I am still a slave to spiritual perfection and religiosity. It's easy to sit in therapy and talk about having left the church, but I step back out into life and realize I'm actually still in the process of leaving. I have worked hard to craft new disciplines, but I find myself slipping back into "oughts." My spirituality "ought" to look a certain way and often that ought is a very similar pattern to the ones I had in Christianity. I crave the security and assuredness that self-discipline gave me - that warm, cozy blanket of knowing I was doing the "better thing." The right thing. So much of my life was caught up in rightness and constant self-reflection of that rightness. Did I do my quiet time, pray, repent of that dirty thought, not read that book, feel bad enough about the mean thing I muttered about that coworker? Was anything I doing enough (the answer was "no.") And I obsessed over these things until I was sick - or sicker than I would have been just left on my own. Religiosity was the will o' wisp drowning me in the bog of my mental illness. And honestly, it's not done with me yet.
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