I have sent my e-mail to the bishop and now it's time to make a formal announcement.

The antidepressants are starting to work, but I feel like I've hit a crossroads in my life. Things are very different from the way they were when I began attending services at my local gnostic church almost two years ago and it's inevtiable that I feel different about life. I'm starting to revisit things I thought I was through with. I'm starting to engage the world more than I did before. I find I simply don't feel like I have the same priorities I did when I started this journey and that's a difficult thing to admit. My current priority in life now has become embracing and adapting to the recent tidal wave of change, both in my personal life and the world at large.

I really did want to wait this out and keep trying, but I've been on hiatus for almost three months already and the feeling hasn't gone away. It's only gotten stronger.

I feel like the priesthood is not something I'm ready for right now and I don't think I'll be able to keep my commitments as a lay server. I may attend mass again at some point but right now I'm in a very weird, unfamiliar place in my life. I feel like for the last five years I've been dead and I've only just come back to life and begun to feel things I thought I couldn't feel any more.

I think I might feel differently if this was something I could devote all of my energy to without having to worry about the basic necessities of life. However, the priesthood and the years of training leading up to it are all unpaid. I know it can't be helped as the organization is very small, but this was always something that made it feel more like a hobby than a professional commitment. The distraction of having to find another way of becoming financially stable was more than I could reconcile with the amount of time I would need to devote to the work at hand.

I'm also having to face the fact that my body rebels hard against getting up early. Between a delayed sleep phase (clinically diagnosed) and a perpetually sour stomach brought on by anxiety, I've often found myself in excruciating pain and fatigue during the mass (I've already collapsed once). Being plagued by problems that medicine doen't seem to really help with is probably the final blow.

Maybe if I can get myself financially and emotionally stable and find some competent help for the remaining medical issues I face, I might reconsider. But this will be a matter of years, not months. I'm resigning for the foreseeable future effective immediately.