Closing Doors

I was just reading an interview by a friend the other day, and something her interviewee said really struck me. It went along the lines of: At some point, you'll have to choose and you'll have to close doors, and that's what's so painful.

Trust me, I don't handle pain well. But there's the rub, isn't it? One day we'll all be 30 and we'll have mid-life crises and we'll wonder how we ended up doing the things we ended up doing. We'll realise that in all of the ten years before the three-oh, we'd have made all of our choices and closed all of our other doors. And with all that post-choosing, the pain will be there. The pain of what-ifs, of it-could-have-beens - I cannot believe how I haven't been able to see that that's what's been plaguing me for so long. I am putting off the closing of doors, fighting to 'keep my options' open, standing for nothing.

No. That's not even totally right. I'm not putting off the closing of doors, I've just been unable to accept that I have had to close them at all. And I have been running away, running and running and running because it's all I know to do, trusting the fantasy that when I escape, I can step through a crack in space-time and emerge in a parallel universe where there is nothing that I fear, because there is nothing that matters.

Lots of us are emotionally stunted. And spiritually stuck. For so long, I have been unable to identify that gnawing hollowness that envelopes me the moment I wake up, the moment I fall asleep, and the moments in-between. I hardly exaggerate. When people try to tell me it's a spiritual emptiness, it is all I can do to not hurl the words back at them.

You don't know what it feels like! I want to say. You don't know what it means to be so dysfunctionally desperate! 

And I want to shove their Bibles and their God-inspired words back into their outstretched arms and I want to continue, God wants too much! God is too simple for my complex life! God is man-created, God is only a belief of belief, God takes too bloody long! 

Then I start to intelletualize God, and God becomes a concept that reminds me too much of Positive Affirmation, something else I want to hurl back at the self-help industry. Maybe God is just a spiritual version of me, or a faith of faith (and maybe it is a faith of faith that warrants the miracles, rather than God), or God is a Jumanji of Coincidences with a really large round table that keeps shifting itself to present new coincidences.

I know what you'd say. I've heard it all before. It's because I'm making my intellect out to be God, or I'm putting myself above God, or I'm not allowing myself to be vulnerable enough and believe, for just a split second, that He could really exist, and that His existence could be the most astounding and beautiful thing there ever was.

And then I look back over my last sentence and yes, God could really exist. See what happens when I use positive words and positive feelings and Positive Affirmation?

I am truly going insane. I am chasing my own tail and going insane and I'm still chasing.