I've decided for my own mental health not to read it because I just can't really deal with the world's vast multitudes in all their glorious selfiness right now.

I once had a shameful and racist argument with a friend who is a POC about what her experiences meant to her and I'm so sorry for it (we are still friends so I can only guess she's forgiven me for being horrible). That's the worst I can think of, although I'm sure I've mindlessly evidenced my white privilege in so many ways I don't even know about, which is also horrifying.

I love Sufjan and this is very accurate.
"I went to a city and it was just a city not a metaphor for faith."

Yeah I have to own that I have been a shitty ally to poc and queer people in the past in ways like this although with much less beard.

This fetal personhood stuff makes me SO SO ANGRY. I am currently gestating a much-wanted fetus right now and I wish all the horrible parts of pregnancy on everyone who thinks women should be investigated after miscarriages or forced to carry dying babies to term or made to go through a humiliating circus to get an abortion - if they can get one at all.
So, to you horrible men and women, I wish constant abdominal pain from everything stretching all out of shape, endless fucking nausea, insomnia, sore backs, sore feet, tension headaches, the horrible uncertainty of the first trimester, the sadness and confusion of waiting for test results that may or may not show that your fetus has a chromosomal abnormality. I hope you suffer from bleeding gums and bleeding noses, I hope you vomit at the thought of an onion, I hope you have to get up seven times a night to pee, I hope you get both a long painful labour and then have to recover from a c-section while horrible nurses chide you for wanting to take pain medication and random people warn you you've ruined your baby for life because you should have tried harder to give birth vaginally, and then I hope you suffer terrible mastitis six or seven times in a row. And I hope you do it all on five or six hours of restless sleep for months and years and without the solace of a nice stiff drink at the end of the day.
Too much?

The lovers, the dreamers, the spectacle. (This is great even though I've never actually read any Guy Debord.)

Your parents shouldn't waste money sending you to university when your brothers need to go instead. Yep, thanks Grandma.

I once dressed up as Jesus complete with painted beard. I think I was 6 or 7? Much mocking ensued. But man when I was 6 I thought Jesus was supercool.

Well the entry point would be reading the book. You don't need a degree in theology to understand it.

Well, I'm an atheist feminist who had utterly nothing in common with either the author or the narrator of Gilead and it is my favourite novel. You don't need to be a person of any particular faith to appreciate how Robinson writes or her characters. You don't need to be a Christian to be interested in what it means to lead a good life, how to love people, how to forgive others and forgive yourself for your essential humanness, which are all the things I think Gilead is "about", as clumsy as it is to put it that way. The main character is a man of faith but it's not a didactic faith, it's one he grapples with, and that is fascinating in itself.