2013-2018
In my experience, there are two kinds of friends. Friends by convenience and friends by choice. Friends by convenience are people you have in your life that you’re friends with because you see them a lot, maybe you work together, study together, or live near one another. You might be close, you might hang out a lot, but if you leave that job, finish your studies or move away – more often than not you’ll lose touch and find other people.
I’m in my twenties. I’m at that point in life when I’m meant to be an adult, but I feel like a kid. I have a full-time job, live in the middle of Manchester, pay my taxes, blog about politics and do all my own washing – but I have no idea what I’m doing. Honestly, I feel like I missed the adulting class at school or something, everyone around me seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. I’ve got friends my age who are getting engaged, married or having families. Friends who have already got their dream job, are travelling the world, studying to become doctors or engineers, or just living the carefree life. Everybody seems to know what their place is in the world and I’m just trying my best at winging it.
Just before my 23rd birthday life was going great. I had a job that I loved; I was working with a team of really cool people, doing something that excited me. I was able to be creative for a living, developing and growing skills I already had as well as learning new ones. I met my targets pretty consistently and, although I made some mistakes, I did the best I could. I learned and grew in my role as it expanded and changed, however when it came to my six-month probation meeting everything changed. My boss told me that the job I was doing was not, in hindsight, the role that the team needed and that they would not be continuing to employ me past my initial probationary period. I was devastated, I didn’t know what to do.
I spend the majority of my time in the past or the future. So much of my headspace is taken up with wishing things could return to how they were back then, thinking about how when that happens I’ll finally be happy. I live so much of my life focusing on the past that I can’t change, and the future that is never entirely certain, that I miss the only thing I have any control over. The present.
When I was eighteen, I was preparing to get baptised, and part of the service included me sharing my testimony. The testimony of how I became a Christian, how God had changed my life, and why I was choosing to get baptised. The purpose of this was partly evangelistic, to share what had transformed my life in the hope it might lead to a similar transformation in somebody else. It was also really helpful for me as a self-reflection, to enable me to work out for myself exactly why I was making this decision, and to give me a written record to look back at in the future. I’ve blogged a lot recently about the ways my faith has changed and deconstructed. But I still get a lot of people asking me what happened. What caused my deconstruction, and the changes in my faith and beliefs? This post is an attempt to answer that question, a ‘Testimony of Unbelief’ if you like.
I’ve always been impulsive. I’m the kind of person who lives in the moment and follows my gut. That’s just the way I’m wired. I hate the idea of making plans in advance because, inevitably, plans fall through, and after getting myself really excited I will be left feeling disappointed and let down. Lately, I’ve started to find myself planning into my future more and more. When I look on Facebook and see SO MANY of my friends getting engaged, their dream job, or jetting off halfway around the world, part of me feels like I’m missing out. I feel I need to be working towards something more, that by now I should have more to show for my life. So I start making checklists in my head of things that I need in order to be content with life. An ever growing list of expectations; a solid relationship, a house, a stable job, a car, a driver’s license, the list goes on and on. My eyes are set on the perfect life, and in my head this is only possible once my expectations are met, once I’ve got through the endless list of things I need to do.
As I mentioned in my previous post, in the last couple of years I’ve been on a journey of deconstructing my faith. The ways I looked at the world, the ways I understood my faith, God, religion and what that meant for me have been totally ripped apart. Safe to say it has been, and still is, extremely painful. The glass box shattered, my foundations were gone, in many ways the faith I had grown up with was dead.
One of my new favourite places to go in London right now is Leake Street. If you have never heard of it, it is a tunnel that runs underneath Waterloo Station, and is one of the few places in London where graffiti is legal. In 2008, Banksy used this tunnel to, in his words, “transform a dark forgotten filth pit into an oasis of beautiful art”. Since then, dozens of amateur and established artists meet there every day, to create new stories and adventures in a dark tunnel underneath the busiest train station in the UK…
