Yesterday, I turned 41…

I look back on my life and see the wasted opportunities. My life has been a series of failed attempts at escaping the horrors of my past. My fear of the end has prevented me from making plans for the future or even seeing myself living that long…

I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was in the kitchen with my parents listening to my father give one of his long winded lectures. They never ended and always included phrases like, “righteous indignation”, “the bible says to inculcate”, and “prove all things, hold fast unto that which is righteous”. They bored the hell out of me but since I was a people pleaser and desperately wanted my father’s approval, I listened intently. He was talking about one of his favorite subjects, the end times. He would always tell us how the end was near and we weren’t likely to make it through alive. This particular time, his story left a lasting impression on me. He told my sister and I that before we know it, the wolves are going to descend from the mountains and devour us alive. I was terrified, but I felt special because, at the young age of 10, I knew something that no one else did.

From that point on, every few months to a year my dad told us about some new doomsday scenario he had heard about, population control, food control, soil depletion, marshal law, and once the internet was made available their frequency increased ten fold. Even though there were times I was paralyzed by fear, I soaked up every word. There’s no way my dad could be wrong.

As I matured, I started forming my own opinions on the whole end times scenario. AIDS wasn’t created to kill off 1/3 of the earth’s population, there aren’t poisons added to the water and food supply to make people sick and easier to control, and wolves are definitely not coming down from the mountains to devour me alive. And even though I know those things aren’t true, I still can’t help but feel like there’s no use to make future plans. I want to travel to Europe to see the antiquities of Rome, paintings in the Louvre, and the countrysides of France and England, but when I think about going I always have in the back of my mind that the world won’t be around or there will be some sort of oppressive govt in control that will keep me from doing the things I want.

I can’t help to wonder about the things I could have accomplished if my entire future wasn’t taken away by my fear of the end….