i’m going to start living for beauty because nothing else makes sense

quiet notes from my journal #4: religious guilt, what it means to be spiritual, meaning crisis, relying on beauty

i think i’ve been searching for something to believe in again. i think, like a lot of us, i’m in a bit of a meaning crisis. what does it all mean? what is it all for? when everything around us starts to appear like chipping wallpaper and wilting flowers, when we watch that number at the bottom of our supermarket receipts slowly rise but our monthly pay checks stay the same, how most of our time is spent in jobs we’d rather not do, watching time slip away like liquid spilled on the floor, slowly spreading and rolling into the cracks in the ground, and we seem helpless—i think we need something to hold onto.

my mother placed the veil of catholicism over my eyes from as soon as i could open them. today, my vision sometimes has a milky blur. sometimes i still catch myself praying to god to take pain away or see the vignette of religious guilt cloud my sight. i wince when i see something disrespectful about the cross, just in case. something religious still has a grip on me.

when i was young, perhaps when i could just about reach the top shelf of the kitchen cupboards, i realised that the concept of heaven didn’t make sense, that everyone’s version of heaven would be different. they kept telling us at school that we are all special in our own way, that all of us were different and saw the world differently. so wouldn’t that mean heaven would be different to all of us? there couldn’t be one single version of heaven because mine would be pink and i don’t think jeremy from science would like that very much. was this the first crack?