Came across this on my YouTube feed and fell in love :

Enjoy the fall.

That is definitely my brand of emo adjacent metal. Speaks to my pain in a voice just enough like my own to be comforting.

Any more than that and it would get creepy.

Feeling relatively okay today. Experiencing serial sleepiness, which can be frustrating because it means that I nap, get up for an hour or so, then I am sleepy again.

I’m trying to remain Zen about it and not get all pissed off and start whining about how I don’t want to sleep I want to DO STUFF.

Oh yeah? Since when? Admit it, what I mean is that I want to play video games.

And seeing as sleeping is actually marginally more productive (at least I get rest out of it), “missing out” on the “opportunity” to play my games seems less than tragic.

Then again, it could be said that progress in video games is the only kind of progress my life makes. Everything else suffers the slow but constant death of stasis.,

Life isn’t supposed to stay the same. It’s grow, or die.,

Guess which one I’ve chosen,

It’s so hard for me to truly imagine life outside the shelter of my video game addiction. There are all kinds of more enriching things I “could” be doing – but I can’t.

Not really. Not without one hell of a lot of pain and fear and change. Not without a leap of faith that seems far beyond my capacities right now.

I don’t even have any faith, let alone enough to power so much as a tiny hop.

I am not capable of belief without evidence. I get the idea – some things are believed not because they are “true” but because it is better to believe them.

That’s what faith boils down to, in the end.

And that make perfect sense to me until I try to imagine myself being part of that.

I can’t. I just plain can’t.

From the point of view of the faithless, faith is insanity. As far as I can tell consciously, everything I believe to be true is backed up by a reason to believe it, and all those reasons intertwine to make my understanding ot the world.

There are gaps. After all, not even I know everything. The difference is that I don’t fill those gaps with faith. I leave them open, no matter what.

Which is all noble and rugged and shit, but the truth is that a cold wind blows through those gaps and causes a deep existential pain like a toothache of the soul and that kind of thing can really take a toll on your spirit.

This is why so many atheists are angry, bitter people. It has nothing to do with the people of faith in the world and everything to do with the fact that science cannot possibly provide the kind of solace, strength, comfort, and all the rest that faith can.

Blaming that pain on the religious isn’t an act of principle.

It’s an act of envy, and you know it.

More after the break.

Faith and belief

Yup, I’m still going on about that.

I feel like it is a very important issue in my growth and recovery. Like I have reached not a crossroads but an offramp, one that seemingly leads off the edge of a cliff, and I have to somehow find a way to hit that ramp with enough speed to get me to the other side of the cliff even though I can’t even see the other side from here.

Or maybe I am supposed to be able to hit the ramp and just…. fly away. Leave the whole practical issue behind and soar above it all. Fly off into the sunset.

I really have no idea. This is very unfamiliar territory to me.

And the thing is, it feels like everyone else can fly like that without even thinking about it. They can cross bridges I can’t see and that won’t be there if I try to cross and they do it so naturally and so easily that they have no idea why I am stuck on the wrong side of the gap, staring over the edge of the cliff, trying hard to figure out how the hell they do it.

But I know that’s wrong. I can feel my spirit banging on the bars of the cage of supposed “logic” and “reason” it has been trapped in for so very long and trying to tell me that it is dying in there and I have to find a way to let it out.

Because my “rational” point of view might have the virtue of being internally and externally consistent with all verifiable evidence and is therefore “true” in that limited sense, but that doesn’t mean it is what is best for my soul.

And that is, in the end, where my illness lies. Not in my bad brain chemistry or my traumatic past or the endless convolutions of my tortured mind but at the very root of my being down in what I call my soul.

There is a terrible rot in that core of mine, one that stems from that primary trauma of being raped when I was but four years old, That horrific act left a wound too big to heal and so I have had to live with it and deal with it my entire life.

That wound has festered in me and infected and toxified so much of my being that it is hard to know where I end and the trauma begins.

But it is not me. I am not my trauma. I am not my pain. I am not my wound.

They are just bad things I have to deal with, nothing more.

They do not define who I am, even if they sometimes seem to stretch from horizon to horizon to horizon all around.

There is far more to life than they can encompass, and I will reach out to that bigger and better world and let it tow me out of this cesspit.

I am not alone. There are people here with me, even when I can’t feel them. They love me and want me to be well and wish they knew what they could do to help me.

Don’t despair, my dearest ones. It may seem like I am on my only lonely little planet somewhere far off in space, and that I don’t even know you love me.

But I do know. I can’t always feel it due to the sickness in my soul, but I do know you are out there and I want desperately to be there with you but for now it is too cold, far too cold, for me to join you.

But some day I will.

And in the meantime, you give me a warm and welcoming home to strive for.

There is something wonderful waiting for me when I finally thaw out.

And that wonderful thing, dear friends, is you.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.