When I was growing up I used to go to church on a Sunday. My family wasn’t religious but my Dad’s parents were and I think we just went to appease them. When I got to about 14 years old I decided I didn’t want to go so we all stopped going. The schools I went to were very religious so I know quite a lot about it. But when I left school I didn’t really think about religion very much. After I was unwell, in the first couple of years I stopped believing in heaven. I had an experience where many people don’t survive. I have never had the feeling that I have to thank someone up high for my survival. My survival was purely due to people on earth. I have been asked, ‘did you see a white light?’. I can truly say that nothing like that happened but I guess if that does happen then maybe you would not be able to tell anyone. I started thinking that when you die there is nothing and that has been really comforting. You don’t really want to know that you have died as it would be horrible. Recently though, I have been feeling the need to look into religion again. I have been thinking about going to church again to see if it will help me to move forward. My local church still does live streaming which it started doing in lockdown so every Sunday morning I tune in and watch the service. I am not brave enough to actually go into the church. It is quite a small church and I will be noticed. I do feel that I need to talk to someone there about what I have gone through and to help me believe in something again. I don’t really want to get into all the religious stuff again though. I have been told that it is not unusual to become more spiritual. I feel that I value my life more as I know how close it was to be over, too soon. On one of the live streams and on the church website they talked about an app called ‘Bible in a year’. Each day is a 25 minutes reading of the bible and talk about the passages. I have found this really helpful to reconnect with the bible and is much easier than having a Bible and just reading it. It is supposed to be used everyday for a year but I have fallen behind a bit so it will take more than a year but this doesn’t matter. As I have said for a few years I felt that I had lost the thought that I learnt at school that when you die there would be something there. I lost my faith. I think now that I am slowly trying to connect with it again. When I was a child and went to school I didn’t really have the choice about what I was being taught about religion. Now I am older and hopefully reconnecting, it is my choice. I am not becoming a Bible basher as my Dad has said, but I am just finding something that is helping me understand what happened to me and helping me move on.
A Recovering Brain 