I have not felt much desire to write recently—well, no, that’s actually a lie. I have berated myself for not posting anything here. I have written several fragments and have been reading some books for research on a piece I am working on. And yet, I still haven’t felt any true drive to finish them. At least not when I am in these fits, experiencing a crisis of faith—of doubt—not in the religious sense, but in my relationships with others and the world itself.
I know that if I finally sit down at my computer to write, it will have melancholic stains that won’t rub out. Sometimes I just have to say screw it and bleed out these feelings. I blame years of watching Clarissa Explains It All and Lizzie McGuire.
Half the time I’m writing, it feels like a teenage girl wailing against the storm of duplicity and injustice, or like some sort of Dostoevsky fever dream—instead of some mysterious secret third thing.
I just have no idea what to do with myself. Reading the news leaves me feeling helpless and terrified. Headlines that should be something from science fiction are trending. And the bad guys get standing ovations and spend millions to prop up false puppets.
I want to grab people by their collars and scream in their faces that innocents are dying in horrific ways. I am partly to blame. I know about cobalt mines and ongoing genocides that echo the Holocaust.
I can practice cut-and-paste coping strategies that my therapist emails me—ones she steals from Facebook. Ignorance is another option, as is distraction. One can only replay the Mass Effect Trilogy and Space Marine II so many times.
Otherwise, I am burying my head in books, underlining paragraphs, and once again feeling even lonelier because I want to communicate the necessity of what is being said. The unsayable.
We are all holding on as best as we can. In the words of Sheldon Solomon, most people are “petri dishes of anxiety,” creatures inhabiting two worlds: the divine and the animal. Ernest Becker’s “gods with anuses.”
My defense mechanisms are working overtime. If I listen to Andrew Huberman and his new priestly class of neuroscientists, I just need to dopamine fast. I have an environmental mismatch as well as a spiritual crisis.
I can come up with a laundry list of problems, all that may ring true. However, diagnosis is not the issue. It is only being able to cope and pray that one day I will wake up without a prefrontal cortex.
I normally try to sprinkle in some remnants of optimism, even some fortune-cookie wisdom, but tonight I’m falling short.
Once again, all I can do is dust off my keyboard, break out my journal, and pray to all the gods, old and new, for some sort of pardon. I want to return my ticket along with Ivan Karamazov, but I lack the constitution to do so.
I know that less cynicism and more attunement to beauty, compassion, and belonging are ways out—or at least through this mess. I hold the key to both heaven and hell, as the Buddhists claim.
I have been neglecting the ways that I commune with my own daemon, with Christ and the Godhead. If I allow myself to vocalize what is compounding all of this resignation, maybe I can take that Kierkegaardian leap—and not fall short. Anything is better than cosplaying as a Lotus-eater.
When I squander my potential and let the demons win, that is when I feel at my worst. I must hold fast and realize that at any moment I can pick up the pen, endure this deafening silence of God and excruciating loneliness, and come out the other end with some trinket. Otherwise, I fear that I will let the darkness win. My intrusive thoughts are unkind, and frankly, I do not want a pair of grippy socks in my future.
Thank you so much for writing, for sharing Christopher
Glad to see you’re writing again man! Been a while since I saw a piece of your work come across my emails.