My Deconversion - 4 Years On

By Pinkbunion ~   

Hello, guys. It's been 4 years since my first post here, which detailed the start of my deconversion, which was on July 2022. So, now, 2 years on from that post, I'm going to give an update. Currently, I am very happy with where I am right now. I have remained agnostic since that 2022 post. I haven't changed much in being agnostic, except that I always change between being an agnostic atheist or spiritual agnostic on different days. I want to remain agnostic because I just want to learn about different belief systems and religions, take whats good in them and discard the things that aren't true or are not beneficial. 

I am also happy that I have found an online community in YouTube, Discord, Reddit and other sites that helped me in improving and expressing my beliefs. These people consist of not only atheists, but spiritual people too, since I don't want to be one-sided, but also listen to other beliefs and religions. Regarding conspiracy theories, I am happy to have found resources online to debunk such things. I am proud of Skeptoid Media and Rational Wiki, which helped me let go of said theories. I also read books that debunked specific conspiracy theories, such as the Moon Landing and Q-anon conspiracy theories. It shed so much light on the people behind the theories, their motivations, how it negatively affected their listeners and the people who were involved in the real life events that the conspiracy theories were based on. I also read books on diverse topics regarding religion, such as books on deism, being spiritual but not religious, near death experiences, people who deconverted from Christianity etc. I chose these topics since it gave a wide variety of information for me to think about in my post-Christian life.

2023 for me was just another year of deconversion from religion, and debunking previously held beliefs of conspiracy theories. However, 2024 for me was a good year and a challenging year. It was challenging because another side of me started to come out - which was my aromanticism and asexuality - in short, being aroace. I knew I was aroace before, but something happened during the last week of January 2024 that further solidified it. I felt strong physical attraction to someone which I thought would never happen because of me being aroace. This set off massive anxiety in me since I did not want to feel physical attraction - which I don't know if it was influenced by religion - but I still kept on feeling it even to this day. This has still continued today, but the anxiety has lessened. The anxiety led me to re-evaluate and think about other areas of my life where I was failing, such as having anger issues, while I still have this anxiety in the background. I wanted to do something to solve the other problems in my personality, which I could do something about, while I could not solve the physical attraction problem and I did not know what to do with it. Thankfully, I had three sessions with my psychologist so far this year, and it helped me a lot to face and solve my problems. The 3rd session focused on me being aroace and my psychologist told me that I should just accept that I feel physical attraction, and to talk more with the person whom I'm attracted to in order to lessen the anxiety, which I did, and which helped a lot, and I am currently feeling more happy and at peace with this issue.

Regarding other areas of my life, I am quite happy since the event stated above spurred me to solve my other problems, such as having anger issues and tantrums, which I noticed, became less frequent after I deconverted. With my sessions with the psychologist, heavy and deep introspection that I did everyday, consuming content that would help me in deconversion and debunking, dealing with me being aroace, and having an online community, but no offline community, this year was very challenging and heavy on me. But it has also helped me grow so much and become more comfortable with my post-Christian life. I wish that I could find an offline community in the succeeding years or in the future so that I could find real life people to talk to about these topics. I could only talk to my elder sister about this, and not my family, since they are very religious and traditional in their beliefs. It's also very hard to find a community in an Asian country where the majority of the population are very religious. However, I am very happy with where I am at now and thank you very much for reading this. I hope that you are also inspired in your deconversion journey or your debunking journey if you are an ex-conspiracy theorist. I also hope that if you are part of the LGBTA+ community, that you would find strength to continue being yourself. Finally, thank you to everyone and have a happy and blessed day. :)