Troubleshooting: Faith

I never had faith. I remember certain episodes in my childhood, which at the very least had something to do with it, if not the reasons themselves. The older I get the more my childhood feels as if it were a lucid dream of sorts. It feels like I experienced that whole portion of my life last night, and now I can only make out bits and pieces, though those bits and pieces are very vivid.

I can recall that when I was younger I was disappointed many times. At a young age I developed a strong sensitivity and desire for pleasure. It’s no wonder that I would come to be highly disposed to addiction once I came of age. I longed for pleasure like I was starved of it. I longed for cartoons, and new toys, and parties, and cakes, and candy, and friends, and laughter, and sleepovers, and Disney world. I needed it. I suspect that this was because I always felt slightly unhappy or unfulfilled and so I kept having to feed that emptiness with anything that I found pleasure in. There was a point that when I perceived pleasure over the horizon I would get terribly excited and expectant. I would look forward to that pleasure. For example, if my parents said they would take my sisters and me to a movie on Saturday, I would spend the rest of the week salivating over seeing Hercules. But if for whatever reason my parents had to cancel I would take it extremely hard. Like I said, I was awfully sensitive. I remember the feeling of disappointment after unrestraint faith that whatever I was looking forward to would come to fruition would fall through. I hated it.

After a few years of these kinds of disappointments I developed a particular hypothesis. My hypothesis was that if I allowed myself to look forward to something it would surely not happen. And so at an early age I became a pessimist. Of course at the time I didn’t think of it as pessimism. I thought of it as a sort of universal reverse psychology. I believed that since I was raised in the church, but, in my opinion, was a very naughty Christian, God was ready to punish me at every turn. I reasoned that God would take from me what I wanted the most, be it a day at the movies, or a particular Christmas present. And so I felt that if I got excited about something in my future, it would tip Him off and He would take it from me as punishment for not being a proper Christian boy. Instead I thought I would trick Him by continually telling myself things like, “It’ll never happen”, “It probably won’t work out.” This served two purposes, it could either successfully trick God and my little pleasure would fly under the radar and find me “to my surprise” or else if it didn’t happen, my expectations didn’t have far to plummet and I could console myself with an apathetic, “I knew it wouldn’t work out” Interestingly, one of my parents’ method of punishment was to take from me something they knew I valued when I misbehaved.

That mindset followed me throughout my life. It certainly played a substantial part in one of the other headlining issues in my life, relationships. My confidence with the girls I like is a close cousin to my reverse psychological pessimism. Rather than to speak to a girl who I would like to date confidently and expectantly, I speak to her as if she would never want anything to do with me. Because I believed she wouldn’t. I believed that because I liked her, she would automatically not like me. So to me it was already a lost cause from the moment I perceived my attraction to her, and my efforts to talk to her were a mere formality. This is an obvious form of self-sabotage. I still believed for most of my teenage and adult life that God was waiting at every turn to compromise all of my undertakings for anything that I wanted. This was my way of coping with Christian Guilt I believe almost every child who is raised Christian but doesn’t “follow the rules” harbors. And so, when I would be politely (or otherwise) rejected by one girl or another, I would immediately think to myself “I knew it…” and several things would happen in my mind: my self-confidence would decrease, my pessimism would increase, my disesteem for God would increase, and my fear of loneliness would increase.

My pessimism for all things that had to do with my future grew. By high school, it was certainly pioneered by my relationship with women, but certainly not limited to it. I felt that most anything I would get excited about would not work out and so as I grew older I became paranoid. I excelled at school because for the most part I could control the outcome. I found comfort in the first half of college through this kind of control. I knew that if I knew the material in my classes inside and out, I would ace the exam, and receive guaranteed pleasure. This I did. Of course there were times where I fell short, but for the most part, I rarely felt threatened about the future of my grades. It wasn’t until law school that my, nearly religious by this time, pessimism in academia was provoked again. The subjective grading system of Law school put me at the total mercy of fate, and in my experience that never goes well. Unfortunately, “I know I won’t get good grades” is not the thought one wants facing an employment season that one has been told is entirely dependent upon grades. Employment, by derivation, was also out of my hands, and so I was naturally convinced that I was not going to get a job, only for the fact that I wanted one. My mom would work to calm me down as I mourned not getting a job 8 months in advance of my first interview. She would remind me that everything would be alright, and that God was in control. Upon her saying this, I would become all the more inconsolable—she’s right, He is in control. And since I can remember, that’s been my greatest fear. To me, He never gives me anything I want. I wanted to go to Tulane, and a hurricane destroys New Orleans and I go to FSU, I want to go to Harvard and have a perfect college campaign, then I fall flat on my face at the finish line with the LSAT, I want a girlfriend and instead I get a million girl friends, all who tell me I will one day have a very lucky girlfriend. He’s going to ruin this for me too, I thought.

So it would seem that my misgivings were not merely me protecting myself from disappointment, but an all out mistrust of God derived from the belief when I was a child that God was going to punish me by taking away anything that he perceived I desired. But later this expanded to God actively punishing me by allowing the things I most fear to happen. Using another relationship example, if I did get a date with a girl I was interested in, I would not find relief. I would become even wearier. Because I feared that something was going to go wrong to ruin the evening. I developed a this-is-too-good-to-be-true mentality in addition to the others. In my first year at law school, aware at how fortunate I was to have been accepted to Columbia, I felt it all to be too-good-to-be-true, and was terrified that I would somehow manage to fail out or else be kicked out. Another area of my life that this has manifested itself in is in my crippling fear of flying. Since I was a child I have had a ghastly fear of falling to my death. I remember reading the myth of Icarus in middle school and how profoundly it affected me when I learned that he plummeted to his death. I remember having a dream in middle school of being on a tall tower with some friends and one of my friends losing her footing and falling over the railing, and before I could grab her hand, she would fall to her death with a blood curdling scream that would have me wake up in a sweat, breathing heavily, scared to death. I had that dream twice. To this day I can’t watch news footage of 9/11. Despite the statistics of how safe flying is, for a long time I was convinced that every time I boarded a plane, it would be my last time boarding a plane. I believed that for the simple fact that I felt that falling would be the worst way to die, it would be the perfect punishment for me. And the fact that I had no control over the flying of the plane, to me, was the final indication that it was certain to happen. It wasn't long before I believed that I could never let my guard down. It was bad enough that I was not living like God said I should, to allow myself to become comfortable would be outright cocky. I learned to never relax, for I knew that the moment I did I would provoke such a reaction from God that I was sure He would never let me forget. Indeed the times I did allow myself to get comfortable in life I would perceive a catastrophe to happen that would scare me out of my comfort and back to vigilantly waiting for the next tragedy. This was especially true when things were going well for me. I thought that at least if I was anxious and stressed all the time He would take pity on me. So it was that I would never allow myself to relax and "trust" that things would be alright. It took tranquillizers to get me to and from Asia the first time I went, because I refused to allow myself to relax and trust that I would arrive in one piece.

By law school I had figured most of this out, though I don’t believe I had put most of the pieces together yet. I remember confiding in Mike that I always felt as if “something bad was about to happen to me”. And this could be in any form, physically, emotionally, and most dreaded of all, spiritually. This had caused a number of mental maladies within me. I mentioned earlier it led to low confidence in any undertaking I took, but it also led to chronic stress. I would stress about everything as I worried about all that could (and what I perceived would inevitably) go wrong. Of course this made me miserable on the inside. On the outside no one would be able to tell, I made sure of that. It was always important to me that everyone perceive me as perfect. Occasionally, though, people would tell me that I stress too much or that I’m too anxious. I couldn’t explain to them that God and I had been fighting for a couple of decades and that I have been looking over my shoulder waiting for His next move. They would think I was crazy.

So how is this resolved?

In a number of ways: organized and laid out here into words, it’s tempting to believe that this should have been easily recognized and dealt with at a much earlier age. But I must remind you that all of these feelings developed subtly over several years and manifested in dark feelings, not black and white words. It wasn’t readily apparent to me that my phobia of flying and my low confidence when talking to girls I was romantically interested in had a common denominator. In accordance with human nature, rather than turn around and face the demons chasing me, confront, and resolve them, I opted instead to push forward and try to act like a person who didn’t have very severe and debilitating emotions and beliefs. And Alcohol and Tobacco went a long way in helping my acting.

It’s certainly not easy to read what I have written here. It’s sad. It makes me sad that I lived like that. It makes me feel like a terrible person for allowing my mind to become so run down with lies and faulty thinking. But I have learned that the first step to growth is understanding and accepting that we will all emerge from our childhoods with unique issues that will show themselves in our adulthood. For the large part, much of the things that went on in our childhood were not necessarily our fault. And so as adults, we just have to suck it up and look under the hood to see what’s wrong. It may not be pretty, but if we wish to lead better lives as better people the only choice is to pull over and pop the hood. If we attempt to continue driving like the engine light isn’t furiously blinking we put ourselves and others in danger as we risk crashing.

To me the solution to this problem is clear. I need to develop faith. It begins with acknowledging that the pessimistic mindset I developed when I was younger to defend against disappointment is no longer required. At this age, I can understand that sometimes, often times, things don’t go our way. When that happens we’re presented with an opportunity to practice flexibility. But I can also understand that it wasn’t long before I began to selectively perceive events in my life, focusing on what didn’t go my way and simply overlooking the innumerable amount of times things went just as I would have liked.

The second and most important element to my pessimism, and what makes using the term “faith” appropriate, is my view of and relationship with God. My relationship with God remains the center of every issue I have thus far discovered. Looking at this entry alongside previous entries in which I mention my relationship with God, we can see the problem. I felt that I was leading a life outside of the “rules” of Christianity and therefore was “bad”. Also, my perception of God when I was younger, as with the vast majority of people who grow up in Christian homes, was one of a strict God who punishes. That’s what happens when one learns about Hell in Sunday school. At such a young age, no matter how the Sunday school teacher explains it, all that a child is going to remember is “bad”, “sin”, ”evil”, “Satan” and “Hell”. I came to know God as someone who was watching me and not pleased with what He saw. I rebelled from Church because I found it suffocating, not because I didn’t believe in God. I have never been an atheist. And so even when I was living as I pleased, I was very aware that God was watching me. And so when I found myself in positions where He was in control or where I needed His help, I expected that He would use it as an opportunity to punish me. So in that way I did have faith— faith that he would punish me for my rebellious lifestyle.

Many would be interested to know that the lack of confidence that they perceive in me and befuddles them is not so much a lack of confidence in my own abilities, but a lack of confidence that my abilities will have any weight on the outcome, as I felt for a long time life was fixed for me to lose.

I mentioned a couple entries earlier that once I entered college I underwent a time of spiritual growth and transformation. Indeed, I learned I knew not the first thing about Christianity, and after much research, fell in love with it—like falling in love with a friend you’ve known since middle school and never noticed much until you actually took the time to get to know her in college. My understanding of God was transformed as I learned about a real loving and understanding God. And for a while much of the weight of my pessimism was lifted from me as I saw the world through new eyes. But as I also said in that entry, something would always come along to distract me from God and all of this spirituality business, and I would turn all of my attention to her. It was always a “her”. I would follow her to my own destruction. And the negative feelings that would result from my relationship with her would fully revitalize my pessimism. I would blame God that it didn’t work out. And spend the next year or so mad at Him, not talking to Him. In that year I would forget all about the loving God I learned about, convincing myself that I was going through a “phase”, and regress back to my primitive belief in a God who was going to punish me for again wandering off the path in search of “worldy pleasures”.

This has happened several times. This is the first time I have been able to see all of this though. To no-one’s surprise, it was always me and not God behind my misery. I believed what I wanted to believe, and Gods nature never changed. I would say I wanted to go to Tulane and Hurricane Katrina’s timing ruined my dream, but I would neglect to reflect on the fact that I was able to stay close to my best friend by going to FSU and but for going to FSU I would have never found my love of languages—I would have been a philosophy major. I talk about not getting to go to Harvard, but I fail to think about how I was accepted to Columbia with an LSAT score that left much to be desired. I talk about lost loves and rejections, and I gloss over the fact that it was my own lack of confidence that turned many girls off to me, and a vast number of those girls would never have been right for me anyway, and that at a certain point I was just going through the motions and didn’t have an affinity for many of the girls I flirted with. I go on about getting a B- my first semester of law school and stop just short of saying I was offered a job that I, by no means, earned.

I have never died in a plane crash.

The truth is, my whole life, God was looking out for me, and I twisted all that He did into a sob story to protect my pessimistic beliefs. I believe I did this because that mindset became so ingrained in me that I felt like it was a part of me, and secondly, I hate change. Also I would have no one to blame for all of the disappointments I have had. I would have no one to direct my anger toward. And being angry for not getting my way is far easier than accepting the life truth that life isn’t something we have in our back pocket— we will often not get our way and no one will be to blame. And I would have to admit that I was wrong. That I spent the majority of my life believing something that was dead wrong. And it would be just as irresponsible to blame the church. No one in the church had the intention of driving me, very literally, crazy. To be sure, my sisters, to my knowledge, have never struggled with the kind of pessimism and depression that I have though we three went to church at least twice a week together. Perhaps they didn’t even harbor a Christian guilt.

Thank God that I have finally learned this lesson. I am ready to perform life-changing surgery. I am going to remove a cancer thats roots run deep so that I may live life without this pessimism. I am excited to look forward to my future confidently and expectantly without wincing. Most of all, I am ready to learn about faith, faith in myself and faith in God. It involves relearning much of how I perceive reality and I expect it to be painful, frightening, and, at times, frustrating, but I know that I will come out on the other side transformed for the better.