Hey everyone y'all go fucking ape shit from Corona yet? We're on lockdown for another month. Stay safe everyone.

So I've been on iso for like 3 weeks now and spent a lot of that time reading. The wife has been binging the absolutely got mess that is Anne "I don't believe in content editors" Rice and drug me down with her because I love garbage too. And among the got garbage there are some gems to find.

Rice was raised Catholic, left it , reverted back, then left again, and you can see her journey pretty hard through her series (everything is Catholic unless it's Orthodox, tons of saint and Jesus and Mary imagery, cathedrals and lots of opinions on the divine from people of different times and cultures)

So far, my favorite book/character has been Armand and you can tell, reading his book, that she's about to go back to Catholicism (fandom joke is it's the book that made her realize she needed Jesus) and I wanna rant on it a bit because it's honestly pretty poignant and I relate hard to a lot of it.

Main kid is Renessaince era Russian Orthodox, and by 15 he was crawling around in a cage monastery, frozen and starving and spending his life painting icons as devotion. By the time I was that age I had contemplated many times joining a convent (back when I thought I was a girl). I use to watch endless documentaries on convents and sisterhood's and saints, and the whole thing sounded horribly romantic, and I longed for that sense of purpose and devotion.

So this kid goes through one heckin ton of trauma and shoots wildly between blind, self harm inducing devotion and terror, and complete rejection of this bullshit. Churches make him so anxious he actually becomes sick (check) images of the saints freak him out (check) and eventually he gets swept into a cult (not far from check considering traditional Catholicism is a mess). In a more recent novel it even conpells him to attempt suicide (check)

And yet through the whole story there's a few voices of reason who, never having been immersed into that fairy tale, point blank call Christianity foolishness , a doomsday death cult obsessed from the begining with the end of the world, dragging Jesus as the Jewish version of pagan archetypes that he is, and even in fiction it's cathartic as fuck to see those words on paper. It's nice to see the complexities of religious trauma dealt with, on both sides, even if it's from an author who once spent 2 pages describing a man accidently pissing on himself. It's been something to immerse myself in, a barrier to help address some shit without being so close to it that it's scary or triggering.

Mornings are still my worst time. I wake up instantly with thoughts of traditional hymns playing in my head or flashbacks to confession or remembering Lourdes reports as simple as 'mans body fights off a gangrene infection pre antibiotics, miracle!' but with something like this to distract with, it's like coming off of a drug; I can still get the fix I feel like I need, but in a way I can set aside my triggers and focus on what heals from this shit instead.

No real point to this. Just felt like rambling about some positive progress. Iso aside, it's been a good week.

Reccent art attached for reference