It is easy for one to say that they will never lose faith; it is much more difficult to comprehend how faith is lost. Still, to this day, I cannot exactly say how or why I lost my faith. There was no definitive moment where I said to myself, "aha, my faith has gone and now I believe in nothing." It was not a calculated effort of my part. I did not decide to not believe. I am not even sure how one would go about doing that, though I do not claim that such a things is impossible either. But, for me, becoming a nihilist was simply a process of realizing how little I mattered to others. The economic crisis of 2008 combined with the unbridled gutting of the arts from the schools offered a solid one two punch to any hope I ever had of achieving anything in this country. Careers can only be given to people by employers and if there are not employed artists you are basically at the will of the wealthy. You have to go to wealthy artists to be deemed worthy of a career in art now, but those wealthy artists do not share the wealth. So, you end up with nothing. You end up discarded, another crossed out name on a casting director's long list of dashed hopes and dreams. It's not like you can really develop another dream either. I am not even sure that I want to do that. Career changes are fine, but perhaps they just do not work for some people. Perhaps some people become so attached to their career that losing it is like losing themselves. Far too few people understand the grieving process when it comes to careers. They do not understand the soul destroying depression and despair that ensues after someone tells you that you are not good enough to achieve your dreams. Rejection of what you once believed to be your co-workers and the subsequent career failure that follows, in many ways, is to be woken up from your dreams and to enter a prolonged insomnia that never ends. A faithful person is able to go it alone under such harsh circumstances because that is what their religion tells them, that people are unreliable and that all you can really depend on is god. So I did that because that was my last resort. You see, I lost my career twice. Once during the current pandemic, but also before during the Great Recession when my hometown theater and many others went out of business, turning a once great profession into a laughably impossible task. I still do not know how I was able to propel myself forward and achieve a steady living after that recession (we did not get any stimulus money in those days), but I did. And then my new acting career, the one I had miraculously built from nothing, was taken from me as well. A recession, briefly followed by a pandemic and now belief is just a joke to me. But before the pandemic I lived the life of a person who had given myself completely to god so that I could forget the cares of this world. It is arguably possible that this is what gave me the will to obtain a second acting career. And I know that many would ask, why not just do it again? Numb the pain with prayer and go work at Amazon to save up to be an actor. After all, that's what (enter whatever dumb celebrity) did. But that misses the point. Don't you see? I did that already. I devoted myself to god and he told me to take a hike. So, even if he is real, which I have no reason to think he is, god does not care about what happens to me. To be fair to the religious, most people do not care what happens to me either. And so both god and people are careless beings. So, you see, there is not point. You cannot win because you cannot please people or god. All that is left in meaninglessness. If I were still a believer, I might just declare a holy war on those who betrayed me for I would believe they had harmed one of god's children, that being me. But harm requires care. You have to care about someone to want to harm them. I was simply tossed aside like a soiled garment. I am nothing to people or god and so I have no faith in either. I am become nothing