Play No More

What's wrong? What's amiss?
I'd be engrossed in something – some book, some study goal, some boy – and then I’d always be the one left. It’s like being kicked out of a shared house, and suddenly you’re on the street, your packed bags on either side of you. There are taxis that slow, windows scrolled down, drivers asking you if you need a lift. You shake your head. No, thank you. Because where would you go?

You could try to scale Mount Rushmore. Maybe try out the scene at Hollywood, just for fun, just for a little while, even if everyone thinks it’s superficial. You could aim to be the next best journalist, win the next award, try freelancing for Greenpeace, save a hectare of trees. But by now you know, you should know, that wherever you go, you take your emptiness with you. And it gnaws.

For a while I convinced myself I was burnt out. I fought too hard, I aimed too high; of course I was burnt out. I’d had enough of the chasing and working and one-minded ready-set-goals, and now my candle was out.

In hindsight, burning out was just another label for what I think really happened as I found myself in my mid-teens, and later in my late teens. Two things happened. Firstly, I’d reached a crisis that I didn’t understand and didn’t want to admit, because the chances of resolving it were zero. It was a spiritual crisis that still plagues me today. I was constantly on the hunt for something, any obsession, that could give me purpose and vision, but I was beginning to see how fruitless and temporary they were, and how I would have to start another cycle when the last one ended. Secondly, I’d realized, however unconsciously, that I had no sense of self. I based who I was entirely on my surroundings, on my personal achievements, on the people I hung out with, on what I could or couldn’t do, what I could or couldn’t appear as.

I don’t like this game so much anymore. I am fully aware that it is artificial, and rather spiritually devastating. But, as you see, I’m stuck.  

The Abandonment of God

Let me tell you exactly what’s happened to me in the past couple of years –

I’ve lost.

That’s what it feels like, and that’s what is true. When I think about what I’ve achieved in the past two and a half years, I draw a blank. If that isn’t scary, it damn well should be. I have been ebbing and flowing, going where the tide takes me, sporadically lifting my arms in the air and saying, Whatever You wish, God.

But I never trusted God. Not in the way that is wholesome or healing. I’d bargain with Him, plead for A-stars, beg for unconditional forgiveness when I was at fault. I’d be on my knees, my heart on my sleeve, be terribly exposed, and experience a quiet cleansing, a quiet peace. Then I’d stand and screw it up.

I don’t know what it is. Part of me has always believed in God, another part of me is sure that God is only my inner self and therefore not God. I don’t know what I want, but I know I’m wanting. And in all honesty? God let me down. He abandoned me and left me to hurt, and gave me no answers. I spend days and weeks and months in agony, alternating between praying and being very angry. Angry because He doesn’t sweep in and help, angry because He doesn’t help me resolve doubts, angry because I still find no one by my side, that I’m still alone.


In the past couple of years, however, something worse, if not the worst, has taken place. I am now completely deficient. At first I'd thought that it was necessary to peel away my willfulness so that I can be open for some sort of spirituality. What I have learned is that, really, I've peeled away whatever little I had left.

It's not in writing, but I've just waged a verbal four-letter war.

Why Is There No One Else?

No one else, in terms of searching and being fed up with the search.

I do sometimes wonder whether it's a personal defect that I seem to so easily turn my back and look the other way whenever Faith gets too tricky. I say this in a most polite way, even if my mind is a raging ball of confusion. Confusion and frustration and fed-up-ness.

Do I care if I never come to know, to follow, an organized religion? Should I care?

How is it possible to want to believe so badly, and not believe at all?

And in believing, how much of it is really brainwashing?

Makes me wish I was brainwashed as a kid, and brainwashed with a certain ferocity. Maybe then I wouldn't be sitting here wondering, asking, and finding answers that piss me off.

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.

On Spirituality

Lately, I have become more interested in spirituality and the living bases of faith and trust. This is, in part, due to a long-standing personal struggle that I have been facing, which has been catalysed by a path of solution that I once took on. I say 'once' because it has since stopped being my solution, but I still believe it to be a path I needed to take in order to reach a place where I can now even start to believe in something that isn't myself.

It is difficult to describe exactly what the words 'faith' and 'trust' mean to me. I have been programmed to keep people at a distance with a ten-foot steel pole, and I whack everybody who tries to reach within that locus. Without trying to be melodramatic, I have a soul sickness so intense that only the very determined or the very ruthless can get past, and even then it is within moments of my consent. When I talk of emptiness, it is just talk, but then I talk of hollowness, and it's like this pit within me that still hasn't stopped digging itself out.

I have learned that I am an incredibly dishonest person. I will never forget this, because it's one of the most valuable lessons I've learnt this year. Dishonesty is what cuts me off from the people I most love, it's how I manipulate and scheme and go in search of a material achievement that continually trips me up, it's what eats me so completely from the inside that I'm only left with a shell. It's my ten-foot steel pole.

On to my topic for the day ... So what does it mean to be spiritual? Is it being 'in the moment', as so many have suggested?

I don't deny that 'living in the moment' could be part of the grand solution. But for me, I just don't think it's enough, because when I'm suddenly forced to stop and stand still, I don't know why I do it all: why I go through every day, why I try for internships for some future-job that I'm not all that interested in, why I'd put myself through hard work when I have only been discontented with any results.

If I start to believe in God, am I weak? It's like throwing myself into the sea without knowing there's a boat nearby. How strong can my faith be if all I've ever known to believe in is Positive Affirmation? Even then, Positive Affirmation fails because it only depends on me.

As you can see, I am in the in-between. I am frightfully aware that 'me' is not enough to give me purpose, but I still need to let go, and keep letting go, to trust that there has always been something else keeping me alive all this while.

I suppose my greatest question is this: What if I throw all caution to the wind and believe, and believe and believe and believe, and then find out there wasn't anything to believe in in the first place?