I’m okay. Just had to get a few stitches from taking a tumble on my run tonight. Fortunately I had a lot of good friends from my run club who immediately stepped in to call 911 and help me out while we waited for them to come.

I wept for a good bit after the credits rolled. There’s layers and layers of shame that I’m still trying to unravel.

Anyway, I’m still processing this realization. I never went through the obvious trauma that the kids at Teen Mania went through but all of us who went through evangelicalism know that insidious shame that we were taught.

More self-hate, more Jesus love. If I started to think better of myself, I would feel shame because then I was taking my focus off Jesus and the only way I could focus on Jesus was to focus on how bad I am.

Looking back, every time I felt a “spiritual high” where I believed I was experiencing God’s love it was deeply associated with this belief of myself as an unworthy awful sinner. So the more that I wanted to experience that “high”, the more I had to demean myself.

I had a bit of an intense realization tonight after watching the last episode. Evangelicalism deeply conditioned us to associate self-hate with God’s love. I never really understood that so much until now. The emotional manipulation of it all is astounding.

It’s really convenient that their crackdown on antisemitism doesn’t appear to apply to literal nazis. 🤔

I don’t know that we’ve even begun to fathom what’s coming. I hope to God I’m wrong and that this is just meaningless anxiety. But I don’t think that I am. I’m afraid.