Don't ever tell me it was a good thing. Don't ever tell me it was God's plan.

Image text: "If this is God's plan, God is a terrible planner." Image source.

Note from Perfect Number: So I wrote this post a long time ago, but I didn't publish it back then because the whole situation sucked and I didn't want to talk about it. And it felt too personal to publish something with such strong negative emotions. Luckily, my life is much better now and I don't have those particular emotions about it, so it feels less "personal" to publish it now.

And on Monday I published my review of VeggieTales "The Ballad of Little Joe", which was a story about being disgustingly optimistic when bad, unjust things happen to us, believing those things are "God's plan" and we just need to accept the situation and trust God.

My story here is sort of the "other side" of the story we saw in "The Ballad of Little Joe."

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[content note: this is an angry post about losing my job, and Christian platitudes]

A while ago, I lost my job. And I didn't really tell many people about it, because I was afraid there would be people who wouldn't believe me- and if someone doesn't believe me, they don't deserve to hear any details about my life. And if I have to do the work of offering evidence and then waiting for whoever's listening decide if it's my fault or not, decide if they're going to be on my side or not, that's more emotional trauma that I'm not willing to put myself through.

So what happened is, the company illegally broke the contract, it came out of nowhere, and they said a bunch of lies about me. But now I'm at a different job, a much better job, and I have a higher salary now.

And I stay out of Christian culture as much as I can nowadays, so fortunately I haven't had anyone say any ****ed up stuff about how this is God's plan and everything worked out so it's all good.

See, there are Christians who would look at my old job and my current job, look at the amount of money, and say that I'm in a better situation now, so actually this was a good thing that happened to me. And God did it.

And just ignore everything in between. As if that doesn't matter. As if, because I have a better salary now, everything is fine.

I am not fine.

You think I'm ****ing fine? You think there are no long-term consequences when people that I trusted suddenly turn evil? You believe in a God who thinks that emotional damage isn't a real thing- or at least, its effects can be totally negated by a big number on a paycheck?

F*** that God.

I am not fine. Now I can't trust anyone who works in HR- are all HR people secretly evil? They act nice, but are they suddenly going to screw me over? And I feel scared I'll lose my job again- everything seems fine, but I thought everything seemed fine last time too.

Any time I'm at work and somebody says, "come here, we're having a meeting," I feel nervous.

If you think this is something that God wanted to happen to me, and it's all good because I have more money, then **** you.

I'm an immigrant. I have a residence permit which allows me to be in China legally. But that's dependent on having a job. When I lost my job, I had a few months before my residence permit would expire, and that meant I only had that much time to find a new job and navigate the sea of bureaucracy that is China- and if I'm not able to get a new residence permit in time, I have to leave the country.

A loving God does not do that to people.

It "all worked out", okay, sure, it "all worked out." I did find a better job and get a new residence permit. And Christians would tell me I should have trusted God instead of being so worried- see, it "all worked out", and that means I was wrong to be worried. Well f*** that. As if it's totally fine for God to just throw someone into an overwhelmingly stressful situation, because God knows it's going to "all work out" and there's not *actually* any danger of getting kicked out of China. Like God is allowed to just do anything they want to people, and then we're the ones who are wrong for having a completely reasonable emotional reaction to what is objectively a very stressful situation.

God knows it will "all work out" so any worry and stress we suffer is our fault, we're the ones in the wrong for not "trusting God"- yeah, f*** that. It's like threatening someone and then laughing at them because haha, what are they so scared about, they should have known you didn't really mean it. That's what all this "trust God" crap is about.

It's like hiding your friend's phone and then watching them panic about it for a few hours. You let them think it got stolen, and then after a while you give it back. See, everything is fine. You knew all along it wasn't stolen and there was nothing to worry about. Therefore you did nothing wrong and your friend was wrong to be worried.

Well, Christians would say, this is God's way of helping you leave a job that wasn't good for you and end up in a better situation. Okay, if that's true, then God really sucks at this. Why can't God just COMMUNICATE? Why can't God tell me "hey you could totally look for a better job"? Does God seriously think the best way to move me from job A to job B is to have a bunch of people that I thought cared about me suddenly turn evil and say a lot of nasty lies about me?

F*** that God. Seriously. F*** that God.

Does God seriously think that having me all worried about GETTING F***ING DEPORTED is a perfectly reasonable way to "help" me change to a better job? **** that.

It's like if you're just standing around and somebody comes up and starts hitting you, hitting you, over and over and you try to get away from them and they keep hitting you over and over, and then you see a huge truck drive past, right where you had been standing... See, this random hitting person saved your life. If they had just let you stand there, you would have been hit by a truck. You would have died. And so, even though they hit you and it hurt, they did nothing wrong because your current situation is better than what it would have been if they had not intervened at all. That is, apparently, the standard we hold God to- no matter how much pain God puts you through, as long as you end up better off than you were before, God did nothing wrong. **** that.

And I keep reasurring myself, it's okay to be angry at the people at my old job who did this. It's okay to hate them. It's okay to never forgive them. (I plan on never interacting with them ever again- if I were going to actually do something to them, then I would need to spend a lot of time seriously thinking about the difference between justice and revenge- because I believe in justice but not revenge. But I'm not going to do anything to them. Just hate them by myself, that's all.)

And you know who else can **** off? Christians who want to tell me I need to forgive, or some crap like that. **** you, and stop policing people's emotions. With an extra special "**** you" to the Christians who are like "there's a lot of misunderstanding about what 'forgiveness' means, it doesn't mean deciding what happened was okay, it doesn't mean reconciling, it means [word salad about doing it to benefit yourself]." No. "Forgiveness", as I was taught, was about policing emotions, rules about what I'm allowed or not allowed to feel when someone hurts me, and I'm not interested in reclaiming that word. And it's useless to claim a word doesn't *really* mean what most people understand it to mean. They only do that because they believe forgiveness is required by God, so then they try to change the meaning of "forgiveness" so it's not such an emotionally unhealthy thing to require from people. Yeah, how about instead you just leave me alone.

And then there are Christians who are like, "well maybe God was trying to teach you something." Well maybe **** you. If God was "trying to teach me something", God failed, and that's not my f***ing fault. In that ideology, God causes bad things to happen to people, intending that they will learn some kind of deep life lesson- and then if I end up all angry instead of learning said life lesson, it's my fault, God did nothing wrong. COME ON!

How are people getting away with this "maybe God was trying to teach you something" crap? Spinning it like "God did this thing to you, and it was for good reasons, you're the one who is in the wrong for not seeing that," when, if it really was true that "God was trying to teach me something," that would mean God really really ****ed up, because I didn't learn some nice lesson, instead I have anxiety about my job, and have a hard time trusting people. YEAH GOOD JOB GOD.

**** all that. **** those nice platitudes about God causing bad things to happen to me because of some mysterious good reason. **** all the Christians who are so attached to their "God has a plan" ideology that they don't care about my emotional health- claiming that the trauma I went through doesn't matter because I have more money now, or that I'm the one who did something wrong by not "trusting God."

I'm an optimist, okay? I can compare my current situation to my old job and see things that are better now, and choose to focus on those things. That's good, that's a strategy that people use to cope with bad things that happen to them. But that doesn't mean, in a literal sense, that what happened to me actually was a good thing. If you start claiming that, that's when you get into ideas that are really really damaging.

If "my life is better now because of events that were directly or indirectly caused by this thing happening" means that the thing was A Good Thing, then the only way that I can claim that losing my job was A Bad Thing is if my life completely and totally sucks forever after. And I do not want my life to completely and totally suck, so I'm making the best of the situation I'm in, always working toward a better future. And I will not let anyone use my success as evidence that what happened wasn't actually bad, that God did it to me on purpose in order to help me get the good things I have now. F*** all of that.

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Related:
How Suffering Did NOT Bring Me Closer To God
God of Bad Snaps