I can't lie.

No, really, I can't. I try, but I have this stupid nervous laugh that I have when I do that completely gives me away. I hate it. If I don't laugh, I smile. Even if I know I'm telling the truth but still leaving something out, this enormous grin comes over my face and tells whomever I'm talking to that I'm a complete asshole.

But it's worse than that. When I hear something I don't believe, my eyebrow raises. When I'm being told something that I don't remotely think could be true, I squint and look at the person talking to me like they're a blithering idiot. When I'm faced with something I'm not sure about, I take a moment to consider it, and it's completely visual: my face takes on an expression of curiosity, my eyes go to the side, and I'm otherwise silent until I've figured it out.

Some people wear their emotions on their sleeve; I wear mine on my face. Everything I feel is fully expressed through my eyes, my eyebrows, and even my mouth. When my boss feeds me a load of bullshit, I can't pretend to believe him (though I try). When my boyfriend tells me he loves me, I can't suppress a smile of joy...or disbelief. Sometimes I feel like River from Firefly; they say because of her brain surgeries via the blue-hand men, she can't not feel things. I can't hide things. When I'm sad, I'm depressed. When I'm angry, I lose the power of speech completely. I'm not sure if it's because I have so many things to say that they all cram into my brain and get jumbled, or if something tells me not to say any of them, so I don't.

I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I suppose that it's good that I'm an honest person, but it means I can't play the game. I can't pretend to buy in to the corporate crap that management dishes out, I can't tell someone they look great when they don't, I can't be a playa (though I don't think I have the energy for that anyway). I compensate by giving compliments about random things; I like your shirt! What pretty earrings! Have you lost weight?

Thank goodness this is just a blog. But I must say, you're looking brilliant today. Have you gotten your hair cut?

The Great Disillusionment

I remember when I lost my faith in any and all higher powers. I was in a coven in college, and had been admitted to the inner circle of allegedly talented witches under the oversight of our high priestess. We were learning magick of a higher level: powerful rituals, chants, etc. that supposedly gave us more control over our environment and over others.

A friend of mine and her boyfriend were being handfasted that night, and there was a large, elaborate ritual for the Spring Equinox. I was excited; I had sewn the bride's dress myself, and she looked regal in it. But then our high priestess walked into the circle, and I looked at her -- I mean really looked -- and I noticed, for apparently the first time in eight months or so, that she was not some wise, powerful, knowing individual. She was a sad, aging woman with a bad dye job who was grasping at the illusion of power and control by lording empty promises over a bunch of early twentysomethings.

And then I started looking around at the other coven members with a fresh eye. They were all there for the same reason: they wanted some semblance of control or power over their environment in a world that provided no comfort on its own. They wanted to feel important, knowledgeable, and justified in this personal idea of entitlement to the secrets of the universe without doing the work of learning physics, history or anthropology. It was probably only a few seconds of revelation, but it caused an irrevocable crack in my rose-colored glasses. From then on, all I could see were desperate people clutching at straws for fast answers that gave them a sense of idealistic control.

While I was in the coven, I was regaled as a quick learner; I gleaned astrology, the tarot, and stone work fairly easily. For a couple weeks after the Equinox, I played with people; I purposefully made things up in tarot readings, in chart interpretations, and rune throws based solely on what I knew the people wanted to hear mixed with a nice chunk of obvious symbolism. They loved it. They thought I'd had some epiphany that had opened up some new wisdom to me. And that's when I lost my appetite for the whole thing altogether.

I realized that religions in general have one thing in common: people are always looking for answers, especially easy ones. Nothing's so simple, though, is it? Things happen. There are causes and effects that cause more effects, but when you start looking for patterns, all you find is what you're looking for. Should someone come along and say "I know what's going on, and you'll be fine if you simply do what I tell you," then life is easy. Follow instructions, do what you're instructed to do, and if something goes wrong, you have a scapegoat. Satan. Heathens. Gays. Religious leaders. Even God, in a pinch. And it's hard, looking objectively at your life and admitting that everything that turned out the way you didn't want it to is your fault and brought about by your decisions. You can't blame God, Satan, sodomy or your mother. You made your bed, buddy. You'd best lie in it.

And that's why I call my epiphany "The Great Disillusionment." Sometimes I wish I still had some sort of faith in something bigger than myself so that I could have blind hope in a better future without knowing it's all up to me to get through the hard stuff. I've thought enough and studied enough about religion for my official stance to be "the existence of a higher power cannot be known, objectively, by anybody, one way or the other. If there is, he doesn't seem to be paying much attention, so what's the point?" Maybe the deists have it right, but honestly, it gets irrelevant after a while.

So I call myself an atheist, for better or for worse. Even though, at its core, I realize that atheism is a faith too; a belief mired in irrationality, because there are some things in this world that simply cannot be known. But that's hard for people to accept, so we all pick a side. This one's mine.