My Faith and My Insanity
I need to cleanse my soul, but I’m afraid the debris is hiding a multitude of madness
I swore off god at quite a young age, after my grandmother died of non-hodgkins lymphoma I was adamant that a man so nasty to cause my nanan so much suffering couldn’t possibly exist, how could he, better yet, how dare he. Then ideals of two personalities, one dark and evil and the other good and light existing in one man made more sense, like he couldn’t control his impulses to hurt people but his good side made up for it by providing us with cute animals and babies and grass and ice cream.
Then at age 21 I went through a nervous breakdown that turned into a full blown episode of mania, and I had never felt closer to god. Whenever I was alone I felt there was a presence around me all the time, I started opening the bible at random pages and automatically thinking that particular verse was directed to me, like the almighty himself had open the pages just where I needed them and forced my eyes to the exact spot that made the most sense to my life. He was obviously sending me messages on how I should act. I had a profound feeling of connection to everything around me. I could smell better, I was adamant my eyesight was improving (of which it was, I had my eyes tested at that time) I was scared shitless and elated.
I have never felt as cleansed and as pure in my whole entire life.
Yet everyone around me was telling me I was mad. Nothing I was feeling was correct and nothing I was sure of was correct because they hadn’t felt it themselves and only people that have medication and can’t function in our society feel these things. I didn’t want to be lumbered as crazy and one of “those” people so I shook myself off and I snapped out of it.
And the feelings disappeared.
I don’t get sad over what I said or how I acted during that time. I get distraught over the fact that I may never feel that level of euphoria ever again without some exogenous stimulus and I really don’t want to put something in my body to feel a high a know I can get without.
So yet again, my focus turns to god.
My ideas of god don’t really fall into the religious type of god, which is a singular entity who decides whether you get into heaven or hell based on your actions on earth, (btw if you’ve been watching “The Good Place” you’ll be sure as shit by unintended consequences we all end up in the Bad Place) and how well you have been on earth is all set forth in the rule books of life mainly the bible and commandments and such forth.
My ideas of god isn’t really singular in its capacity to be found, god is everywhere. He’s even in us, like Zarathustra and his Overman. And like Nietzsche I dislike nationalism and Jingoistic competition because it sets us apart and if god is everywhere then every body of every creed can find it, instead of finding their own gods with their different but very similar belief systems. Faith to me is very different to Religion. Sometimes I ask the universe for help navigating life, for some wisdom on how I deal with difficult people without sacrificing myself. I don’t ask Jesus or Allah, or even Buddha.
The closest euphoric feeling I get is working out, and I also get it when I meditate at yoga, but I really have to be in the zone. Climbing a hill, out of breathe, ass aching and heart pounding out of my chest and when I get in my car and my body returns to natural homeostatic state that chill feeling is extremely euphoric. But I can’t help but feel that maybe I might find Euphoria in the church, or the synagogue, probably more the synagogue as my rejection of human form god seems to align me more to Judaism than any other faith.
The fear of inciting any sort of madness through the finding of religion runs deep through me. I just am scared that if I use the manifestation powers of prayer that I will awaken some delusional paranoid schizophrenic that can’t keep their shit together, not because there’s a stereotype but because I have been there once before.
There is a link with religion and psychosis but only when the extremes of the original and their behaviors are presented in a sudden manner. For example, if a vicar suddenly denounced god in church and called him an overbearing overlord you would be thinking rightly so that he might be struggling with a mental health issue, you would also think this way of someone who is stoic and a well adjusted atheist suddenly started speaking in tongues and professing love to Jesus.
Individuals experiencing religious delusions are preoccupied with religious subjects that are not within the expected beliefs for an individual’s background, including culture, education, and known experiences of religion. These preoccupations are incongruous with the mood of the subject. Falling within the definition also are delusions arising in psychotic depression; however, these must present within a major depressive episode and be congruous with mood.[4]
Religious delusion was found in 2007 to strongly correlate with “temporolimbic overactivity”.[8] This is a condition where irregularities in the brain’s limbic system may present as symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.[9]
Now I don’t know whether my preoccupation with god and religion and faith is a mild mania episode where I am seeking the feelings of the previous and extremely strong first mania, but I am also seeking to be accepted whilst doing so. I don’t have a faith, and I feel as if I had a faith when I do suffer my bouts of low mood and feelings of wanting to be closer to my ideals of god, that I am actually seeking the euphoria I first felt when my cognition and reasoning was compromised. If I had a faith that was commercially recognized would my mania be a sign of mental illness or just a blessing from our shared deity.
I want to get high, I just don’t want to be called crazy while I do it without drugs.
And then there is running.
