As a Jamaican immigrant, faced with the prospect of telling my mother I got a ‘C’ in Biology, I quickly got on my knees and spoke to God. I said to God, “God, if I get a ‘B’ in AP Bio, I won’t masturbate for two weeks.” My final grade was exactly an 80%, and from that moment, I entered into a progression of increasingly demanding covenants with the Lord.

To understand my incoherent actions doesn’t require a Rocket Scientist, or more appropriately, a Therapist: the answer to the age old question is that nurture is the absolute culprit for our behavior. As well as Christianity and shrewdness, productivity was impressed upon me from childhood. When I immigrated to America in my youth, the country’s capitalist moral compass favoring success didn’t surprise me, and while I had an aptitude for school, my nature was curious and creative. I threaded a fine line between responsibility and passion, seldom making promises to God until the weight of a reality shocked me like a stubbed toe: college applications.

The pressure of satisfying the hunger of an inherently greedy and vapid society and subscribing to American grind culture slowly deforms a sensitive soul like modulators on a Bonsai Tree, bending its branches and conforming a once free entity into a specific aesthetic outside normality. Pressure to get a good score on the SAT and get into a good college were heavy, and for a while, I thought I was a failure because I wasn’t constantly productive. So while Americans ran on Dunkin, this Jamaican was powered almost purely by guilt, spending my senior year of high school deformed, hunched over a computer studying for the SAT and writing college essays. It was then God came into my mind again. 

On December 6, 2019, hours before my last possible attempt at the SAT, I made another promise to God. Unsure of my abilities, scared of failure, and with my back against the wall; I said to God, “God, if I get a 1460 or higher on the SAT, I won’t masturbate for six months!” It was a promise born from fear, fear my work wouldn’t pay off, fear I wouldn’t please my parents. Importantly, I made that covenant with the understanding that God wanted it from me, that my promise to him was mutually beneficial: I got what I wanted, success, and God got what he wanted too: a pure soul.  What I didn’t realize was the emotional toll a covenant came with: it was a loan spent immediately, its debt staring me in the face the instant my score read 1460, which it did.

Six months without masturbation. Shit. What did I get myself into? I didn’t quit masterbating when I saw my score, or when I got into my dream school and promised God I’d add another day to the promise for Columbia. I stopped masturbating a year and a half later. Concurrently, getting a 1460 qualified my mania and my promises simultaneously devolved into miniscule desires; giving up Instagram for a week in exchange for a good grade or, for a month, giving up all music genres except Christian in return for my drowned phone to turn back on. I got what I wanted each time, and slowly but surely I became a covenant junkie; always ready for the next fix. 

During my Christian Music Era, I felt unfulfilled and listened to a specific song a lot for refuge. It was called “Solid Gold” by Delta Goodrem. It had a beat and melody so exquisite and satisfying it was like cutting the first piece of your Birthday cake, closing your eyes and opening wide. The lyrics, however, weren’t as gratifying. “I wake up, from the storm, to my world on the floor, and I’m crying for the times that you stood in my way.” The words can only be described as a manifestor’s worst nightmare. The lyrics called down negatively, simultaneously pushing its singer into a pit of despair. I sang them anyway; soon enough, I began to cry more and found myself pushing myself up off of one knee, trying to leave earth filled with misery but finding it impossible to plant both my feet on new ground. I knew my unhappiness wouldn’t be cured by my own will, and I decided making a promise to God would save me. I made a deal with God, and in return for something so minuscule, so stupid I can’t even remember it, I gave up the right to listen to anything but Christian music for a month. I thought it would make me happier, force me out into a ray of sunshine. It did the opposite. In my promise was a small caveat; “I get to listen to one non christian song a day!” Instead of finding solace in the flood of God’s chords, I found true happiness in the 3-4 minutes I could listen to anything else. For a while, I blamed music for my sadness, but that wasn’t the whole truth. I was sad regardless of what played between my ears, nonetheless upset when I gave up bad habits, and felt unaccomplished no matter how many deals I struck to see success. That was when it dawned on me: covenants with God suck. 

When it took me months to complete a covenant, another feeling took hold, a feeling so compelling it slapped me upside the head and commanded me into my room, an emotion that pushed me to the floor and spun the world around, distorting reality and leaving nothing but self reproach on my tongue and dueling winds in my chest: guilt. It didn’t happen in one instance, rather realization was slow, taking place over the course of months. I realized that the covenants I thought would help me were only beating me down like heavy rain on a leaf, splitting greenery indiscriminately. Culture influenced my desire, and religion in turn guided my achievement. I was beholden to a strict moral code whenever anything positive happened to me, which made my life a living hell. Full of guilt and unhappiness, I realized that I was ruining my relationship not only with God, but my relationship with myself. To avoid failure, I tried to give up culpability for my life, not realizing that I was forfeiting my most inalienable right: free will. I chose to relinquish responsibility to dodge losing, giving up the best part of life, living and learning. Before God made his covenant with Noah to never destroy the earth again, he first sent rain for 40 days and nights, flooding the Earth and decimating everything except for what was on his followers’ arc. To Abraham, protection for him and his descendants meant circumcision and strictly following God’s commands. Who wants to live a life with no free will? Who wants to crawl through barbed wire for a measly prize at the end of the course. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t work hard toward an end goal, but I am saying that the journey is more important than the destination. You shouldn’t have to suffer through hell to feel whole. No one needs to grind their life away to feel as though they’ve accomplished something. Today’s culture promotes a toxic way of life, affecting each individual in a specific and harmful way. 

For me, I say no more! No more promises to God, no more needless suffering, and no more guilt. I can’t control my future, but I have an authority over my happiness that I don’t plan to give away. Not again, and not anytime soon. Should I continue to make promises? The answer is unequivocally no. To the question of grinding, I say, “Don’t grind, but work toward taking the wheel of your life.”