Son of Believers
2026-08-24
I've been having to remind myself why I write, especially after dealing with the bout of shame from grappling with its confessional nature and the bleak horizon of getting paid some time in the future. More than that, I keep circling back to the question of value. Are people reading? Do they care? Are they invested? Am I just writing in circles? How can I turn this into something that's not vain or idiotic? But as I worked through these inquiries, I remembered the actual position I put myself in—and the position I find myself writing through.
I know I keep saying it over and over: that "this is for me," and that the views don't matter, and whatever else. Even when I regret where I'm at, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm sick; the world doesn't revolve around my min-maxed neuroanatomy. Hunter S. Thompson had a great quote, and I keep coming back to it:
I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
I feel myself wrestling with that in ways I always return to. In a sense, there's a certain heroic aspect to it—that I am forced to deal with at least drugs and insanity by virtue of my prescribed lot in life. Thankfully I've never had problems with alcohol—and, well, at least not anymore with violence—but drugs and insanity seem to be mainstays. Reminding myself that I'm always a couple bad days away from another stint at the hospital is a shitty deal, especially because I have to sacrifice a lot in my personal life to keep myself out of those forms of social control. I can't go out and put myself through too much, or else it'll end up with me either dead or in jail; that's not something I'm willing to put my loved ones through, even if I'm statistically destined for it. Writing here isn't a salvation, but at least it can help hold off what most would see as an inevitability. In the same way guys like Hunter or Ernest offer themselves as cautionary tales, I want to offer myself as a tale of my own. My hope is that it's at least one where the ending is more peaceful. Sometimes I think that's what my heroes died for; they wanted me to know that it doesn't have to go down that way.
More than that, I can be an advocate if I have the fortitude for it. I've feared being a symbol, and I think I've found a decent reframing for that fear. It's something I've talked about before, and while I don't feel like I'm necessarily saving anyone else from their own hardships, I do at least feel like a witness to them—or at the very least, a mirror.
I think there's a lot of guys, particularly in the growing sphere of American Orthodoxy, who have an idealized version of the past. I don't yearn for it, and I think that's because I've recently come to the understanding that those people back then are the same people we see alive today. Even if the setting feels different due to industrialization, we are still cobbled together with the same set of wires. It reminds me a bit of that one still from ATLA, you know, this one. I think about my own familial lineage (rich coming from an American, I know), and on my paternal grandmother's side, their last name was Creason. I was thinking about the etymology of that name, and then it hit me. The surname Creason went through several different alternative spellings, namely Creeson. In Middle English, the root "Cree" comes from words like "creed," or a statement of belief. A lot of the guys on that side of my family had biblical first names, like Noah (my namesake) and Solomon. And so even though the actual record is a bit scarce, some deductive reasoning tells me that the surname Creason means "sons of believers," and those believers were ostensibly Christian.
When it comes to many of those English folks' reasoning for coming here, a principal one was for religious freedom. The Anglican church became a grossly corrupt institution, and while those ancestors probably didn't have the fullness of Orthodoxy, they knew something was wrong, even if they themselves were built from broken parts. And so when I think of my conversion to Orthodoxy, it really does feel like a "coming home" moment, just stretched over the course of generations. The historical precedent is there with the Israelites as well, and it makes me feel like even if there's so much that is wrong with the world, I really do believe that I am part of a movement coming back to a greater truth; it's an ancient truth that gets constantly denied, but throughout human history, it has persisted. More than anything, I have the blessing to create a record of this repentance for all of those believers who came before me, and maybe I can help justify them when we're ready to cash our chips in. So with that, I have to keep going in spite of everything I face.
Not for me, but for them.
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