Page 16, Snowy's article in the final copy should read: " As someone who grew up with the Force being everywhere, I may have been at a disadvantage when it came to "awakening" to it. It was always talked about: in every playtime, on every t-shirt, scrawled on every Pizza Hut collector's glass, and was something I barely understood, let alone even took time to think about in any sincere way. People couldn't be Jedi. And it didn't help that my parents were the most decidedly fundamental religionists in the world. It doesn't matter what their religion was because I was not allowed to think about anything even remotely different.
So now, at age 39, after having lived and explored religion as far as I thought I ever would and deciding they were all wrong, it seems unlikely that I'd do something silly like "awaken", and even less likely that it would be to "the Force". At the end of 2015 I said to myself that 17+ years was long enough to be depressed, and I was going to stop now. I slowly, across weeks, surrendered my antidepressants and antianxiety medications from my system. As I began to crawl back into the light of day I realized that what I really needed was a major change of perspective. I needed something I could call a religion. I'd been rejecting it for almost 20 years. But I needed something open-minded, full of a lust for life. That came in the form of Jediism. When I first saw what Jediism really was, it was as if someone had taken the best part of every other religion, welded them together, polished them until they shined and released it into the atmosphere. The other Jedi I've met are all fantastic, and the ones that I disagree with are sometimes even more brilliant.
Being on the other side of depression is a constant, daily effort. I have to constantly be aware of my thought process and listen to myself to make sure I'm not falling back into my old, negative patterns. But the Jedi I've been around have made it so much easier. And that's one thing I'll fight to hold on to. That feeling of community and working together on something good."
Topic Author
