Feeling better today.

The sunshine helps, I think. It boosts my mood. So does moving around more. It’s hard to convince myself that motion will make me fill better despite all the times it totally has, but that’s the depression talking.

And I don’t listen to that whiny bitch any more. Never tells me anything good anyway. It can shut the fuck up permanently.

I would stick its head under water and laugh at the bubble till it died if I knew how.

Therapy was good. I told my therapist about how depressed I have been lately, and why. The stuff I covered on Wednesday. Told him how writing it out helped, too.

Once more, thank you.

He was pretty appalled when I told him about how I had to shop for my own clothes. It really is appalling when you think about it. A lot of my childhood is appalling.

I made the “mistake” of saying that I thought some people had far worse parents than I. I have met a lot of people online with whom I would not swap. Parents that beat them, screamed insanity at them, belittled them, did everything they could to make sure their kid never thought, even for a second, that they were valued or loved.

But therapists do not like that kind of quantitative comparison. They hate to hear their patients say someone else had a worse childhood than themselves. To them, it sounds like you are minimizing your own pain.

And they are not wrong.

He also made the point that in some ways, neglect is worse than outright abuse. I’ve said as much here. Abuse at least gives you a relationship and an enemy. The person beating you is the Devil. You’ll kill them or get out or both. But when you are emotionally neglected like I was, there is no clear enemy.

My parents did fine on the basic level of parenting. I never went hungry. I had a birthday party every year. I got a winter jacket and boots when I needed them. Ditto school supplies.

And of course, my parents never told me they didn’t care about me, didn’t think I was worth anything, and wished I had never been born. To this day, I am sure they would deny ever even thinking those thoughts.

And I’d believe them.

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is how you act, and from a very early age, I was given the distinct impression that I was, at best, an afterthought.

I told my therapist that all my life, I have felt cared about, but not cared for. Caring about someone in a passive kind of way requires very little effort and absolutely no commitment.

The example I used was telling a friend that you had to move this weekend, and them saying “That sucks. Good luck with that. ”

They have definitely established that they care about you enough to be sad that you are doing to have to do something which sucks. But they are also not going to exert the tiniest bit of effort to actually help.

That is how it has been for me for my entire life. Teachers, parents, eve siblings sometimes. Everyone went on record as caring, but absolutely none of them were inclined to go even slightly out of their way to help me.

Couple that with the way my parents told me, both in words and in attitude, that I was never ever allowed to ask for anything, including help, and I was one abandoned kid.

But not in any ways that show, of course. Real abuse leaves no evidence.

So all through my childhood, I was terribly alone. Nobody was there for me. I had nobody I could rely on, nobody who had my back, nobody who was willing to do a damned thing to help the weird little fat kid.

You would think I would be able to go to my teachers, but nope. Their response was always the Platonic ideal of caring about but not caring for. They were technically sympathetic to my plight, but they made it clear they were not going to do anything about it. They just wanted me to go away.

That’s why I eventually gave up trying. It was really hard for me to ask for help in the first place with how my family had raised me. Having my head messed up by getting an answer that seemed sympathetic but didn’t actually help was too much.

I mean, what a trip to lay on a kid, right? From where I sit now, it was clear that they didn’t want to help me, but when I was elementary school age, I didn’t understand that. So I would go away from those encounters feeling like I had gotten what I wanted, but also knowing that I hadn’t, really.

Eventually, my cynicism caught up.

Looking back, I am amazed that I didn’t end up being a very bitter, angry, and possibly even dangerous person. I suppose the lack of a clear enemy helped with that. I had no idea I was being neglected as a kid.

However you are raised is normal to you.

It took a lot of years of adulthood for me to be able to articulate and understand what was wrong with my childhood. All the sort of surface things a kid could understand were there. I wasn’t beaten or verbally abused. I lived a normal middle class life. I had a roof overhead and food on the table and a place to lay my head.

I would not have been able to understand, let alone articulate, what was different about my childhood. And even if I had been able to do it, I probably would have blamed myself for it, like I did with everything else.

After all, I was the weird little fat kid who was way too smart for his own good. That meant there was something wrong with me, something that meant I would never fit in or be accepted.

Of course it was all my fault.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I question everything.

And Western culture says “Good! You should!”.

But you shouldn’t. You really, really shouldn’t.

Because that kind of questioning destroys faith and annihilates the possibility of feeling safe. If you question everything, absolutely everything, then there is no solid ground to stand on, no safe haven in the storm of life, no quiet place to lay your head and go to sleep.

It makes you afraid to truly believe anything at all. Even things you should believe in. You end up associating solid belief with being trapped or exposed (or both) and so the mind keeps moving, moving, moving and you can never truly rest.

People require faith. Why? Because their knowledge is finite. Faith covers the gaps. It doesn’t have to be faith in any deity, entity, or spirituality, but it has to be something.

That whole Socratic “know that you know nothing” thing can kill you if you take it too far. The human mind cannot withstand a true understanding of how little it knows versus all it does not without some kind of counterbalancing force.

Faith also drives motivation. Motivation hinges on belief that action leads to happiness, and there is only so rational such a belief can be. There has to be a solid core of belief that remains immune to the degradation of the intellect in order to keep things moving forward. Lack of such a core renders the individual wretchedly inert.

And what is the use of questions that keep you from “error” if they also leave you helpless and depressed? It’s easy to avoid life’s potholes if you aren’t moving.

The unexamined life might not be worth living, but to me, it’s 50/50 whether or not it’s happier.

Maybe it is worth it to make more stupid mistakes if it closes the gaping screaming gibbering hole in your soul. Maybe you need faith of some kind in order to make it over life’s potholes instead of getting stuck in them.

Maybe reason can give you directions, but only faith, at least in oneself, can give you horsepower.

That’s the trick, though, isn’t it? Faith in oneself. The questioning mind denies the possibility of faith and therefore requires proof before it believes in something.

But what proof can there be in a faithless person who finds themselves in the dank dark cage of depression? The illness itself makes it hard to be good enough to oneself to encourage any kind of belief in oneself. In general, it makes you treat yourself quite badly in many ways, and is therefore anathema to the sort of self-trust that leads to faith in oneself.

I mean, who could trust a person who treats you so badly?

Others find their faith externally. Faith in God, Allah, Yahweh, the Buddha, Ganesha, and so on fills all those nasty gaps in one’s spirit and allows a feeling of wholeness that will never be found in the land of universal questioning.

Even those who have abandoned the faith of their youth retain it within them. They simply disconnected it from the dogma that was needlessly attached to it by a religious organization with its own agenda.

The source is gone, but the shape of their faith, which is the shape of their gaps, remains, holding everything together.

And for them, questioning is liberating. For them, it is safe, because deep down they know that the important part of their faith remains and their questions can only free them of stifling dogma.

They don’t even have to keep believing in God.

And when you think of it, ruthless atheism requires faith as well. Specifically, faith that you can rip out all your false beliefs without mercy or consideration and just get by on whatever’s left.

That’s like thinking you can rip out all the parts of your car that you don’t like and get to work with whatever’s left.

In fact, Western nontheistic thought has an enormous blind spot when it comes to spiritual/emotional health. The underlying assumption is that if the soul doesn’t exist, neither does the spirit and therefore one can simply ignore the consequences of a headlong and heedless pursuit of the truth.

You know, because we are all rugged intellectuals who are too macho to admit some questions can hurt us.

And that is how I have lived my life. I have taken great pride in my ability to go right to the heart of the truth no matter what. In many ways, I see things more clearly than most people. I have developed and honed those perceptions over a lifetime, and in that way, my mind grows stronger constantly.

I learn. I think. I grow. I improve.

But what use is all that if there is no faith to propel me? The best engine in the world is useless without fuel. And the nourishment the soul needs cannot be found in the cold and barren world of questioning and smothered emotions.

So a lot of intellectual compatriots of mine are stuck in the same kind of dead end that I am. They only trust that which can be verified by reason, and to be frank, that is just plain not enough.

It’s like trying to live without eating. No matter what your philosophical objections to food are, you will starve without it. Even if you had a very experience with food and have every reason to mistrust it. Even if you now hate the food of your youth because it was forced down your throat and turned out to be not nearly as nutritious as you were told.

Even if all that uis true, you still have to go find food you like, or you will die.

Well a lot of us are dying inside from lack of spiritual food, and what’s more, a lot of those people refuse to even accept the idea that food might help, or even that food is a real thing that people actually need.

In many ways, faithlessness is as massively ignorant as any religious doctrine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.