to find the truth you've got to read between the lines

Maybe my tea will brew faster if I apply some meme.

Okay really. December 13th: your guilty pleasure fandoms.(rustydragonfly)

Okay so, I try really, really hard to not have guilty pleasures - if something brings me joy and does not directly hurt other people, then I'm not going to be guilty about it. (There's some room there for, "you are allowed to feel how you feel, but it's unreasonable to tell me to stop enjoying what I enjoy because you have baggage to deal with" wrt the "hurting other people" - see also "gripes incessantly about Moffat/Moffat's Doctor Who" as my litmus test for unfollowing people on tumblr.)

When was a kid I absolutely Was Not Allowed to watch or read or otherwise consume media that didn't pass some kind of never-stated, never-explained degree of Christian Wholesomeness. And after a while, it didn't have to be enforced; I'd absorbed it. I enforced it myself. And the things I were guilty about consuming were media that had sex and swearing in them, or things that allowed for a world without Christianity.

I watched Die Hard III for the first time in 1998 or 1999, and I did so in one and two minute chunks - flipping back and forth between it and another channel, terrified that I'd be found out and lectured on how bad movies like that were for me. I watched Enemy of the State one summer when I was at my Nana's, and I remember really distinctly that she told me "That garbage will get into your heart and you'll never be able to get it out again" - "That garbage" being Will Smith saying the word "fuck" a lot while being chased by scary people who wanted to kill him.

And then I discovered Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Universes where there had never been a Christianity were exempt, based on some mental gymnastics on my part.

I first read Dragonflight when I was, what? 16? and struggling with my faith and my politics. Reading in publication order I got to Dragonsdawn inside a couple of months: I struggled a fuck of a lot with the idea that everyone on Pern was an atheist, and that among them were good people and bad people and okay people, and that based on the theology I'd been raised with every single one of them would have gone to hell.

I asked special permission to read Harry Potter after reading articles about how it wasn't about demon worship, and convincing my mom that I was mature enough to put the books down if I felt like my soul was being endangered.

Around the same time, I was interacting with people whose upbringing and political leanings and religions differed from mine on the Dancing Dove for the very! first! time! and struggling a lot with the idea that these people I cared about so much and who accepted me even when I acted like a brat and wanted me to be the best me I could be ... that they were going to hell, by the theology I'd been raised with.

Something had to give -- the thing that gave was belief in hell. And after that cornerstone came out, the rest of my faith fell down around it over the next eight years or so. You can see remnants of it in my Star Trek fanfiction.

TL/DR I spent a lot of time in my childhood and young adulthood feeling ashamed of the things that made me happy, and when I shed the last pin of identification about three years ago (Christian to agnostic), I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't feel guilty about the things that bring me joy. I've done okay so far with keeping that promise, I think.