Today I've been more anxious than I've been for a while. I'm not sure exactly why. Could be the depressing grey weather, could be me being tired of my dysfunctional body. That'll be another entry though.

For some reason the following has been running through my mind today, so I'll put it into typing and hope it'll help let it go.

Before I started my deconverting process in January 2014, I'd really thrown myself to God's arms, really trusting that his plan was best. I had zero doubts about my faith and did all I could to show my trust to Father and Son.

The result was that I wound up in a situation that was the most screwed up thing I've ever been through. I couldn't but realise that following through what supposedly was God's calling for me would have completely destroyed what I knew as "me". I absolutely could not do it, my self-preservation instinct came in the way. That was horrible in its entirety and going its aftermath a little later, I was seriously suicidal. I felt that not following through also left everything in pieces, and for a while I didn't see what I had left and what I could recover.

Still, I didn't lose my faith about there actually being a God for over a half a year from those days.

During those months I was in a very strange place mentally. It was so much like losing such a trusted friend and not daring to make contact again. I even felt Jesus was calling me back. It was in the usual things that I'd been used to think of as Jesus communicating to me: Songs playing in my head, mental images, little coincidences. "Baby please don't go" and "You left me just when I needed you most" were my mental soundtracks day after another, among other songs with the "I love you, please come back" theme.

Not knowing how else to make it stop, I said "No". Firmly.

All my prayer techniques and such still worked for me like they had for so many years, so I decided had to use them to stop this. I sat down to do a ritual in which I prayed very firmly, really meaning it, that Jesus, angels, God, or any spiritual being whatsoever was to never contact me again. Ever. I said in the prayer that I wasn't interested in being anyone's weapon in a spiritual war, or a divine messenger, or anything else whatsoever, and calling me to be such from there on would be against my will, and they'd have to respect me that much because God created my free will.

I was very good at conscious self-hypnosis so I went into my head and switched off as many things about magical thinking that I could think of, and even the quick switch into deep trance that I had, because I'd become all too aware that that would open doors to things in my weird subconscious world that I didn't want to deal with.

Then I just waited and observed how Jesus seemed to go away. I "knew" he was still out there, but I felt that he'd left me alone, finally. Emptiness, a very hollow feeling was in the place within me where Jesus used to be. I was very disappointed, I felt cheated by God, like the abusive spouse who gives you gifts and "love" to trick you into a place where you'd never go without manipulation. I felt God didn't care for me, but just his own spiritual warfare. I felt that if I'd actually been manipulated by a demon, I had no way to know it - and it shouldn't have happened anyway because I'd prayed to Jesus all the time!

Later on I had another crisis when someone asked me a good question about why exactly I let things get so bad in the first place. From there started my walk into agnosticism, into admitting that I have no way to know that anything I've ever experienced was of a god, at all.

Ever.

Not when I was much younger, hit by a car, and the tree branch I held on to while waiting for help seemed as thick as an angel's finger. Not when I spoke in beautiful tongues and spontaneously danced praise dances in Pentecostal church. Not when a major pain in my body was gone for seven whole years (only to come back worse, though). Not when I felt that a fellow believer knew things about me I hadn't said out loud, and I thought it had to be Jesus speaking to me with their mouth. Not when I had a dream that appeared to come exactly true later (though many times they were symbolic or about normal things that are likely to happen anyway). Not when I met a previously unknown person who changed my life and then went away again.

That was awful, too.

Not suicidal thought inducing awful, but it was a major crisis and one I didn't expect to ever have, not even when I turned my back on God. I thought I'd always have the inner "knowledge" of God and the angels and spirits existing.

Getting used to the completely changed worldview, though, has significantly reduced my anxiety. I spend so much less time worrying, it's very strange.

Just now I noticed I've been holding my breath. I feel faint.

This is painful, but I'm in the middle of a conscious process of ridding myself of the remnants of magical thinking I have in me. Admitting the weird thought patterns I used to have seems to help giving them the significance they deserve - which is pretty much that "my head is prone to this kind of stuff", not anything deeper than that.

Anyhow, there are a few more things I need to do tonight, so I'd better log off.