Love and Disillusionment

It started with a cult.

Though I suppose at this point, it's hard to say for sure if that was the true impetus for the questions to come.

At the very least, it was the final blow in a long series of well-intentioned experiences that soured into steady defeats. As varied as they were deep, united only in the depths of disillusionment that they unearthed within me.

So perhaps it’s more accurate to say, it started with the echos of a heartbreaking realization:

Even the most beautiful dreams, sung by the most beautiful dreamers, could traverse the wide ocean and still crash unceremoniously into the shore. Those waves could then melt back into the ocean, to gather and learn and try something new, only to face the same end. Never getting anywhere other than the edge.

I started wondering if that’s what love amounted to. A lot of great effort, great intentions, good ideas, beautiful dreams, that couldn’t help but enter and end in the same cycles.

My faith was shaken but even so, it was faith that encouraged me to meet this moment with something other than the cynical conclusions that felt most obvious.

It was faith that stirred up something within me, something that looked at the mess I had just witnessed and asked:

What the fuck is going on?

I felt betrayed.

It wasn’t the first time, and something about that fact made it sting all the worse.

No, the first time I unknowingly gave my power to a charismatic leader who disappointed me was in 2008 when a much more naive version of myself thew my heart and soul into Barack Obama’s Presidential Campaign.