“Get up. We’re leaving.” That’s what I heard every Sunday at seven in the morning. Before I could even comprehend that it was no longer dark out, they’d have me shivering after they pulled the sheet off my bed. Every Sunday it was the same thing: “Get up. We’re leaving,” followed by some mumbling from myself asking where we were going. Their answer was always that one word I dreaded. Church. Why couldn’t someone just light a match and set it on fire? Maybe then they’d get the picture that not everyone wants to go to a church to be preached at.

After so many years I finally put my foot down. No longer wanting to get up at seven to get bitched at in the car ride to that church, then sitting still for two hours pretending to listen to a preacher talk at me, not even to me, but at me, I did just as my sister had done. I said no. Christianity obviously wasn’t for me. If my parents, my own flesh and blood, could be as cruel as they were and still have the nerve to call themselves Christians, what were the rest of them like?

I lived so oblivious to their traps. My own parents were cruel and evil, just sitting and waiting for you to make a wrong move. Check mate. It was all a chess game and I always lost. I was a pawn in their mind games and lived to tell about it. They’re hypocrites. They preach love and happiness yet made their own children live in fear of daylight. I was locked in my head for too many years. I had to notice eventually.

So, I was brainwashed until I was twelve. Then I started to realize that this wasn’t what it had been when I was eight. How could I know there was a ‘God’? Was there proof? I know some Christians who would say the Bible is proof, but it’s not. Anyone can write a bunch of crap and put it together as a book then sell it to the numb minds that would believe anything in front of them.

In the end, I think it was my grandfather’s death that was the defining moment. I was already questioning religion, but when he died it all seemed impossible. I remember spending many nights sitting there praying, hoping someone would hear me and bring the outcome I wanted with all my heart. I loved my grandfather. He was the closest person in my so-called ‘family’ apart form my sisters. I spent many nights after his death just crying because I couldn’t fathom why he had to die.

Everything seemed to blend together, creating a massive blur of reality. I no longer knew fact from fiction. Inside my mind I questioned everything. Finally I reached a conclusion. There was no ‘God’. If there was, he was cruel to me and I wanted nothing to do with him. So from then I faded to pits of darkness. Believing in neither heaven nor hell. No ‘God’, no ‘Satan’, just nothing. It seemed so much easier to just believe in what was proved. But then my heart twisted more. I started fading. The light seemed so far from my grasp that I gave up. Darkness. If I could believe in anything, it was darkness.