Fear of meaning

My psychologist sat across from me in his office and he stated, “I don’t know what scares you more…the thought that life has no meaning or that everything in life has a meaning?”  The icy realization flooded into my brain as if I had been submerged into a frozen lake.  He is right (he is always right).  For so long, I fought with myself to find the meaning in every aspect of life.  I was convinced that even the most mundane of events happened for a reason.  Although, I did not (and still do not) believe in a God so it was difficult for me to truly believe that without a divine interference, something as meaningless as finding a penny on the ground could, for example, lead to the death of your mother.  However, for years I tried to cram my life and every event into this type of belief system.

As I grew older and experienced more cruelty from the world, I began to loose faith in my faithless lack of coincidences.  The jading set in.  I refused to believe that something as horrific as a woman being raped would have any positive purpose.  “Oh but maybe she will become an advocate for women’s safety!”  Regardless of how much positivity she has been able to contrive out of the trauma, I am willing to venture that any woman who has suffered such a thing would not hesitate to completely erase that incident from her life.  To believe that the decimation of her very being happened for a reason, is a heinous thought.  A thought that makes the world an even more heartless place.

As I wrote in an earlier post (An existential new year), stripping life of any and all predetermined purpose, creates a world void of divine and intentional cruelty.  It helps the jaded shadows in my heart to come back to reality with less hatred.  So yes, I am more terrified by the idea that everything happens for a purpose and has a meaning.  Meaningless hate should not have meaning but the same standard would have to apply to love.  Hard to stomach.  Believe it or not, I would like to once again have faith in people.  But I have learned that I cannot trust that much without hurting exponentially more.  I select my friends wisely and slowly.

It has been difficult for me to abandon the idea of everything happening for a reason.  For example, a friend’s father is an ardent pilot who frequently attends airshows with a few of his fellow pilot friends.  One weekend when another obligation kept him and his friends away from the show, a plane crashed directly into their usual seats.  Of course had they been there, they would have been obliterated.  A part of me screams, that of course…the fluke of an obligation happened so that he would miss that show and not die!  But I cannot pick and choose which events happen for a specific reason and which ones do not.  Other people died that day.  Perhaps some of them had never been to an airshow before.  For me, it causes less inner turbulence and turmoil to leave life blank of meaning and seek it out from a clean canvas.

I have to make sense of the random.  Unless otherwise clearly evident, I strive to create meaning out of mundane, instead of the mundane imposing meaning on me.  This is a sentiment that I also discuss in the post I have linked above.  I realize that I continue to come back to the topic of Existentialism but it is such a fascinating and fulfilling philosophy.  Dr. Daine explained that because Existentialists believe in self-responsibility, if ever they find themselves unhappy, it is their responsibility to change the situation.  Laying blame is not an option.  Of course when I believed that everything happened for a reason, it was far more easy to say “oh, well I am unhappy now because of blah, blah, blah but if I wait for the Universe to unveil my destiny, I should be happy again.”  “The Universe got me into this, it has to get me out.”  It is a terribly lazy way of being!  I wish someone would have slapped me out of such nonsense much sooner.

So why am I so unhappy now and how can I change it?  I am unhappy because I work a job that does not satisfy me.  How can I change that?  Throw myself into my writing.  And that’s what I am doing.  Or at least attempting to do.  I would absolutely love getting paid to write.  Part of writing for the masses is providing hope.  I have a difficult time providing hope since I am a rather hopeless creature and writing heart-felt sentiments about the “light at the end of the tunnel”  feels forced.  How, then, can I give people hope?  How can I positively influence people?

Perhaps I can start by saying that I am not the only one who has these internal wars.  I am aware that some may not want to publicly discuss these issues or are not comfortable confronting them.  I still have a horrid time when I venture to that avenue of my brain.  But the further I venture and the more honest that I am with myself and everyone I interact with, the better.  I am the Queen of the tw0-faced but am trying to relinquish my crown.

Hope, hope, hope.  How to give hope.  There are wonderful mental health professionals out there!  Never, ever be timid to seek out help.  Be open to the reality that therapy might first tear you apart.  Then, be ready to heal.  Avoid complacency.  Do not allow yourself to become stagnant.  Even those few sentences feel fake when I re-read them.  I suppose I am not done being torn apart.

I will continue my writing in the hopes that I can make a career out of it.  Anyone want to hire a great writer?

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