It has been very difficult for me to voice let alone grasp the decision to leave my faith. My faith has been the intellectual grindstone I've had. I can safely say my family have something of an intellectual/political current running underneath it. My father and his brother were involved in several political youth groups in his Caribbean mother land. He ingrained in my the sense to be challenged and similarly to do so to others.

My life early on took a turn for the disparate. I was sort of an outcast in my neighborhood. I read alot, kept to myself, and having been molested by a teaching assistant in school I kept a line keeping me from everyone. Even from my own mother and father that I held so dear in my heart. My parent's grocery cart Catholicism did little to answer the onslaught of questions I had for that most elusive and negative God.

When I was 12 years old my older brother became a member of the New York City Church of Christ. With what seemed to me an almost overnight transformation the distant cold older brother I knew wanted to take me out. He wanted to take me to Six Flags and to church and to eat and to meet his new friends. Sandwiched in between the affection I so desperately wanted from my older brother was religious dogma.

I ate it up. The wonderful people, not marred by the injustices done to the immigrant families and lower income housing folks in the ghetto. These people were professionals from the city, hip, with money and happy with God. These people did not acclimate to the Lord's demands, the seized them with ferocity.

And I did so, with accuracy.

My parents had the hindsight to recognize something, that this faith my brother and I so instantly took should not be taken so lightly. My parents made me wait an entire year before I was to be baptized. And during that year I ingrained a line in my family, us versus them. Father/mother and their old world catholicism and brother/sister and their new-aged Christianity. Mind my sparkling with the polish of New Age liberalism and great music, theirs sat unused yet unyielding to the change of time.

But things rapidly changed. The faith I so rapidly procured became something of an intellectual block. Where there were questions, there were quickly patched up "faith-holes". Questions that fundamentally negate the validity of the life that you are claiming to live were quickly patched up with a Scripture from Acts. I felt that my questions were merely the little ponderings of a much too curious youth. Those friends of mine that I cried, that I prayed and loved with to them too I administered these superficial intellectual patches.

The summer before I went to college everything changed. I've had arthritis as a child and was prone to upper respatory illnesses. I became ill alot in school. I became irritable and regressed into a very deep depression. I had suffered from depression and anxieties for years but nothing like in college. The loneliness, the new enviroment and the freedom to question intruded the system constructed for me by others.

Sophomore year after being ill for quite some time, discharging from school and a deep depression something stopped inside of me. The constructed need to tell myself to stop questioning and turn to the Word, stopped. The constant cries to God stopped.

I began to deconstruct.

I began to delve into the fundamentals of what, who, how and why is my belief the way it is. In the construct of my life, of my life in these times, in my life as a Latina, in my life as a city dweller, etc. My already daily journal entries became HUGE. And then something in me started again, the questioner. The value I so wanted to remove and replace with Born Again Christian rigidity came back. This value that my father and his family and all the wonderful thinkers of the world have tried to rise up. This ability to reason, to wonder, to question and debate was silenced for so long, though to be so wrong that I was so afraid.

I'm still afraid about alot of things, because now I'm not living in the constructed frameworks Christianity but building a framework of my own. The past mistakes that I have committed and the one committed against me have been taken into account. Even my past faith will remain a component of the way I see and live my life.

But no more can I see things as they have been constructed for me. The rose colored glasses are off, I'm still pretty nearsighted but I'm bound to see for sure.

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