Oh, Good Lord

I am religious.

Very religious.

I am not a Bible-beating, soapbox-standing, convert-the-heathens, accept-Jesus-or-you'll-go-to-Hell-forever religious kind of Christian. More like an I-should-have-died-about-four-times-now-but-God-keeps-me-alive-for-a-reason-so-I-guess-there-is-a-God-after-all kind of Christian. I can guarantee you that's about five times as powerful.

Actually, one of my best friends recently told me that the only reason he believes in God is because I've died on the table so many times and yet somehow, I end up getting released from the hospital within three days every time and I'm A-OK.

Today, one of my Christian roommates and I were talking. Over drinks (I had two! And stopped. So I'm thinking maybe I'm not an alcoholic and maybe just a depressed twenty-year-old). After the two of us had made a pretty solid stance against our (hammered) Muslim roommate about why we believe in a Christian God and not his God (going into it will only deeply upset me), the Muslim roommate gave up and went upstairs and the Christian and I were sitting alone talking.

This friend is an EMT and wants to be a doctor. And the story I told all my roommates about my hospitalization was that it was an alcohol-induced seizure. Which is true, as far as I know, but I don't remember a damn thing. It's what the nurses told me. He was very upset that I was drinking and told me he wasn't equipped to take care of me if I had another seizure.

I said I didn't think that would happen (because as far as I know the seizure was from the fuckton of pills I took, not the booze).

He asked why.

I chose not to divulge my little suicide attempt.

He asked why again.

I told him to mind his own business.

He said, "What, it's not like you got roofied."

Which set me off, because I have been, and I don't like those kinds of jokes.

So I told him to fuck off.

And his response was, "Why would you put yourself in that kind of situation?"

As if I had voluntarily gotten roofied. As if I had asked someone to spike my drink and fuck me while I was passed out. As if I hadn't been drugged when I wasn't looking and, possibly most cruelly of all, when I was otherwise completely sober. Yeah, because I asked to get raped. Asshole. I have never, in the year since it happened, encountered someone who blamed me for what happened (well, except the cops) and I didn't expect the blame to come from a fellow Christian.

So I was all angry and bitter, and wondering how I would ever continue living in this house with a roommate who blames me for being randomly victimized by a piece of shit I didn't even know, and I was fuming and locked myself in my room and considering doing some more serious harm to that good ol' liver of mine (just quickening the inevitable, really) when I remembered a line from Lucky, Alice Sebold's memoir, which I read before my little incident happened.

"You save yourself or you remain unsaved."

And I realized that once I had opened my mouth to this boy to tell him the truth about what really happened, I had been expecting him to save me. To tell me that it was absolutely fucking tragic that such a terrible thing had happened to me, and to give me a hug, and to tell me it would be okay, and fall in love with me because I have such an awful story and look at the odds I have overcome and so on and so forth and I want to vomit now when I look back at my thought process (of three hours ago) and I can't believe it had ever even crossed my subconscious to think that someone else's pity could fix the way I feel.

Only I (and Jesus) can save myself.

That's at once empowering, and lonely.