11 Months Until I Can Move, But Where Do I Move To?

Yesterday, July 20th marks 11 months until I can sell my house, and I can't wait to move, this town has been nothing but problems, both with family and my former church, if you aren't familiar with all this, check out my updated My Story page, I have spoken about it at length, the problems with family, and the church/cult.

It's time to start over somewhere else, and I'm not sure if I should stay in the St. Louis area, or start all over somewhere else completely (which is what I'm leaning toward).

If leaving the St. Louis area entirely, I need a city that is not too expensive, not crowded/traffic congested endlessly (like say Atlanta, Chicago, New York City), and a place where industrial work, especially warehousing is plentiful.

The Most Intense Guest Post I Have Ever Written

Now that I am in the process of moving forward in life, since I have bought my own house (closing was this past Thursday, June 20th, I now legally own it), I have realized that I still have a lot of work to do, not only on the house, but there's a lot of work to do emotionally as well. I've realized that if I am really going to move on in life, I have to confront my past, and start building networks of new people in my life.

Well, in the spirit of confronting my past, I recently wrote a guest post for the blog Confessions of a Heretic Husband (I really love the tagline under the blog's name "Everyone's a heretic to someone"). It's a guest post that was harder for me to write than anything I have ever written before, it's still hard for me to read. On this blog, I have generally been very open about my life, but there are some details of my life, especially from the last 5 years of my life, after that infamous nervous breakdown, that I haven't told anyone, either on this blog or in person. All of that changes today with this guest post.

It's not an exaggeration in the least to say that I have been held hostage for the last 5 years, it's hard to say, and humiliating as well. 

There was a time, about 3 years ago, that I attempted to leave my mom and dad's home, and my mom in response literally barricaded the door to keep me from leaving, knowing that if I tried to push past her, she would either become violent, or play the victim, and claim that I physically harmed her. Some abusers are really good at playing manipulative games like that, playing the victim to gain sympathy when they are the ones carrying out the abuse. 

Here are some excerpts from the post:

“Where are you going?” she kept asking over and over again, with defiance and a hint of amused contempt as she stood in the middle of the only doorway out of the room. 

Undercover Agnostic: (Update 13) Post-Father's Day Thoughts

Of course, yesterday was Father's Day in the US, and churches often take part in ceremonies honoring fathers. The church I am undercover in (hopefully only for a few more months), is no exception to the tradition.

The singing was done by the male members of the choir, and one of them, who recently become a father himself, and is an avid comic book fan, went up onto the podium with both him and his infant son in Superman capes. (I suppose he was saying he was "superdad"). It was rather amusing to watch.

Father's Day is a much easier holiday for me to celebrate than Mother's Day, my feelings about Mother's Day are worse than my feelings about Christmas. To me, it's even more hollow, and joyless, and I don't like the expectations that are upon people to celebrate it joyfully like everyone else does.

Father's Day makes me grateful for my father, especially after I just finished a guest post I wrote for the blog Confessions of a Heretic Husband. The post isn't up yet, and the time of the writing of this post, I'm still awaiting word on when it will be published. It was one of the hardest posts I have ever forced myself to write.

I'm not going to give away much of what is in it, but it talks about my last 5 years, the time since my infamous nervous breakdown. I spill it all, and what I have had to deal with from my mother. Let's just say that emotional abuse doesn't stop when you turn 18. There's details of my life which I have felt too humiliated to talk about until now.

That post made me grateful for my father. As bad as my life has been with my family, it could have been worse without him. You see, on the surface, my family seemed like the typical fundamentalist family when it came to gender roles. My father worked full time as a mechanic (until he had to go on disability when I was 14), and my mother was the stay at home mom, homeschooling me. What people didn't often see was that the roles were truly reversed.