littlefire
You can call me Fio
Howdy y'all,
I've only been surfing this site for 30 minutes and I'm already hooked. I'm littlefire and I'm a 21 year old formerly homeschooled German-Irish-Dutch-American bigender lesbian recovering-fundamentalist-evangelical-Southern-Baptist craving a new framework for my spirituality. Years of emotional and religious abuse (plus a few mental illnesses) have left me really disconnected from my family and former associates in churches and para-church organizations (and I was REALLY invested in biblical literalism, evangelism, and complementarianism, among other things), but escaping that environment and discovering parts of my identity that I wasn't allowed to touch before have helped me move past fear of hellfire and consider other religious traditions that can nourish my soul without crushing it and beating it into submission. I can't go into a church service anymore without having an emotional breakdown, and I dabbled in Quakerism for almost a year, but that still had too many Christian ties for me that neglected so much of the breadth of spiritual wisdom out there. I've started reading the Talmud and Bhagavad Gita and stumbled across Deanism via internet search, but I'm finding that I don't completely resonate with any one tradition. My background has scared me out of "buffet-style" religion, but I'm hoping that in this forum I'll gain the freedom and reassurance to find my own path.
I know this is a really really long intro and I apologize...
I gotta ask a question too though - are there any people/forums on here that discuss spiritual gender non-conformity and/or spiritual naming? (I'm in a transitional/coming-out/weird period with my gender and am hoping to continue my journey of fully integrating that part of myself.)
ANYhoo.... thanks for reading this long crazy thing, and I look forward to meeting you all <3 Blessings!
-littlefire
I've only been surfing this site for 30 minutes and I'm already hooked. I'm littlefire and I'm a 21 year old formerly homeschooled German-Irish-Dutch-American bigender lesbian recovering-fundamentalist-evangelical-Southern-Baptist craving a new framework for my spirituality. Years of emotional and religious abuse (plus a few mental illnesses) have left me really disconnected from my family and former associates in churches and para-church organizations (and I was REALLY invested in biblical literalism, evangelism, and complementarianism, among other things), but escaping that environment and discovering parts of my identity that I wasn't allowed to touch before have helped me move past fear of hellfire and consider other religious traditions that can nourish my soul without crushing it and beating it into submission. I can't go into a church service anymore without having an emotional breakdown, and I dabbled in Quakerism for almost a year, but that still had too many Christian ties for me that neglected so much of the breadth of spiritual wisdom out there. I've started reading the Talmud and Bhagavad Gita and stumbled across Deanism via internet search, but I'm finding that I don't completely resonate with any one tradition. My background has scared me out of "buffet-style" religion, but I'm hoping that in this forum I'll gain the freedom and reassurance to find my own path.
I know this is a really really long intro and I apologize...
I gotta ask a question too though - are there any people/forums on here that discuss spiritual gender non-conformity and/or spiritual naming? (I'm in a transitional/coming-out/weird period with my gender and am hoping to continue my journey of fully integrating that part of myself.)
ANYhoo.... thanks for reading this long crazy thing, and I look forward to meeting you all <3 Blessings!
-littlefire