i am a humanist

i am an atheist.

i have been an atheist since approximately middle school. my friend went through some sort of religious awakening and wanted to convert me to christianity so she invited me to a church lock-in and gave me a “junior” bible. i never did go to the lock-in, but i did spend quite a bit of time going through the kids’ version of the bible.

my ethnicity is asian and my immediate family lived far from the rest of my extended family in white midwestern suburbia. i don’t recall one conversation about religion with my parents. i was a blank slate. consider if you were that blank slate and now you’re reading about adam and eve (woman responsible for the original sin of having curiosity); sodom and its rape-y citizens plus the chick turning into a pillar of salt (the lesson here is…sacrifice your daughters and women still shouldn’t show curiosity??); those same daughters drug their father and sleep with him to get pregnant (wtf am i supposed to do with this story); reoccurring themes involving foreskins (yes foreskins); a drunkard chosen to preserve life by marching animals two-by-two onto a big ass boat (and later noah commits the ultimate sin of being naked); and so many, many more bewildering stories. obviously, all of this sounded nuttier than a fruitcake. witches, ghosts, santa claus, and all sorts of other stories sounded equally as plausible, and a hell of a lot more fun.

i started reading books about christianity, and also about all religions. the more i read, the less sense any of it made. taken literally or just as parables, none of the major religious texts–the bible, the talmud, the quran, the vedas–felt like a logical foundation for belief. the underpinnings of violence and genocide, mysogyny, anti-gay sentiment, the dislike of “the other”, the strange relationships and sexual acts…and yet, these are the texts around which so many millions center their lives.

i’m sure if you grew up with religion, it seems perfectly acceptable, perfectly normal. lots of problematic thought and behavior can be normalized by repeated contact. but when you’re a blank slate like i was, it is unfathomable to have blind faith in a god or gods who have some sort of naughty or nice list, watching to see what havoc they may want to wreak.

religion is a human invention. at the beginning of human existence, the world was a scary place. humans soothed themselves by creating a narrative for the unknown. having an explanation provides a feeling of control–even when there actually isn’t any. religion, like everything else, has evolved through the ages. animism, polytheism, monotheism, and so many others. and yet, the same people who look back and scoff at the idea of greek and roman gods are the same people who are convinced i’m going to hell because i have not accepted jesus into my life. i think of the poor tribes still living in isolation in the amazon–they haven’t even heard of jesus, poor things.

i have always marveled at the thought that religion was created to explain what was beyond human knowledge–everything from lightning and thunder, the sun, the stars, the creation of earth, human existence, life and death, disease, and so much more. now we have explanations for a lot of phenomena, but people want to suspend their logic and knowledge so they can continue to believe in a magical all-knowing, all-powerful god of everything.

i’m not saying that it wouldn’t be nice if there was a god. i understand the motivation. nothing has changed from the beginning of human existence to now–there is still fear. if there is no god, then there is no plan. good things happen, bad things happen, some people live, some people die–and there’s no overarching storyline, there’s nothing that you can do to guarantee the good and ward off the bad. when a mother loses a child, she says, it’s god’s plan. when a man loses his leg in a car accident, he comforts himself with the idea that god is testing him. we say we want free will, but really, we want life to be a bowling alley with bumpers. we want fate. we want there to be invisible threads which connect us to people and places and things which reveal the purpose of our lives. we want to be the hero in our own story which ends with us walking through the pearly gates of heaven.

wanting all of those things does not, however, make it real. i prefer to live in reality. i even prefer reality. religious people speak of the majesty of god, but isn’t it so much more amazing to understand how the universe began with a big bang, to try and wrap your mind around the sheer magnitude of time behind the evolution of every creature sharing the world with us? to see the balance of life (at least before humans showed up). to know that you are responsible for your own life, and that at the end, while there may not be a heaven, there is at least the peace of nothingness.

humans don’t need religion. like kids let go of fairy tales, we can also put religion behind us. at this point, it’s holding us back. all of these antiquated ideas towards women, homosexuality, other groups of people, and abortion is rooted in religion. people suffer because some ridiculous religious text or some self-proclaimed prophet says something is right or wrong with absolutely no consideration of hard science. people die because zealots deem everyone who is a non-believer as worthless. anything can be justified by religion because it is based in fiction and blind faith. it tells you to believe the sky is red when your eyes tell you it’s blue. there is no way to refute such a thing. the religious will even tell you that there is physical evidence contradicting what religion says solely to test your true belief.

what nonsense! humans have created the most unbelievable technology, and yet we’re stuck in the dark ages when it comes to religion. i think it will be our undoing. there are so many issues in the world, some which are reaching a crisis level. i believe that human ingenuity, when properly focused, could find solutions. but instead, across the world, we are frozen and sometimes even moving backwards when it comes to political and social causes. much of it is religion or issues that stem from religion.

so, i urge you to take up a new belief system. become a humanist. believe in humanity.

we are more than capable of living within a moral and ethical framework without the threat of heaven or hell. i have never believed in god, but i am very concerned with what is right and what is good. my entire career revolves around that understanding. to that end, i do things to show people i care about them, that i have compassion for them. i want to be happy and i want the people around me to be happy. the things that i do to ensure positivity in my life and the lives of the people around me only becomes positive reinforcement to do more in the future.

we are also capable of running our lives, of taking action and finding solutions. i think religion infantilizes us. believing that there is someone pulling the strings makes us passive. i remember when i was a kid, my brother would do his chores ineptly on purpose so that my mother would get exasperated and do it herself. but as soon as he was in college on his own, miraculously he was able to do laundry, cook, clean, and everything else. when you know that you are the only person who can make positive or negative change, you step up. my failures are my own, but so are my successes. that is power, and that is control.

fat, FAT, faaaaat, fat!

six years. six years of my life have gone by since my last post. amazing trips, work triumphs, great new friends, terrible dates, family drama, loneliness–and all of it unrecorded.

except, maybe, on my body.

i think i’ve always had issues with food. i remember as a kid and teen coming home from school every day to an empty house, going into the kitchen and grabbing a whole box of cheez-its or wheat thins. eating half a box or more while lying on my parents’ bed watching tv. sometimes my mom would get home early and i’d hide the box under the bed or in my room because i couldn’t get back to the kitchen in time. yet, at worst, i was only 5-10 pounds overweight.

the summer before college, i crash dieted and binge-exercised and lost any extra weight plus a little more. i still had problems with food, but i ate in private and i was always able to stay thin with weeks here and there of very little food and lots of exercise. i wonder if any of my roommates heard me sneaking into the kitchen after midnight, bent on an epicurean orgy for one.

my last year of college, i got into running. by the time i started law school, i was a size two, but curvy in the best way and the fittest i’d ever been. no exaggeration, i turned heads. on more than one occasion, i recall walking out in a bathing suit and a guy would actually stop mid-sentence and then nervously finish. i’m not boasting, i could barely believe it myself. i was never THAT girl in high school, and i never believed it even when i was hot. i would lie in bed and marvel at the way my stomach was so flat, so concave, even as my stomach sometimes rumbled. it was almost a point of pride. i had control. don’t get me wrong, i never made it to the point of anorexia, but in order to eat pizza or drink at constant parties, i had to find other days to compensate.

but i had time then. i could fit in work-outs, i wasn’t exhausted from working long hours and trying to get enough sleep. that all changed when i started my career. i don’t think it was just work, i’m not naive. obviously, the food monster inside me was just lying in wait. i’d broken up with my boyfriend and my life was all about work. i’d work until all hours of the night, getting home with no energy to prepare a healthy dinner or tamp down on the food monster. my mentality was let me get past this big hearing, write this big response, prep for this trial–THEN, i’d deal with my personal problems. well, there was always another case, and there was always another tomorrow.

food became everything. big win in court? that deserves a celebratory meal. terrible, horrible, awful day? comfort food. nothing big planned for a saturday night? that calls for a feast and a bottle of wine. i would order-in constantly, the embarrassment of the front desk man seeing all my food deliveries still not enough to stop me. i was always waiting for that moment, that glorious moment when i decimated whatever delicious meal i convinced myself i deserved that day.

honestly, there were times where i couldn’t wait to abandon some party just so i could go home and savage the contents of another styrofoam container. sometimes, i would eat with my friends and still go home and order food. at first slowly, and then faster and faster like a boulder rolling downhill, i put on weight. it happened over the course of eight years, and yet somehow it still feels like i was chubby one day and morbidly obese the next. now, at night, my hands map the unnatural bulges, the rolls, the cellulite, the ruin i’ve become.

there are so many good things in my life, but my body is holding me back on some of the most important. no one respects fat people. every day, i am underestimated at work. if i’m fat, i must also be stupid, lazy, unprepared. in some ways, that works to my advantage because they never see me coming. but every day i am also unseen. men forget to hold the door open for me, their eyes slide past me at the bar. i live in fear of seeing people i know from my past life, the one where i was thin and beautiful and wanted. i avoid seeing old friends who are in town for a weekend. family weddings fill me with dread. and certainly, i don’t date. sex feels like it happened to another person in some far off wonderland.

how did i let myself get here? how did i go from this beautiful girl that should have had everything to this thing.

it’s hard to write this. being this honest about how disgustingly gluttonous i’ve been, seeing it in black and white, putting this out into the world for judgment. i think the only reason i can even do it is because i’m fighting for control again. it only took a global pandemic resulting in months long house-arrest! after wasting the first three weeks of quarantine drinking wine every day and over-eating like i was on vacation, i realized that if i did this the entire quarantine, i’d reach the tipping point. that’s that critical threshold where your body is so heavy, it’s hard to move. it hurts to move. and so you just don’t. and soon that weight snowballs and the likelihood of ever losing it is next to nothing. it’s just a slide into diabetes and heart disease and a life alone because how could a man ever want to touch this mountain of fat. so i started a strict, but healthy, diet and exercise regimen mid-april. no food deliveries. no processed food. lunch and dinner only. no snacks. no soft drinks. alcohol only on fridays. one hour of exercise a minimum of five days a week.

as of this post, i have lost 26 pounds.

i need to lose another 70.

some days, i’m certain i can do it. i think it’s impossible to have reached such a level of discipline and fall back into bad habits. but I know that’s not true, and then i feel overwhelmed and discouraged. how can i possibly dig myself out of such a massive hole? losing weight is such a slow, mentally-draining process. every day that this coronavirus rages, i’m stuck home alone in my apartment, the kitchen twenty feet away. every day, it’s a battle not to eat everything. every day i weigh myself and progress is measured in increments of .2 or .3 pounds. these are such minuscule victories that the idea of losing 70 pounds seems ridiculous, impossible.

at this point, i’m trying to concentrate on one day, in one week, at a time. i’m hoping writing all this out gives me the will power to keep myself on track. maybe if i write it, it will happen.

thin, be thin.