Experiment 2: The Micro-Essays
...when I questioned my religion
My parents raised me to be a devout Catholic. We went to church every Sunday and filed into the same pew week after week. I grew up hearing the same scriptures on a constant loop, and frankly, I didn’t enjoy it. I was constantly told that I would grow more fond of it as I grew older; I had to put up with it because going to church was the only way to get to Heaven.
As Catholics, we were quite fond of our traditions and rules. The emphasis was on the latter. We were bad followers of Jesus if we only went to church twice yearly (on Christmas and Easter; we lovingly called these families “ChrEasters”), despite the Vatican only requiring attendance at one mass per church year. We were bad Catholics if we ever set foot in any non-Catholic church. We were going to Hell if we drank alcohol (despite Jesus literally performing his first miracle to provide more alcohol to a wedding party), fail to dress modestly (but let’s all forget about the part of the Bible where Jesus told men to gouge their own eyes out if women’s provocative dress tempted them), are gay (here we pay homage to the mistranslation of a portion of the Bible condemning pedophilia), or swore (I don’t have anything to add here, but I can’t think of any reason why saying ‘fuck’ would anger The Almighty enough to damn you to an eternity in Hell).
The Catholic Church is strong in its absolutes. We believed there were very few people who actually made it into Heaven immediately upon death. If you weren’t the cream of the crop, you went to Purgatory, which was described as a sort of “waiting room” for Heaven. Your place in purgatory is entirely dependent on how religiously you lived your life on Earth. The further you strayed, the longer and more uncomfortable your “waiting room” experience would be.
I never really considered the fact that I might be oppressed and gaslighted by my own religion until I began to understand that the world is not black and white. It all came down to the classic “stealing bread for your family” scenario. At the age of 14, this broke me out of the cage that the Catholic Church had held me in since birth. I realized that my entire belief system (yes, all of it), could be inherently wrong. The domino effect carried on and carried me away from the pointless strict rules I had believed were necessary to follow in order to stay away from Hell. Not to get into Heaven, but to stay away from Hell.
Why did I blindly follow these traditions and rules that, if you thought about them critically, made no bad or evil contribution to the world? If I still chose to believe in God, why did it matter if I sat through an hour of repetitive scripture every Sunday? If I’m living the sort of life that Jesus preached, but I don’t go to church, is that really going to send me to Hell sooner than those who attend church weekly but fail to treat others with kindness? Why should I continue in a church that continuously deems some people more worthy of salvation than others? A church that continuously gave abstinence-only speeches to girls and compared their virginity to an object while not preaching the same values to the boys? A church that sang “All Are Welcome”, but refused to baptize my little sister because she was born in my mom’s second marriage?
By the time I was 18, these questions haunted me. Now that I lived alone, it was completely up to me to determine whether the answers to these questions were enough to keep or deter me from the organized Catholic Church. Catholic guilt consumed me whenever I thought about it. If I turned away from the church, wasn’t I turning away from God? From eternal happiness? But was this extremely flawed organization really going to provide that to me, or was it something I needed to find myself? Was this actually guilt over leaving the church or was it fear of how members of that church would start to perceive me if I didn’t show up on Sunday?
...when I started liking the taste of coffee
“Y’know, Kara, coffee stunts your growth. If you even have a sip of that coffee, you won’t be any taller than a 10-year-old for the rest of your life.”
Why do we, as adults, gatekeep coffee so much? Sure, we could say that it’s a matter of keeping children from developing an early caffeine addiction or to keep them from bouncing off the walls in a caffeinated craze. But, here’s the thing: we give children caffeine and other energy-boosting things all the time. It’s in their chocolate and their pop (a translation for those outside the American midwest: “soda” or “Coke”) and there’s enough sugar to last a lifetime in their snack foods and other treats, but most parents have absolutely no issue giving their children those things on a semi-regular basis.
So, why not coffee?
Don’t hit me with that “coffee will stunt your growth” shit because it’s so fake. Even in the instances where it hasn’t been fake, it’s still only just barely real. That legend had me so terrified as a child that, when I eventually did decide to start drinking, I was terrified that I was going to end up losing height. I researched the topic for weeks on end in fear of hurting my body.
I remember taking that first sip of coffee and recoiling the second the dark brew hit my tongue. There really was no reason to be gatekeeping this stuff, kids wouldn’t actually go back for a second sip given the chance. In this sip, I astral projected back to the Girl Scouts meeting where we learned the now-debunked theory of where each type of flavor is focused on the tongue. At that moment, I was simply reviewing the back portion of the tongue, where bitter was housed.
If we never introduced cream and sugar to coffee, many would never come back to drink more. For a long time, my coffee existed as an undertone in the swirled painting in my mug. The cream and sugar were more than a mask for the bitterness; they were the main event. I was the living, breathing rendition of that one scene from The Office.
“Michael, is this JUST milk and sugar?”
The funny thing is, our tastebuds aren’t built to deal with large, obnoxiously sweet beverages each morning. It’s almost as if coffee, as the name suggests, was meant to be the main component of a cup of coffee. As I grew, I learned to appreciate the contrast that the bitter coffee brought to my mug. It took some dark roast to appreciate the light sprinklings of sugar.