DailyBlog: What will I never give up on?

*** The first three books in my six-part dystopian series have officially made their way out into the world! Check them out!
For the sake of blogging, self-exploration, and contemplation, I’ve been slowly making my way through answering questions from this list

Today’s Question: What will you never give up on?

I suppose that I’ll never give up on my determination to be a better person than the people who have been awful to me. This is such a broken record in my blogging, I know, but its such a significant aspect of what has made me the person that I have become.

I will also never give up on questioning the “norm” and pointing out its frequent hypocrisies. As a child, doing so is being “disobedient” but as an adult, in my opinion, its such a crucial life-skill if you want to grow, evolve, and live your life as your most authentic self. I’m glad that I was a “stubborn, willful child” right from the day that I was born. As a FTT infant, I needed that determination. Sometimes these norms are just plain silly. I remember being told that I had to make my bed every morning and I thought that seemed unbelievably silly. Was my bedroom a showroom? Were there tours going in and out of our house during the day? No? Then why did I have to make my bed? I was a stubborn child, so I devised a clever way to defy this without defying it directly. I simply stopped UN-making my bed in the first place. I began sleeping over my comforter with just a blanket. This became habit, and now as a grown adult, this is still how I sleep. I just fold the blanket in the morning and poof, I’m done. It’s very comfortable, too, as I tend to kick around in my sleep and the blanket isn’t attached to my bed.

Sometimes these “norms” are a lot more serious. As a huge animal lover, I know its hypocritical of me to not be a vegan. If someone handed me a plate of meat and told me it was “dog”, I’d be horrified, but yet I eat cow, pig, chicken… why is it okay for me to eat one living being but consider it sadistic to eat another? I have no answer for that and the conflict increases in size in my mind a little bit each day. Sooner or later, I suppose I will end up vegan. I got some extremely strange looks at Thanksgiving when somehow the subject of cannibalism came up and I said I’d try “people” if it was on my plate. I wasn’t kidding. I feel like if I eat cow, pig, and chicken, I have no business denying that I’d try any other type of meat if it were offered…

I was raised Catholic, but denounced that before I even reached “conformation” (which I refused to do) because if ‘God’ is so loving and wonderful, why would he/she/it condemn you to hell if you sinned without confession to a priest before you die, when ‘God’ supposedly tempts you to sin in the first place? If that depiction of ‘God’ is correct, ‘God’ is a jack*ss. (I’m agnostic.)

Yeah, I will never give up on asking “why” to every question, and I’ll never give up on refusing to accept anything at face value until I’ve had time to investigate and evaluate according to my own conscience.

“Just because” doesn’t cut it. “That’s weird” isn’t a sensible response. I’ve grown so much and changed so much just by asking the difficult questions and challenging myself to find honest answers. I feel sad for people who don’t do that because they’ll never have an opportunity to know who they truly are beyond the insular life that immediately surrounds them.