Hi. I’m Arys. Of course, that’s not my real name, and perhaps I will give up the idea of anonymity on the Web. But not anytime soon, I hope. If you entered through the original cafevenus.net portal, you will have noticed the opening page that I wrote back in the spring of 2004, when I first dared to tread upon website design. They were dark days indeed as I was struggling with school, and preferring to escape by creating webpages instead — and playing lots of video games.
I am afraid I have only had the privilege to play a lot of Final Fantasy XII like 3 months ago. I have been playing Xenogears again just out of pure nostalgia, needing to feel something besides the absolute panic of the hardest classes I have ever had since starting school. I’m just hoping my philosophy of keep going will see me through to a graduation on the other side.
I actually an optimist, if I was really allowed to be myself. School was supposed to be an adventure, the first real step away from all I knew — and everything that was essentially rotting around me. When I first started, I was so competent. It was so great; I loved being me. But things got difficult and changed how I perceive things. So when I finally regained my footing and did go back to school, it kind of became a nightmare once things got difficult. That said, I want to try to change it, in the middle of the worst parts of all the triggers. I believe that people create their destinies, at least, that they have the power to do with what they have been given. I suppose from an accurate political science standpoint, you need to be a given a certain amount of things for any effort to create real change; perhaps even a chemist might say that an insufficient amount of a catalyst may fail to make a change. Yet I think for many people that I know, it is possible to try to do something with what you have, where you are, when you are. At least, I know for me it is; and it’s killing me to feel like a victim of my own worst fears — fears that keep generating from overload. I would have taken a break from school and it’s overload, but it’s already been 7 years.
So I need to re-create faith — um, not in god, that never really worked out for me. When I first came here I abandoned my former faith, and then I had learn what real faith was about. I was always told that when you acted on faith, there was peace. But it’s not really true; faith is what you have when nothing seems to be going right. Nothing feels right; I guess for me that’s what made Christianity seem so hokey. Christians would act on what they claimed god had told them, only they would go out to start a church or something and then give up after six months because they were so miserable. Maybe god didn’t tell them that, or maybe the ideas of faith that were taught them were goofy. You can’t have faith without every initial experimental indicator telling you you are wrong. Some Baptist or non-denom evangelist will likely respond, “Aha! Don’t you get it?” To which, I would say, I do but you don’t . . . get me, that is.
It takes a great deal of faith to lose faith. Many Christians I have come across seem to be terribly unable to fathom this. I actually made a conscious decision to change. The churches that I used to love to go to and belong to became stale to me; I could see through the message that I no longer wanted a god who would send good people to hell. I no longer wanted a god who promised to answer prayer and yet would not speak in a clear voice his purpose. I no longer wanted to serve with the people who chose to serve god, because ofttimes, they chose to be ignorant, in order to secure their faith. So what faith did it take for me to change?
I had faith that it could be better without god, or Jesus, or the Bible. It’s really difficult to come to that conclusion when for the prior 15 years of your life, all you knew was salvation — and all you believed was that you couldn’t live without it. If you don’t think this could true, consider those who are in “cults;” they have the members of mainstream religions constantly coaxing them from their joy to something like a half-life. I lived a half-life for three years at least, but I didn’t have anyone to tell me that it would get better. I told myself it would get better. And it did.
I am Wiccan now, more or less, but there were witches who didn’t think that I really was Wiccan enough. Pretty soon I learned that they were snobs and really no different from the willfully ignorant Christian people I knew. They wanted me to feel everything immediately, they thought I was trying to force it and therefore, I really should just be Christian. Some things about Wicca felt real, some things just fell on the emotionless parts of me. Do I think Wicca is the “truth”? No . . . but I guess there are probably those who think that it is, and those who know better.
I am convinced by the historical critique of Wicca, that it itself is not hundreds of years old, but is based on traditional ritual practices. But mostly I believe in my own power — maybe my destiny, but more importantly my ability to manifest my destiny. I have been able to so far, once I decided to have faith in my own will and the ability to impose it upon the universe. I don’t know that these ideas will work for everyone — I’m not prepared to write a book about it. I think people fail to know who they really are more often than not and therefore, make ridiculous choices based on flimsy logic. Life shapes you; you haven’t lived until you’ve had to experience real faith. Maybe it’s not that so important what you believe, but that you believe. Maybe that’s all anyone needs to know.
This is me. How I write and how I think. Please feel welcome to visit my world. 
