, and I was struggling to function at work. It took a friend nearly halfway across the country to reach out to me at the moment I needed someone most to get me the help I needed.

I spent five days in the hospital. It wasn’t an immediate fix. You don’t go from where I was to perfectly whole and healthy in just five days. But it was a beginning. I got on some life-changing (and life-saving) medications, had some intensive inpatient therapy, and found some direction for my mental health. It was like someone had turned on a single light bulb for me so I could see, just a little. It didn’t address the issues of theology I’d been wrestling with. None of that even came up while I was there. It turned out that the core issue of my depression was brain chemistry, so taking steps to solve that started me on a new and different path. The other stuff I’d been silently wrestling with was still there, of course. But for the moment it was… less, and more manageable.

The bottom basically fell out of my life that April. I lost nearly everything important to my security, but I gained some perspective. Just a little. It was enough. The last ten years have been me creating a new identity for myself. I’ve made new friends, most of whom are not Christian and therefore far more accepting of who I am. I’ve done the work on myself to figure myself out, to learn who I really am, and to embrace new ideas and ideologies. I’ve gone from a right-wing conservative evangelical Christian to someone far more open to loving others just as they are.

And somewhere in there I realized I was an atheist, and I was okay with that. It wasn’t something I sought out. It wasn’t something I wanted. It was something that happened to me, over time, over the course of more than a decade.

I look at myself now, though, and I love who I have become, who I am right now. And I’m not done growing, not done learning and changing. I still consider myself an atheist for the moment, but I know my atheism is almost exclusively an atheism of the Christian God, the evangelical God. I’m that atheist, sure, but in other ways, I’ve become spiritual with some pagan leanings. I’m growing and changing and learning. I don’t know what I’m going to become, and I find that thought exciting, even exhilarating! Because I know I can become anything and anyone I want. I have that freedom, and it’s an amazing feeling!

I’ll be writing more about this process of growth and change in the days, weeks, and months to come. I’d love it if you’d come along with me, and the easiest way to do that is to subscribe to my blog. This thing is the archive of my growth since around 2003. It, like me, has gone through iterations and changes over the years, but it’s the chronicle of my journey — past, present, and future.

Stay tuned! There’s more to come!

The post I Never Wanted To Be an Atheist appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

For starters, it should be known and understood that I am not a liberal, even though I hold views that many people in the US would consider “liberal.” I am also not a conservative. The vast majority of my conservative viewpoints fell away when I deconstructed from faith, religion, and evangelicalism. For some reason, here in America people want you to be either liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, left or right. You have to be one or the other, dammit, or you just aren’t American! But those are labels and brands that no longer apply to me. For me, Conservatism long ago became the brand of hate, of judgment, of restricted rights applicable only to those who hold the reins of power. I identify more closely with liberalism as a result, but even there, I find shortcomings and failures to fit the way I define who I am as a person. Who I am now is something different, something more… eclectic, something made of parts of several different social and political structures.

I think most of my political values can be summed up by two aspects — the social and the fiscal.

Socially

From a social perspective, I consider myself a Progressive. This means I am constantly seeking to push social boundaries to a place where things are equal and equitable for all people. From a practical standpoint this looks like:

• Black Lives Matter
• Equal rights for women, including rights to govern their own bodies, the right to not be assaulted, regardless of what they are wearing, the right to equal pay and benefits, and more.
• If you couldn’t suss it out from the previous point, this means I am also Pro-Choice.
• I am an LGBTQIA+ ally. I know quite a few people who are queer or trans, and I support their right to self-determination, to be who they say they are.
• I’m a huge proponent of gun reform. Specifically, I’m convinced we need a much better system in place for determining who is allowed to own firearms. Background checks should include a comprehensive psychological evaluation to determine if you’re mentally capable of handling firearms safely. There are numerous factors that need to be overhauled. Guns need to be harder to acquire so that responsible people are the only ones in possession of them.

There is probably a lot more I could (and should) list here, but these represent my top priorities socially. If you think there are other things I should be including, please feel free to comment and let me know. That’s the thing about being a Progressive — my perspective, my viewpoint is always open to change, open to be broadened, open to be more inclusive.

Fiscally

Where it comes to money and finances, I tend toward a more socialist approach. I am all for resources being owned by the people. I want equitable distribution of wealth to the masses and the removal of class in society, putting everyone on the same financial playing field. Practically, this looks like taxing the wealthy their fair share and at a higher percentage than those who earn less. There should be Universal Healthcare for all, and education should be free.

But, you ask, doesn’t this mean taxes will go up? Sure, but what most people fail to take into account is that what you lose in taxes, you get back in public services. You’d no longer have to pay for insurance plans that don’t cover everything anyway. You could go to college and get a degree without incurring crippling, predatory debt. And these are just two benefits that are at the top of my list of benefits.

So to put it all together, at this point in time I consider myself a Progressive Democratic Socialist (because I also still believe that people have the right to self-determination in how they’re governed). I will continue to vote for political candidates who most closely align with my values, and more often than not those candidates are going to be Democrats — until such a day as a viable Socialist candidate enters the fray. (It won’t be Bernie, but maybe someone else will take up his mantle.)

I think we can do better. I think we can be better. But we first have to care more about people than we do about money or power.

The post It’s 2026! What Does My Political Headspace Look Like? appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

I grew up a Christian — devout, sincere, faith-based, and Bible-believing. Over time and for a myriad of reasons, I began to think of myself as agnostic, though for a while I waffled between agnosticism and faith. But more and more and piece by piece, my faith fell away, and I was forced to admit to myself that I was an atheist. The God I grew up believing in no longer existed, certainly not in the way I was taught.

My journey away from faith and into atheism was long and hard and deeply traumatic. It took years to happen, and I fought it tooth and nail almost every step of the way. In losing my faith, I was losing my identity, my community, my hope for the future. For a long time I was lost, adrift on a dark sea of fear and anguish. It took me a long time to find my way out of that darkness, and I had to do it almost entirely alone.

By the time I acknowledged my atheism, I had worked through the vast majority of my fears and uncertainties. I had begun to forge a new identity, free of God, free of faith, free of religious oppression, free of the lies that had caused me to judge people unfairly, free of many unnecessary restrictions. This, too, took time, but ultimately it was work worth doing. I found greater freedom, greater joy, and greater contentment than I had ever discovered in my faith and religion as a Christian. I discovered a person within myself that I was happy with and found that I liked myself a lot more than I did when I had faith.

But relatively recently, I came to the realization that my atheism has been, up to now, primarily a reaction to my former Christianity. What I mean by this is that I have almost exclusively thought of my atheism as being “not Christian.” I no longer believe in God, which is to say Yahweh, the God of the Bible, or at least certainly not in the terms under which I was taught he existed or as he appears in the pages of Scripture.

And that was how my unbelief began — that God, if he exists, is almost certainly not the God I grew up believing in, not the God I heard about from my father’s pulpit three times a week, not the God as he was depicted in the passages of the Testaments, both Old and New alike. That understanding eventually gave way to not seeing evidence for God’s existence at all, of course, based on a variety of measures ranging from biblical to philosophical to scientific to personal and more.

But my point here is that I had always framed my atheism in terms of what it wasn’t, and what it wasn’t was Christianity. It wasn’t other religions, too, but for my immediate intents and personal experience, it was mostly that I was no longer a Believer, a follower of Christ, a Child of God.

So what I realized is that, for me, atheism had mostly become one half of a binary system. And I discovered that that left the door of my mind and heart wedged slightly open to the idea of other kinds of spirituality, things that, as a Christian, I might once have evaluated and rejected because they weren’t approved by Christianity in general, and certainly not by the brand of Christianity I grew up under.

Since coming to this realization, I’ve really started exploring spirituality, recognizing that I’m open to other possibilities. I’m not looking for a new “replacement” religion. I don’t necessarily need a belief system that includes a god (or gods), though if one comes along that fits into where I’m at, I’ll certainly allow myself to consider it and even embrace it. But the point is that I’m now more open to those possibilities. I’m still very rational, very science-driven, very hands-on with actual data and facts and such. But I’m also willing to entertain the idea that there may be more out there that we just don’t know for sure about, that science has yet to catch up to or, even, may not be able to know.

I’m in no hurry as I go on this journey. It took me literal years to find my identity as a non-Christian, as an atheist, as a… whatever it is I am now. It’s going to take time to continue to grow and shape my identity moving forward, and the important thing to note is that I have that time (and I have the most amazing partner to walk with during this time), so there’s no need to rush it. I’ll talk more about my journey as I go, and I hope you’ll come along. As always you can subscribe to my site to get updates as soon as I put them up, if that’s something you’re into.

The post My Atheism Has Been One Half of a Binary System appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

But I grew up Christian. And evangelical. God meant God, with a big ‘G’, and there was only the one. Christianity is inherently monotheistic and has been since its inception 2000 years ago. Plus, I live in the US, where Christianity has been the predominant (or at least the loudest) religion. So when you hear someone say, “God,” here, you usually know who they’re referring to.

More and more, though, I’ve come to consider myself atheo-spiritual — atheist with a healthy dollop of spirituality mixed in. And I realized a while back that my atheism is a direct response to the kind of right-wing, fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity I grew up under (something I thought I’d already written about here but haven’t and so will at some point in the future). Because of that, I’ve realized that means I’m actually open to spirituality as a whole and, by association, paganism and polytheism.

But here’s the rub — I’m not a fan of the term ‘god,’ even in a polytheistic sense. At least, not as a personal practice, as something that I might in the future adopt for myself. I know this is simply a reaction of it being too much like the term big-‘G’ God and as such is something of an irrational, emotional association, but there it is. I’m not comfortable with the term little-‘g’ god and much prefer to refer to them as deities because calling them gods puts them on a pedestal too similar to the one I grew up believing in and worshipping. (The irony here, of course, is that the God I grew up believing in himself has polytheistic origins that got pushed down and written nearly out of existence, but that’s something I didn’t learn until I was already well away from faith in Yahweh.)

This might all seem like a game of semantics, but for me now, for where I am at the moment in my journey of spirituality, this distinction matters to me. Calling them deities and not gods makes it more palatable to me to entertain the idea of becoming pagan and polytheistic. It’s just something I’ve been mulling over recently and wanted to share my thoughts on. I’d love to hear yours, if you have any, especially if your background is similar to mine. Religious trauma from Christianity is a real thing, and it’s something I’m continuing to unravel from the way my mind works.

The post Of Gods versus Deities appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

It’s not a coincidence that my anxiety has also been higher than usual during this same time span. Most weeks, I’ve been able to get by with taking my emergency klonopin only once or twice a week. This past week and a half, I’ve taken one almost every single day. This past Monday, my anxiety go so bad that I ended up having a moderate panic attack at work. Fortunately, I was able to step away for a few minutes and call my girlfriend, who spent a few minutes just talking me through it, calming me, and helping me find my grounding again.

But overall, the last several days have just been… difficult. My anxiety has been riding between a 4 and 5 most days, and it’s been made worse the last couple of days due to unexpected vehicle repair bills I don’t have the savings for. So it’s going to be a few days before I can even get my car back.

All this has compounded on itself to destroy my desire to even find escape in video games. I find myself, instead, doing more doomscrolling on my phone because it’s easy and nearly mindless, but which does next to nothing to help my overall mental state. Watching our country fall further and further into a fascist dystopia really isn’t good for the mental well-being. I’d turn off the news and social media for the sake of my sanity, but I also don’t want to be blind-sided by events that might directly affect me or people I love.

I will get back to gaming eventually and even hopefully soon. But right now, I’m just trying to get control over my anxiety again, to find my mental footing among the national and global chaos. Baby steps.

The post Anxiety As a Factor of Gaming appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

Do you know what it’s like to wake up in the wee hours of the morning, not yet fully awake but just semi-comatose enough to know that something isn’t right? You hear yourself involuntarily grunting — it’s not enough of a sound to be a groan but also not little enough to be merely a sigh — because you’re in discomfort but can’t yet ascertain why because your brain isn’t really awake and processing input yet. So you roll over in one direction, hoping that getting more comfortable will resolve whatever issue is plaguing you, only to hear yourself grunt again and feel a little shiver of something spike through your body, especially your belly. So you roll again, in the other direction this time, seeking comfort and solace but not finding it. All during this, little grunts continue to escape you unbidden, little thrums of noise that emanate more from your chest than your throat.

And it takes a while, but you finally — finally! — start to rouse enough to realize what’s going on. Your anxiety is spiking severely, and you’re having a full-body reaction. Naturally, there is literally nothing provoking the anxiety. You’ve been asleep for nearly five hours, after all, and your dreams haven’t been particularly stimulating in any way at all.

At this point, you recognize you’re not going to be getting back to sleep anytime soon, so you reach over and turn on the lamp. You sit up and take a drink from your water bottle because you’ve been at least partially breathing through your mouth, and you’re parched. You lie back again and realize the cat is curled up against your side, blearily looking at you with sleepy eyes. At least he’s comfortable.

You lie there a few minutes, hoping sleep will approach again, but nope. The anxiety is doing an excellent job of keeping it at bay. So you grab your phone, check the time, and realize you still have a couple of hours before your alarm is scheduled to go off. And you know, you just know, that you won’t be getting anymore sleep this night.

It’s a rough way to start a Monday, and it’s a rough way to start a week. But it is what it is. Nothing for it but to knuckle down and push through as best you can.

The post Sleep, and the Struggle Thereof appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

I don’t really expect any of that to change much anytime soon. I’m not sure I have enough money again this week to get my blood pressure medication refilled. I have a sleep study coming up to help determine how badly my CPAP needs replaced and settings adjusted so I sleep better. And the anxiety? Well, that isn’t ever going to go away, is it, considering I’ve had it literally my entire life.

The best I can hope to do is distraction, which lately has been gaming every waking moment I’m not either working or (fitfully) sleeping. If you want to keep up with that, I stream nearly every day on Twitch, or you’re welcome to send me a friend request on Xbox Live (my gamertag is TTL Dem).

Hey, have a great day!

The post So Much Colorful Trash appeared first on Jim Stitzel.

I don’t understand my sleeping mind. I can’t remember the last time I had a true nightmare. But for a number of years now, the kinds of dreams I have feature situations and scenarios that are either very troubling or extremely upsetting, or both at the same time. They aren’t scary, though, so I don’t categorize them under the umbrella of “nightmare.”

Instead, they seem to be manifestations of my anxiety disorders and of the ever-present stress they create in my mind and body. Such is their intensity that they frequently disrupt my sleep and have me waking up in the dead of night drenched in sweat. Many times I struggle to shake off the emotions associated with those dreams, and they can sometimes negatively set the tone for my day, leaving me wrapped in an aura of uneasiness and even dissociation. 

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the types of dreams I have, and I think I’ve boiled them down into three main categories. Here’s what I’ve come up with. 

The Malicious Id 

The Malicious Id generally takes the shape of me as the bully (which is ironic, considering I was bullied for years through elementary and middle schools). I live in these dreams as someone of indeterminate age, but generally felt to be somewhere between a teenager to young adult. I’m often around other people, usually children, almost always younger than I am. I can never tell if I’m with them in some kind of supervisory role or just present with them, but regardless, one or more of the children will do something that I find annoying. It’s always something small and trivial, barely worth even a second glance, but that minute behavior will send me into an irate tailspin, and I will flip the fuck out. My reaction will always be some sort of overreaction, and I will take out my irritation on that child. I never strike or beat the child, but most commonly I will yell and shout and push the child around, usually hard enough to knock them to the ground. Then I’ll turn on the other children and at least threaten the same treatment on them. 

It’s usually at that point that I wake up, feeling frustrated and upset with myself and confused as to why I would dream myself behaving in such a way — again — when that kind of overreaction is something I would never do in reality. The children are always nameless and faceless, complete and utter strangers so far as I can tell, but that doesn’t prevent me from feeling terrible about these types of dreams and about myself for having them. 

This, the Malicious Id, is the least common of the three types. 

The Infinite Stress Loop

The Infinite Stress Loop is basically just what it sounds like. It is typically centered around whatever job I’m working at the time and involves a repetitive looping of performing the same action or task over, and over, and over, and over again, ad infinitum. For instance, a few months ago when I was working fast food, I dreamed about watching the order monitors and seeing new orders pop up on-screen. I would fill those orders, bump them off the monitors, only for new ones to take their place. This is, admittedly, how the process actually works in real life, but in the dream, there is never any hope of breaking or ending the cycle. There is no shift end to hope for, no expectation of any kind of lulls to catch your breath, no relief that ever arrives to help you. It is just the process, and you in the process, and it never ends. 

At least until you wake up, feeling stressed to the max, every muscle in your body tense, jaw clenched so tight you could crush diamonds between your teeth, anxiety ratcheted up to the nth degree. 

I do know what generally causes these dreams — becoming so hyper-fixated on my job that day that it follows me into sleep, and I end up not getting much actual rest that night to recover for the next working day. It happens, too, when I do web design (something I love to do, so it’s not just stressful jobs where this occurs), getting caught in a loop of working on a block of code over and over again. 

It doesn’t matter if I enjoy the particular job I’m doing at the time or not. The job follows me, becoming an affliction in my sleep, and I wake up feeling like I got no rest at all. 

This is the second most common type of dream I have. 

The Conflict Scenario

Both of my parents passed away a little over three years ago, mom three months after dad. For nearly two years after that, they would visit me in my dreams on an almost nightly basis. Many of these dreams were benign, ruminations of events with them that never happened, visitations that were frequently peaceful and nondescript. 

But more commonly than not, most of these dreams about my parents would spin into strife and conflict, though never with my mom. It was always a fight of some kind with my dad. There would be arguments and yelled “discussions,” and nearly every time, the verbal fights would turn into physical ones where I would beat the living shit out of him. I would always wake up from these dreams upset and frustrated and covered in sweat, but the anger from my dream would never follow me into wakefulness — I would just be shocked and confused as to why I would dream such violence so relentlessly. Yes, my dad and I were never particularly close, especially as I became an adult and my mental illnesses began to worsen and require daily maintenance and self-advocacy and self-care. But never in all that time did it ever occur to me to take violence to him in any way. That somehow came to be a thing for after he died and only then while I slept. 

I talked about these conflict dreams about my dad with my therapist, and we both agreed that I probably had/have some unresolved anger toward him that manifests these dreams. Some of that anger comes from various things growing up in his household and from some religious trauma growing up as a pastor’s kid that I continue to work through even now. But I think there’s more anger from the way he died, from the reason, the choice he made, that helped facilitate his death. I won’t go into any of that here. None of it is important. But the fact remains that there has been some anger I’ve had to work through, that I am still working through, that created the underpinnings for these conflict scenarios with my dad. 

These dreams about my dad have lessened quite a bit this last year, but they do still occur from time to time. And sometimes they have started to include other members of my family. But as more time passes, the more affable these nighttime visitations with my parents have become, the more convivial and familial. 

These conflict dreams have far and away been the most common stressful dreams I’ve had the last few years and by far the most intense and traumatic. I look forward to the day when I banish them completely. 

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