What kool-aid am I drinking,
thinking that it’s juice?—
healthy and upstanding,
when actually, its use
is to poison and control me—
like creeds I used to drink,
slowly dying from the lying,
till I began to think.
Commentary
Having broken free of the most major brainwashing in my life—the dogma of my evangelical, fundamentalist Christian upbringing—and experiencing the brilliant freedom of being allowed to think for myself, I’m on a lifelong quest to unlearn all the smaller dogmas of cultural programming, cognitive biases, and childhood core beliefs. See my essay “Growing Beyond Childhood Beliefs” for more about all of this.
— reposted from the commentary I wrote for my poem “Break Every Leash of Dogma” which I’ll also repost here because it’s relevant:
Break every leash of dogma
that keeps my mind constrained,
and let me roam for wellness, sense,
and peace, unrestrained.
In other words, I never want to go back to automatically believing what I hear from others or even from my own thoughts. I want to use rationality, critical thinking, evidence-gathering, and logic to examine my beliefs!
In the notebook
I'm always impressed seeing your process. You took a whole page of complex thought and turned it into 8 neat little lines! 🤯 It can definitely be hard to question patterns we seem to naturally fall into, and I do wonder how much of it is just hardwired. But it's still better to question and try than accept blindly.