(You will have to read “The Most Harm” if you haven’t, at least part one and part two before you can understand what it going on here, because these next two posts build directly onto them.)

I love fairy tales. As a little girl, I dreamed of the day my handsome prince would come and rescue me from loneliness and solitude. Yes, I know, not very feminist, but I think I’ve pretty well established that I did not grow up in a home where strong, independent women were encouraged! Only the prince became the dragon, and Steve became the knight, rescuing me from the dragon who wanted only to possess me.

But life isn’t that black and white. Real people rarely contain the dichotomy of purely good or purely villainous. I am no exception. Up to this point, it has been fine to write about these issues in a black/white perspective, leaving out the gray and the black parts of me. I write this blog primarily for myself and others like me who have been hurt by religion. The details didn’t matter quite so much. Now, however, I am getting a lot more traffic, and I am seeing enough misconceptions about the situation through emails I receive and comments I see that I need to clarify a few things.

In my post, The Most Harm II, I wrote that there was about 5% that I didn’t write. In the comments section, someone defined the situation as rape. Later, in another part, I said I didn’t believe it was because of the other 5% I wasn’t writing. At the time, it was fine. I knew my regular visitors well enough to know that what I wrote would suffice for the time being. I couldn’t write the other 5% because the other 5% contains the real identities of Bob and Mark and the black parts of me. The reason for not writing the other 5% that I gave in the post is also true: it also makes the story much more complicated as you can tell from the length of this post.  Life is never as simple as it is in fiction, is it?

I don’t actually feel ready to admit the gray areas in public, though I do to myself and Mark and Steve. To me, those are the important people and the rest don’t matter. Like I said, though, I am attracting enough comments and new visitors to whom it might eventually matter whether or not I am telling the whole truth. My intent has never been to deceive anyone: this blog is my journal of thoughts and memories as I exit fundamentalism. I share it online in hopes that it might help someone else, but the process is more important to me than the actual events. While I would never just make something up or purposely misrepresent something, there are details that sometimes, I am simply not ready to share. I am not writing a book, I am writing as I heal. But I am getting enough traffic now that I need to be very careful to represent myself 100% honestly. Will that take away from my raw, journalistic style of blogging? Not really; I’ve been doing this for a long time now: it just makes me be more honest with myself so I can be sure I am completely honest with the reader, who wasn’t there and relies upon my information to tell them. So posts gain depth, but require more courage to post. This is clearing up a detail from months ago, long before I started getting more than 40 hits per day (and none of them on those posts).

In some ways, this post is harder to write than my confession about why my marriage ended, because I feel like telling the whole truth will make it look like I intentionally misled people, when that’s not what happened. Again, it’s my journal, and telling the whole story and how much that extra 5% affects me is part of the process of moving past everything: both that which is my fault and that which isn’t.

It’s so hard to admit. I am fine admitting fault; how else do you learn? But this situation is different. This situation became the catalyst that changed my entire life. While I like the end result of those changes, they were excruciatingly hard to make. To admit that I had any part in destroying my life was too much for me to bear. I couldn’t write it. I couldn’t admit any fault, because if I did, then I had myself to blame for my own bad circumstances. So admitting it to myself became enough for me. I wasn’t ready to admit it to the world. Now that I am gaining some notoriety, I want to make sure that the perceptions people have are accurate. It has never been my intention to misrepresent myself, just express myself and how I felt. In some ways, what I wrote was 100% the truth as I felt it at the time. I don’t think anyone will swing over to Bob’s side of things, but there is more to the story than what I have told. And if suddenly I am less interesting because I am not the spotless heroine, so be it. Those are good for books and movies, but pure victimization rarely happens (though it does, so please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying).

So for the sake of honesty, here’s that other 5%.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under atheism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.