I was divided before going to college. One part of me was filled with an energetic anticipation of college, thinking that this was where I would go to finally resolve my personal problems. I would be in classes that engaged me, have friendships that would be fulfilling, become romantically active (sometimes I dreamed of myself as a veritable Don Juan). I knew, on a conceptual level, that there would be problems and issues, but generally speaking, I would be happy. Happier than I ever was before.
Then there was the other part of me. The frightened part. The part that feared leaving the comfort of my home, being in a world I had no experience with. The part that feared that I wouldn't know what to do, that I would be more isolated than ever, and that my hopes of friends and relationships would only ever be hopes, never fulfilled. But what I feared most of all was that this entry into college would mark another crossing point that was bringing me ever closer to what I feared was my ultimate destination--failure. Failure in job, relationships, life.
Ultimately, neither my greatest dreams nor my worst anxieties happened. No major shift occurred in either direction. I did not become a new person.
I became only myself, in a new place.
The same things I struggled with in High School I continued to struggle with in college. My anxiety and my depression did not change, though the things I worried and despaired about might have. More significantly, I did not cease to have Asperger's syndrome. I still struggled to interact with others as others could interact with others. I still was not interested in parties and other high-intensity "social" activities that my peers enjoyed, such as concerts or going to bars. I still struggled to relate to my peers and continually felt a disconnect from them.
At the same time, I began to develop further my personal skills and better learn the career I wanted to take, and begin taking the steps towards that career. I had my first relationship, and have made new friends. My grades have been generally improving. I'm away from the stifling aspects of the home life, and am in a position that has enabled me to better foster my own personal development.
Yet those were not the things I focused on. I ignored that I had not fulfilled my negative expectations, and instead focused on how short I had fallen of my positive expectations, which of course left me feeling more depressed. I still felt isolated like I did in high school. I still broke down like I did in high school. I still felt the urge to hurt myself like I did in high school. Like in High School, this was never a constant state, and it moved in and out with more positive feelings. But those feelings were still there.
I think one root for the development of mental illness in college, and my own unhappiness in college, is the failure to meet expectations.
Our culture expends a great deal of energy convincing us that college is worthwhile--more than worthwhile, that we must go to it. It does this by affecting us with wide-ranging fantasies, of career success, of finding "who we are", of achieving our career goals, finding good love and good friendships. Perhaps for some people that is true, in exactly the ways which they conceive of it. But I think for a great deal of us, those high expectations fail to be met, and we feel the frustration of having not met them. I think a lot of unhappiness arises from lack of acceptance--from our expectations being in conflict with reality. We desire to reach a point, but we do not actually reach that point, and we become sad and unhealthy at the gap between desire and reality.
Of course, this only applies to causes which are more, shall we say, psychic in nature, which is to say they have to do with our thoughts and feelings as thoughts and feelings.. Some mental illnesses develop out of neurochemical or otherwise biological causes (forms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, for example), and all I can suggest with regards to why those occur more often in young adults is that perhaps those psychic causes become triggers leading to the development of those disorders, or that an unhealthy psychological disposition leads then to the development of psychobiological illnesses. Perhaps the neurobiological qualities of the developmental stage itself is a breeding ground for mental disorders. Ultimately, though, I don't know shit about those things, so I couldn't really say.
Regardless, I know personally at least that a great deal of my distress arises from seeing the world which I live in now, and being frustrated that it was not what I desired it to be. I look at friendships and wonder why they are not more fulfilling. I look at my classes and wonder why I do not get better grades. I look at my depression and wonder why I am not feeling happier. And all of those feelings, that constant contrast, leaves me miserable.
=====
Yet things have been changing.
Not suddenly, not dramatically, as I had envisioned they might be. But gradually, subtly. I was in a new environment. I had to learn new ways to manage my problems, to deal with classes, and a greater workload. My old means of coping were insufficient, and I needed to learn new ways. My mom saw my struggles, and found a therapist dealing especially with people with Asperger's, and with him I began to learn how to better manage not only the current issues I was struggling with, but issues that had been plaguing me for years before. We dealt with class stresses, with old regrets, with pretty much everything. What had initially been gotten just to help me deal with old stresses was creeping into far more deeply rooted problems. I began not merely to sustain, but to recover.
And it has been far from a straight road. It has been bumpy, going up and down. I've still broken down, and old issues still creep up. That is what makes recovery so challenging--that there is no clear pattern, and the future is uncertain. But as I have argued prior, I maintain that hope is not only valuable to recovery, but invaluable.
There is no final stop. There is no moment of total euphoric triumph, there is no happy ending, at least not in the sense that there won't be problems afterward. Rather, it is a dogged, constant effort, moving forward one step at a time, up a hill, in the pouring rain. Sometimes you slip and fall, and gravity pulls you down. But there's nothing else to do but to get up, wipe off the mud, and keep going. The top is so far away, and sometimes it just feels easier to lay your head against the mud and rest, but goddammit, you might just get there. And someday the rain will stop, and the ground will dry. You will get strong, and climbing the hill won't seem as hard.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Saturday, April 12, 2014
4/12/14: Cynicism
In class, I saw one of my fellow students exhibiting a great deal of cynicism about her ability to change the world. I found myself getting annoyed by her, perhaps only because her opinion differed so strongly from mine, then I reflected that I've felt a lot of the same things a lot of times, sometimes confident enough to say them out loud. I wonder if people looked on what I said the same way I looked on what she said.
Cynicism is an understandable reaction. It hardens us against pain. It hardens us against disappointment, and frustration, and hurt. The onus is reduced on us to defend our beliefs, or to alter them as need be, because there is always room for thinking the worst case scenario. We can always take comfort in certainty, and the same applies for worst-case scenarios. And if we should be proven wrong in some single case, well, we are pleasantly surprised, but under no need to rethink our cynicism, for there's no guarantee the same outcome will happen again later.
The alternative to cynicism, that which requires us to have faith in others to do what we believe is right, and faith in the world or in our own abilities to enact change, is very, very difficult, especially for people who have been hurt before. It's hard to believe we can get good outcomes when so often we do not. And every time we hope for a better outcome only to receive the opposite, we open ourselves up for hurt, often quite deeply. It is hard to have hope, because the world seems determined to undermine it at every turn.
Yet the world is not a ball of sheer human misery. Sometimes good things do happen. Sometimes the world changes for the better. Consider the causes of civil rights, gay rights, and women's rights. An astounding amount of progress has been made on all of those fronts in the past hundred years alone. Does that mean it is destined to stay here forever, and that we are to continually improve? No. But it does testify that, no matter what the situation, things can improve.
Of course, the cynics may be right, and there is not much we can change about the world we live in. Certainly sometimes the cynics are right are in various matters. Yet while cynicism may be a good personal defense mechanism, and even if most of the time the cynical belief is proven right (which is a big if), it is not quite so useful for affecting change. Cynicism implies, to one degree or another, a resignation. Of course one may be cynical and still work their utmost to obtain something, but I do wonder whether, if one believes their efforts to be ultimately futile, they do not hold back, consciously or unconsciously the degree to which they will try to affect change. If we believe that we have the ability to affect change, then do we not alter our behavior to try and accommodate that, and work all the harder to our desired ends?
One may see similar arguments used here to that in my previous post where I justified my belief system, which is quite intentional. In both cases, I invest myself in the possibility of a positive outcome, not because I know it to be true, for I don't, but because it carries the capability for me to change myself and how I interact with the world. Now in the prior case with my belief system, that affects change primarily in the here and now, as I don't follow the Pascal's Wager logic that my beliefs--or anyone'--will change my ultimate destination after life. In the case of society, however, that belief carries the potential to affect quite strongly not only how I feel and act, but also possible outcomes. By believing I can enact change, I raise the possibility that I will, for I gear myself towards actions intended to produce that change.
And I believe such a belief is more than warranted. In my other blog, I made the argument that hope is necessary for recovery in mental illness. I believe the same is true here. Hope--the belief that we can make things better in some way--is instrumental, for it gives us a goal to strive towards, and the belief that we can actually reach that goal, if we should strive hard enough. And we may fail, we may fall short. But how much farther will we have gone with that hope, than we would have gone without?
We can choose to be cynical. It is undeniably the safer option, at least for ourselves. But for the world to improve, I believe we need to have a disposition of hope, and believe that we don't know if we'll succeed, but dammit, we might.
Cynicism is an understandable reaction. It hardens us against pain. It hardens us against disappointment, and frustration, and hurt. The onus is reduced on us to defend our beliefs, or to alter them as need be, because there is always room for thinking the worst case scenario. We can always take comfort in certainty, and the same applies for worst-case scenarios. And if we should be proven wrong in some single case, well, we are pleasantly surprised, but under no need to rethink our cynicism, for there's no guarantee the same outcome will happen again later.
The alternative to cynicism, that which requires us to have faith in others to do what we believe is right, and faith in the world or in our own abilities to enact change, is very, very difficult, especially for people who have been hurt before. It's hard to believe we can get good outcomes when so often we do not. And every time we hope for a better outcome only to receive the opposite, we open ourselves up for hurt, often quite deeply. It is hard to have hope, because the world seems determined to undermine it at every turn.
Yet the world is not a ball of sheer human misery. Sometimes good things do happen. Sometimes the world changes for the better. Consider the causes of civil rights, gay rights, and women's rights. An astounding amount of progress has been made on all of those fronts in the past hundred years alone. Does that mean it is destined to stay here forever, and that we are to continually improve? No. But it does testify that, no matter what the situation, things can improve.
Of course, the cynics may be right, and there is not much we can change about the world we live in. Certainly sometimes the cynics are right are in various matters. Yet while cynicism may be a good personal defense mechanism, and even if most of the time the cynical belief is proven right (which is a big if), it is not quite so useful for affecting change. Cynicism implies, to one degree or another, a resignation. Of course one may be cynical and still work their utmost to obtain something, but I do wonder whether, if one believes their efforts to be ultimately futile, they do not hold back, consciously or unconsciously the degree to which they will try to affect change. If we believe that we have the ability to affect change, then do we not alter our behavior to try and accommodate that, and work all the harder to our desired ends?
One may see similar arguments used here to that in my previous post where I justified my belief system, which is quite intentional. In both cases, I invest myself in the possibility of a positive outcome, not because I know it to be true, for I don't, but because it carries the capability for me to change myself and how I interact with the world. Now in the prior case with my belief system, that affects change primarily in the here and now, as I don't follow the Pascal's Wager logic that my beliefs--or anyone'--will change my ultimate destination after life. In the case of society, however, that belief carries the potential to affect quite strongly not only how I feel and act, but also possible outcomes. By believing I can enact change, I raise the possibility that I will, for I gear myself towards actions intended to produce that change.
And I believe such a belief is more than warranted. In my other blog, I made the argument that hope is necessary for recovery in mental illness. I believe the same is true here. Hope--the belief that we can make things better in some way--is instrumental, for it gives us a goal to strive towards, and the belief that we can actually reach that goal, if we should strive hard enough. And we may fail, we may fall short. But how much farther will we have gone with that hope, than we would have gone without?
We can choose to be cynical. It is undeniably the safer option, at least for ourselves. But for the world to improve, I believe we need to have a disposition of hope, and believe that we don't know if we'll succeed, but dammit, we might.
Friday, April 4, 2014
4/3/14: My Beliefs
Ooh boy. This is a big one, ain't it? The fate of the universe is in my hands, in a way.
I consider myself somewhere between an agnostic and a spiritual agnostic. Agnostic being "I don't know what", and spiritual agnostic being "I believe something's out there, but I don't know what."
This isn't one I came to overnight. I thought about it for many years, and even now I go back and forth. I do not have proof for my beliefs. There is nothing I can point to where I can say "This is unassailable proof." I have things that seem suggestive to me of a greater spiritual life. I am disinclined, for example, to dismiss all near-death experiences as mere biological events, or that all religious experiences were simply the result of personal delusions or primitive superstition. Others may be inclined to do so, and that is their prerogative, but it is not mine.
My life has been filled with a great deal of existential distress. It is not a pleasant experience. A lot of this I can attribute to my own issues with anxiety, where I worry about things simply because they might happen, or they might be true. I worry that my family doesn't love me because I don't know that they do. I worry I might get brain damage tomorrow because I have no way of knowing I might not. Life may be meaningless, because I have no way of knowing that it is.
These all may seem like very different issues, but they are all rooted in the same thing, and that is the fear of uncertainty. With uncertainty, my imagination takes flight, in the most unpleasant way possible. All my greatest fears and worries become equally viable, for I have no convincing reason to believe they are not.
Recently, I have begun reading a book about dealing with such anxiety. The book does not seek to allay my fears of these various uncertainties happening, for it knows it cannot do that. Rather, it asks me to accept the uncertainty, and live my life in the best way I can, right here, and right now. I suppose I have taken that as the basis for my spiritual beliefs as well.
I have no proof for my belief. I would argue that no one does. The Atheist and the Christian both have their arguments, and both can be perfectly compelling, but in the end all they are is words on a paper. Words which can carry great meaning, but even then that meaning is limited by the restrictions of our human minds. Existence being the widely complex thing that it is, I am skeptical that any of us can look at issues of metaphysics and somehow come at something that is true. Plato uses the argument of the men trapped in a cave, making their pronouncements about the world based solely on the shadows they see on the cave wall. I would argue we are in a similar situation.
Our everyday beliefs are all, at their core, uncertain. We cannot be sure that anything we feel or experience is true. We cannot be certain that we have loved ones. For all we know we may be living in a matrix-type environment where all of our relationships are artificially constructed. Perhaps our loved ones don't really love us, but merely convince us that they are. We can argue and provide reasons to argue that our loved ones love us, but in the end there is never any way to be certain. When faced with that we have two options: we can either choose to live in a fearful uncertainty, forever wondering if they love us or not. Or we can make a leap of faith and believe that they love us, though we may not be certain. We believe this not because we have compelling evidence that it is true--we will never have such evidence. Rather, we believe it because, by believing it, we inform our actions, and make our interactions with those we love all the more meaningful.
The same applies for any belief system, be it nihilism, or Christianity, or anything else. We truly don't know. We are faced with a vast, expansive universe, and our own ability to understand it is at most a pinprick to the whole of existence, if it is even that. Philosophers may debate as they have done for hundreds of years, each believing themselves to be correct. Am I to assume that all philosophers but one are deficient in some way? Or shall I assume that many different philosophers have different beliefs not because some are smarter than others, but because they all are, by virtue of their different selves, taken to believing some things are true, and other things not?
I don't know. That is the point. Life is vast and uncertain.
Life may very well be meaningless. There may be no self, no soul, and no afterlife. Love may be simply a convenient construct, and compassion a cruel illusion. None of us may have any inherent worth. We might not. But we don't know.
Similarly, life may be full of meaning. Love and beauty may not be merely concepts, but true and real things. We may all have dignity and be worthy of compassion and love, not simply because we are told that, but because it is inherent to our being. We may have purpose, and our actions in this world may mean something beyond the cruel intransience of our physical existence. We don't know. But it might.
I choose to believe that it might. Not because it is true, because as I have said, I do not know it to be true. But because it gives me life. It fills me with a sense of meaning and purpose. It makes my interactions with other human beings meaningful, and enjoyable. It makes love and compassion feel like something transcendent, and invaluable, rather than incidental. It changes myself into a better human being.
We can argue this and that for as long as we can stay awake. We have done so for the last 2000 years, and if we manage to survive another 2000, I daresay we will continue to argue these things further. But at some point, we need to stop arguing. At some point, we need to be willing to step into the world and carry a belief with us, even if the belief is simply that we cannot be certain. Not because we're necessarily right, but because at some point we need to go outside and live.
So here is what I think. If I am right, if what I believe is true, then I will live a happy and fulfilling life and move on to the next as best prepared as I can be. If I am wrong, then at the end of my life I die having lived a life as happy and fulfilling as it could be. Either way, it can provide for me happiness in this life, which nihilistic sentiments routinely fail to do.
As I write this, it is a beautiful day outside. The sky is blue, birds fly above me, and the world is set into its various rhythms. If believing what I believe makes the day that much more beautiful, and if believing otherwise makes the day less, and if I have no compelling evidence to believe one or the other, then why not believe what makes the day more beautiful?
I consider myself somewhere between an agnostic and a spiritual agnostic. Agnostic being "I don't know what", and spiritual agnostic being "I believe something's out there, but I don't know what."
This isn't one I came to overnight. I thought about it for many years, and even now I go back and forth. I do not have proof for my beliefs. There is nothing I can point to where I can say "This is unassailable proof." I have things that seem suggestive to me of a greater spiritual life. I am disinclined, for example, to dismiss all near-death experiences as mere biological events, or that all religious experiences were simply the result of personal delusions or primitive superstition. Others may be inclined to do so, and that is their prerogative, but it is not mine.
My life has been filled with a great deal of existential distress. It is not a pleasant experience. A lot of this I can attribute to my own issues with anxiety, where I worry about things simply because they might happen, or they might be true. I worry that my family doesn't love me because I don't know that they do. I worry I might get brain damage tomorrow because I have no way of knowing I might not. Life may be meaningless, because I have no way of knowing that it is.
These all may seem like very different issues, but they are all rooted in the same thing, and that is the fear of uncertainty. With uncertainty, my imagination takes flight, in the most unpleasant way possible. All my greatest fears and worries become equally viable, for I have no convincing reason to believe they are not.
Recently, I have begun reading a book about dealing with such anxiety. The book does not seek to allay my fears of these various uncertainties happening, for it knows it cannot do that. Rather, it asks me to accept the uncertainty, and live my life in the best way I can, right here, and right now. I suppose I have taken that as the basis for my spiritual beliefs as well.
I have no proof for my belief. I would argue that no one does. The Atheist and the Christian both have their arguments, and both can be perfectly compelling, but in the end all they are is words on a paper. Words which can carry great meaning, but even then that meaning is limited by the restrictions of our human minds. Existence being the widely complex thing that it is, I am skeptical that any of us can look at issues of metaphysics and somehow come at something that is true. Plato uses the argument of the men trapped in a cave, making their pronouncements about the world based solely on the shadows they see on the cave wall. I would argue we are in a similar situation.
Our everyday beliefs are all, at their core, uncertain. We cannot be sure that anything we feel or experience is true. We cannot be certain that we have loved ones. For all we know we may be living in a matrix-type environment where all of our relationships are artificially constructed. Perhaps our loved ones don't really love us, but merely convince us that they are. We can argue and provide reasons to argue that our loved ones love us, but in the end there is never any way to be certain. When faced with that we have two options: we can either choose to live in a fearful uncertainty, forever wondering if they love us or not. Or we can make a leap of faith and believe that they love us, though we may not be certain. We believe this not because we have compelling evidence that it is true--we will never have such evidence. Rather, we believe it because, by believing it, we inform our actions, and make our interactions with those we love all the more meaningful.
The same applies for any belief system, be it nihilism, or Christianity, or anything else. We truly don't know. We are faced with a vast, expansive universe, and our own ability to understand it is at most a pinprick to the whole of existence, if it is even that. Philosophers may debate as they have done for hundreds of years, each believing themselves to be correct. Am I to assume that all philosophers but one are deficient in some way? Or shall I assume that many different philosophers have different beliefs not because some are smarter than others, but because they all are, by virtue of their different selves, taken to believing some things are true, and other things not?
I don't know. That is the point. Life is vast and uncertain.
Life may very well be meaningless. There may be no self, no soul, and no afterlife. Love may be simply a convenient construct, and compassion a cruel illusion. None of us may have any inherent worth. We might not. But we don't know.
Similarly, life may be full of meaning. Love and beauty may not be merely concepts, but true and real things. We may all have dignity and be worthy of compassion and love, not simply because we are told that, but because it is inherent to our being. We may have purpose, and our actions in this world may mean something beyond the cruel intransience of our physical existence. We don't know. But it might.
I choose to believe that it might. Not because it is true, because as I have said, I do not know it to be true. But because it gives me life. It fills me with a sense of meaning and purpose. It makes my interactions with other human beings meaningful, and enjoyable. It makes love and compassion feel like something transcendent, and invaluable, rather than incidental. It changes myself into a better human being.
We can argue this and that for as long as we can stay awake. We have done so for the last 2000 years, and if we manage to survive another 2000, I daresay we will continue to argue these things further. But at some point, we need to stop arguing. At some point, we need to be willing to step into the world and carry a belief with us, even if the belief is simply that we cannot be certain. Not because we're necessarily right, but because at some point we need to go outside and live.
So here is what I think. If I am right, if what I believe is true, then I will live a happy and fulfilling life and move on to the next as best prepared as I can be. If I am wrong, then at the end of my life I die having lived a life as happy and fulfilling as it could be. Either way, it can provide for me happiness in this life, which nihilistic sentiments routinely fail to do.
As I write this, it is a beautiful day outside. The sky is blue, birds fly above me, and the world is set into its various rhythms. If believing what I believe makes the day that much more beautiful, and if believing otherwise makes the day less, and if I have no compelling evidence to believe one or the other, then why not believe what makes the day more beautiful?
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