I often find myself getting lost in my own thoughts.
To some, this may sound peaceful, relaxing, or therapeutic.
Personally, there is nothing I enjoy less than being left alone with my own mind.
As we all know, the mind is powerful. The mind is creative, and produces ideas. The mind is strong, and processes through crises or traumatic events. The mind is beautiful; it perceives everyday life and all of its radiant beauty. But the mind is also dark, and dark thoughts seem to have no limit.
I’m not certain when it happened exactly, but at some point in my life, I decided that I hate to be alone.
I strive to keep myself surrounded by people. I thrive on social interaction and good company. But why?
When I am alone, my mind has a field day. My mind tortures me with unanswerable questions, existential stress, and apprehension.
I wonder to myself: “why can’t you just think about happy things?”
And I answer to myself: “what even is happiness?”
My thoughts are in a constant battle between positivity and negativity.
I try to persuade myself to believe certain things such as: everything happens for a reason; heaven is real, God is real, we are all going to be okay, we all have a purpose, and death isn’t the end.
And then I find myself counter-arguing that none of this is truly known, nor logical!
I am a very logical, realistic, and fact-driven individual.
At the same time, I believe that there is much I have yet to see or understand. I believe that humans are perceptually limited and far from “all-knowing.” For this reason I am very intrigued by the idea of a higher being, the spirit realm, aliens, the afterlife, and so on.
It would be closed-minded to assume that these things do not exist just because we’ve never seen them with our own eyes.
So what is one to do about this?
When I was little, my mom made me go to church every Sunday. I hated church. It was full of elderly people who kissed me on the cheek, the music was boring, and I really had no idea what the preacher was even talking about.
When I turned 13, my mom gave me the privilege to choose whether or not I wanted to attend church. Naturally, I rebelled and never went back. There was nothing there for me.
I went on and lived my life. I thought it would all work out fine. Slowly but surely, my mental health took a turn for the worse. I became depressed, anxious, I feared being alone. I yearned to feel loved and cared for. I felt distant from the world, maybe even from myself. Even with two loving parents and a sister in the home, I just felt like something was missing.
Since then I have tried filling the void with many things.
I tried filling the void with boyfriends. I figured nothing could be better than having a human at my side to engage me in conversation, share ideas, reassure me, boggle my mind, and provoke new thoughts, but most importantly, to love me. What could be better than that? In my opinion having a significant other is one of the best experiences in life, but as I’ve learned, it won’t fulfill you completely.
The next stop on my journey to self-fulfillment was college. I relied on alcohol and parties to fulfill my happiness. I thought that as long as I was surrounded with people, I would never feel alone. I also thought that I could drown out my negative thoughts with alcohol. This proved to be false. I had some of my weakest moments in college. My mental health was at an all time low. I asked friends for advice and almost went to see a palm reader for answers. My mom steered me away from this as it did not fall under her own belief system, which leads me to the next piece of my journey.
After graduating college, I immediately moved out of my parent’s house. I decided it was time to take full control of my life and to find my true self. My boyfriend and I moved in together and things were going great. A few months in, we found ourselves in some pretty big trouble. I won’t go into details here, but he was facing 10+ years in prison for a crime he didn’t even realize he committed. I was overcome with disbelief, denial, anger, sadness, and above all, hopelessness. This was the end for me. I truly believed I would die of heartbreak if he went to prison. After processing this information and the possibilities of the situation, I knew there was only one place to turn. Ironically, it was the same place that I thought I’d never go back to: church.
This time around, I tried a new church. This church was lively, loud, and full of happy people. They must be doing something right, I thought. So we gave it a shot, and we didn’t half-ass it! We prayed, and prayed, and prayed. We went to morning services, evening services, and services on the weekdays. We went to see three different evangelists who came to Pittsburgh to preach about all of the good God has done and all of the proof of his existence. One night, an evangelist even “filled us with the Holy Spirit.” When this man touched us on the head, we fell to the ground and we were filled with laughter! We both experienced a cold feeling throughout our bodies that we couldn’t explain. It was the most out-of-this-world experience I’ve ever had. And in that moment, I knew there was more to life. I knew there was a higher being. I felt so light, so confident, and so loved. It was a high. A natural high. I didn’t feel depression for weeks. We kept up with it and we even asked our pastor to pray for us the night before the hearing. And guess what? My boyfriend who was facing ten felony charges, left the courtroom with nothing but community service and some court fees. Miracle? Maybe. Coincidence? Maybe. Decide for yourself.
Unfortunately, we fell away from our faith a few weeks after receiving our miracle. You could say we became lazy. We lacked the motivation to wake up on Sundays and go to church. I then found myself trying to rationalize what had happened to us. I tried to make sense of things that I didn’t fully understand, such as falling to the ground and laughing uncontrollably. I had doubts. My mom warned me that this was the devil at work. Christians believe that mental illness can be an attack of the enemy (this is stated in the Bible). I didn’t like this idea. My psyche rejected it. I didn’t want to believe that there was an evil entity attacking me. To me that's insane and unfair! But then I realized I can’t pick and choose what I believe based on what makes me most comfortable. According to the Bible, both God and the devil exist, so if I believe in one, I must believe in the other.
This allowed for a whole new spectrum of thoughts to cultivate inside my mind. Good versus evil. Light versus darkness. One cannot exist without the other. It all started to add up. I became enraged at this idea. And again, I rejected it. I convinced myself that there probably is no God, nor a devil, because that’s what was most comfortable for me to believe. Then it dawned on me, maybe that’s how faith actually works. We decide what we want to believe in or we are born into a belief system, and then we just believe.
It has become very clear to me that no one person, nor group of people, could possibly have all of the answers. How could every religious faith be correct at the same time? What if every faith had a piece of the truth? What if faith is just something humans came up with to stay positive and hopeful? I personally have never finished reading the whole bible myself, so I can’t say that the Bible doesn’t make sense. In fact, I’m sure it makes a lot of sense if so many people believe it and live by it. But I’m also sure that other religions make sense to the people who practice them. Hence “we believe what makes us comfortable.” But at the same time, personal experience is the number one piece of evidence that sways a person’s faith. And I’ve had my own experience. I literally fell to the ground and laughed like a crazy person in front of a bunch of strangers. Am I taking it for granted? Is the devil actually persuading me that God is not real? Confusion took over my mind. I feel guilty for falling away from faith after receiving a miracle. But a tiny piece of my mind won’t stop saying “don’t be ridiculous, life is about chance.”
These thoughts continued to consume me. I needed to know the truth. But how could I possibly figure it out? I decided to open my mind to other supernatural possibilities and to stop worrying about my spiritual faith for a while. It was exhausting and driving me insane. So I began to fill my mind with new questions. Are aliens real? If they are, does that mean God isn’t real? What about ghosts? The Bible doesn’t mention either. Most Christians believe that the Bible tells us everything we need to know. So are Christians not supposed to speculate on things beyond their understanding? Is the Bible created to protect us? What if we are meant to trust in it and not question anything else for our own good? We obviously aren’t created to understand everything, but why? What is being hidden from us? I’ve watched numerous documentaries on alien encounters and I’ve heard some pretty serious ghost stories from people in my life who have no reason to lie to me. Do I believe all of these stories? Well, do you believe everything you hear? Most likely not. But let me ask you this, do you believe all of the stories in the Bible? Why or why not? Why do humans tend to have doubt?
I have always based my beliefs on evidence. It just so happens that I am one person in this whole wide world who lacks alien or ghost-related evidence. Does this prove that ghosts or aliens don’t exist? Of course not. There are also many people in this whole wide world who do truly believe in these things, so who’s to say they didn’t really see them?
Do I sound crazy? Probably. Paranoid? Maybe a little. Or maybe I just have “anxiety.”
According to webmd.com, I experience many symptoms of anxiety on a daily basis. But what does this term mean?
Anxiety or not, I don’t want to believe in things just because they make me comfortable. And I don’t want to not believe in things just because I haven’t seen them with my own two eyes. Humans tend to fear the unknown. I definitely fear the unknown. And unfortunately, I can’t turn these thoughts off.
What really happens when we die? Does anyone have legitimate proof of this? When I am alone, these are the places my mind wanders to. Do these thoughts correlate with anxiety? According to webmd, researchers don’t know exactly what causes anxiety, but they think it could be linked to “faulty circuits in the brain.” Do these faulty circuits create an ability to think for yourself? Is there a connection between “mental illness” and lack of faith? For me, they seem to fall hand in hand.
I am not writing this to persuade, nor to alarm anyone. I am writing this to provoke new ideas in your mind. Maybe I’m writing this to see how alone I really am in the way that I think. But what I really want, in the wise words of Lorin Ashton, is for you to “think for yourself, and question.”
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