*Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians* by Edward Armitage. Julian the Apostate was a former Roman emperor and philosopher. In Christian tradition, he is known as an apostate for his promotion of Hellenism and is considered the last pagan ruler of the Roman Empire. Image from the Walker Art Gallery.

I have committed apostasy. The price to pay is hell. Or so “they” say, rather gently. It is hate delicately masked by love. How fragile is that love, how dependent on ignorance. It’s quite a thought to behold and I hold it like a child clutches a dandelion.

Apostate comes from the Greek word apostasia. Some interpret this Greek word to mean “to fall away.” It sounds romantic. To fall away from old skin into new. But the literal translation is different. It comprises of apo, “away from” and hístēmi, “to stand.” The literal translation holds more agency. It reinstates that one does not uncontrollably fall away from the old skin, rather, one willfully stands away from it. I, as an apostate, have traded in an old identity for a new one, yet I am still learning to recognize myself.

I am the antithesis of everything I once was before. My old self would not recognize my new self with all the thoughts inside her head. She would be unable to pick out my poem from a pile of prose. Religiously, politically and creatively, I am a different person. But I won’t bore you the minutiae of what I do and don’t believe because it is irrelevant. What is relevant is how others perceive me and how I perceive myself post-seismic shift.

Discovering life beyond the walls of my decorated echo chamber continues to be exhilarating yet dark. I exist, but only in hiding. Therefore, I only exist post-mortem. I masterfully choose who knows all the parts of me, teetering between the old and new for ultimate safety. I do this because I know what “they” will say. That my soul is in peril, that I’ll come around, that doubt is from the devil. It won’t matter how kind I am or how morally consistent. To them, my free will to question is acceptable as long as I return to the very conclusion they have already outlined for me, dizzying myself in a useless circle. My thoughts and opinions are not born of agency but rather, an unidentifiable force. That my religious and political identity is somehow not a choice. So I keep myself in tactical hiding. I am not always in the mood for condemnations and bitter judgments. I am not always in the mood for false love dripping in moral superiority.

When you peel the veil from your eyes there is no going back. Once you see the truth you can not unsee it, you can not brainwash yourself back to a place of stupefied bliss. Life is not a science fiction novel. So I hold on to my new self while I try her on for size. She is everything I want to be. Trading love letters with the truth and falling deeply in love with justice, exercising her right to change and partake in evolution. She is all these things, yet remains relatively faceless to me. Only in one place does she grow tangible and reveal herself.

Here at my fingertips, I have a blank page. As blank as my face is now in the mirror. Outside of this space, I perpetually search for identity and am occasionally denied, but on this blank page, I know who I am. I etch the words out and let them dance into my likeness. This blank page is a mirror of my beauty, my ugly, and my moral convictions. It is the only place that remains indifferent to all the things I have to say. This blank page does not accept nor deny me, it makes room for me. For every part too melodramatic to say aloud, too colorful to fit on a canvas, too detailed to be expressed in a song.

For now, I am content, in this in-between of sorts, because I am filling up the blankness with the words lodged in my pen. Maybe these words, which I have delicately written out upon this page, will be my guiding light, revealing me from hiding. This, all while I turn my head back to wave goodbye fondly at who I was before, and in many ways, still am. A strong, gentle person with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and truth. I am beautiful in all my forms, in perpetual evolution, honoring my biological design. The English writer L.P. Hartley said it best in the opening sentence of his novel The Go-Between. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

AUTHOR:

Jane Partizpanyan

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Apostasia