(written on Sept. 18th)
After a relatively decent night’s sleep in Grand Junction, we crossed into Utah pretty quickly, taking the route through Green River and then Price and then Spanish Fork canyon, and on up to my brother Jared’s new house in Highland.
We’re likely going to be in Utah for about 2 weeks, and we’ll bounce around a bit between Salt Lake and Utah counties, I’m sure.
It was super good to see my brother Jared, and we chatted for a little while.
Unfortunately having my accountant go MIA meant that I had to hunker down and start working on taxes instead of enjoying my vacation–deadline for my s Corp filing being the 15th.
My brother understands because he runs multiple businesses, but it still stinks to have to show up on vacation and then hunker down and disappear to try and pound through taxes because someone makes a promise and then breaks it and leaves you scrambling.
I also found out that the Civic I was hoping to drive was not legal to drive, so I’ll need to get that figured out if we’re going to be able to use that while we’re in Utah.
Gorgeous weather in Utah, though. And being right up against the mountain where my brother lives, part of me is feeling a pull to come back to Utah.
Utah is really hard for me, though. Moving back would be really hard for me.
I love the mountains. I love the mountains.
I hate how crowded it is. I hate the smog. And for the kinds of things that I want to do for the rest of my life, I wish there were more diversity of culture and whatnot, but in the capital of Mormondom, I can’t expect it to be what I want it to be. 😅
And there are just a lot of… very painful memories. Outside of Utah, I think it’s easier to not be bombarded by painful emotions and thoughts. I am all the time anyway, but it’s compounded and multiplied in Utah. So I don’t know if I could really handle it in Utah?
Or maybe it would be like pulling a Band-Aid off, hurting a whole lot in the beginning, but then I’ll figure out how to deal with it, and it’d be no different than anywhere else?
It’s possible, but here in Utah, there are so many memories everywhere–triggers to memories all over the place.
Who knows. Maybe Utah will be back in my future. Maybe it won’t. Arkansas isn’t my home. It never has been. The property where I live is a place my soul loves to be, with wonderful family there, but honestly, the peaceful, soul enjoyment isn’t because it’s Arkansas: It’s because it’s in the country, and it’s peaceful, with trees and open fields and a creek. I have the same peaceful feeling and love of my surroundings anywhere I have those kinds of things.
It’s just the concrete and the noise and the buildings of civilization and the crowdedness that suffocate me.
(and the humidity, ticks, and chiggers are a… big drawback 😅)
In some ways, I wonder if going to Arkansas was one of my worst decisions. It wasn’t in my plan to stay there. And it appears that much of the physical damage to my body that I may well have to deal with for the rest of my life came because I came to Arkansas. Life would likely have been a heck of a lot different had I stayed in Utah. I likely never would have had any of the kinds of experiences that destroyed my body. My life was on a completely different trajectory.
But what’s done is done. I don’t know what comes next. Being a mechanic is not going to continue. My body is broken from that work. And I am too emotionally screwed up now and burnt out beyond anything I ever pictured I could be. 😅
So what’s next?
I don’t know.
I feel like I’ve been making all sorts of terrible financial decisions over the years. I tried to make good decisions, but… And I have, I guess, but… real estate wise, no. And that part of my financial life is so huge.
It’s funny… Well, not funny at all, but when I look back, as I do regularly, there’s just a single event, something I felt strongly that God told me, that was then reinforced many times over years, that led me down the path that I am on now. Had I never had that event happen, I never would have lost all my money in 2016 and started completely over with nothing. I never would have gone to Arkansas and destroyed my body. I never would have been a mechanic. I almost certainly wouldn’t be nearly 42 and still single. I’d probably have a family.
All of the most painful and challenging and destructive things that have happened in my life can be traced back to that one single event, believing in it and following what i understood from it.
And yet here I am all these years later still unable to walk away from it even though it’s caused me more pain than anything I ever could have imagined.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a foolish idiot. How ridiculous it is to still be stuck on this. Sometimes I wonder if I’m actually really strong, able to hold on to something that’s right, even if pathetically, through all of the excruciating pain.
I don’t know the answers to those wonderings.
I just know that I can’t keep going as I’ve been going because it will take my life.
I’ve come to the realization that unless there is a god, I likely won’t survive this. I’m perpetually at 99.99% of my emotional limits. And just the slightest bump in the road can send me over the edge.
But for now I’m still here, still kicking. Wanting somehow to find a way through this. Hoping for miracles, either by means of external events, or via a transformation of my emotional state.
But I know myself, and unless there is an answer that undeniably proves that I’ve been walking the wrong path, and that my expectations and understandings for where I was headed were incorrect, I will never be able to let go.
Ever.
I know myself well enough.
At least I think I do.
And thus, I will either ignore that experience and choose a different path and wonder for the rest of my life, and regret for the rest of my life, and feel disappointed in myself for the rest of my life that I couldn’t hold on. Or there will be some experience that I will have that will undeniably point me a different way. Or one day it’ll actually turn out as I was told, or I just won’t make it, the pain being too great.
I’d like to say that I’m not selfish enough for the latter option. But when the waves of pain get so tall that all I can see and feel is pain, sometimes it’s hard to remember that there’s anything else but that pain. I suppose that could be a consequence of just pure selfishness. But I also think it’s just a coping mechanism. Pain can be so intense that you would rather die than continue bearing it. Reason goes out the door. In such circumstances, the window of perspective shrinks exponentially, and all you can think of is that you just desperately want the pain to stop.
I haven’t made that choice. And if I had to guess, I probably never will. I don’t think I have it in me to kill myself, even in the most excruciating time. Still, it is mostly a daily thought these days, a daily wish, one that I vocalize audibly to myself often several times a day, but without the courage to follow through.
But I don’t want to be selfish. I want to lift the world. I want to have the drive to do that return. I want to have the hunger to spread love and joy grow strong enough to overcome the pain, both emotional, mental, and physical, that leaves me exhausted and unmotivated and emotionally unable to do anything challenging.
I’m a mess. 😅
But I’m still kicking. And I’m still hoping. And occasionally, when I’m desperate enough, I’m still praying.
Though my prayers are brief and without faith.
I want there to be a god. I want there to be the god that I felt like I got to know so deeply and so personally who has… since disappeared. I want that being to exist and be real.
But I don’t want pain and desperation to drive me back. I want any migration back to god to be calculated and informed and not the desperate reach of a man in agony hoping that there’s maybe some god who can rescue him.
I know deep inside I still believe to some degree because I can’t let go when it would be so much easier to simply disbelieve.
So much easier.
Belief, contrary to what some people say, is not a choice. It’s not something that we can just go, boom, I choose to believe, and suddenly we actually believe.
That’s a lie, in my opinion.
I believe belief comes by meeting thresholds of evidence that we, perhaps unconsciously, have set up as standards in ourselves. For some, that threshold of belief is something as simple as seeing the image of the Virgin Mary in the bark of a tree or in the darker spots on a piece of toast. For some, it comes after going through a type of scientific method, testing doctrine and promises, and watching the results. For some it comes through deeply personal experiences that are rationally unrealistic in their minds to be anything other than the divine. For some, there will never be a threshold of evidence high enough, and they never believe. There’s a spectrum that might well be as long as there are people on this earth, but belief isn’t simply just a choice.
Nope.
I find myself in this situation, in that spectrum, but from the opposite perspective. What is my threshold for disbelief? I’ve had so many deeply personal experiences with what I understood and believed to be the divine, that my belief in God was so deeply implanted into my heart and soul that even the last many years of excruciating pain and agony and confusion and everything cannot extricate.
And I know they never will. There will be no agony powerful enough to completely extricate the last remnants of belief from my heart. It’s just not what I’m made of to let that go. My threshold of belief was met, and met so powerfully that only direct experiences from the divine more powerful than the first, would have the power to change my understanding and belief of what’s happened to this point.
So if there’s no god, then I’m pretty well hosed, because I can’t ever stop believing completely. I don’t think there is an amount of evidence to the contrary that could ever supplant the amount of evidence that managed to implant that belief so deeply, so irretrievably, into my heart.
And that brings me full circle to those four options as to how things go forward from here.
Believing again… fully… is choosing to invite PTSD-ish experience through my front door, so to speak. It’s… really hard. I wince and recoil at the very thought. Part of me, I think, is ignoring God stuff and keeping it much farther than arms length because I’m not emotionally strong enough right now to deal with what would be required to go back.
So i could do that. I can feel that I could be close to making that choice, but it’s also so… terrifying.
I could choose to walk away, and that would be choosing to look at that deeply implanted belief, deny it, knowing that I’m denying something in which part of me still believes, and then trying to ignore that breach of my own integrity for the rest of my life.
I can’t do that.
Can I?
Or, a miracle could happen, and it actually could all come to pass as I trusted.
Or… i could choose to end my life… Which is so often a half-heartedly wished for escape, but a selfishness that I hope I do not have in me. And I hope that I never become so blinded by the pain, that I don’t realize how selfish suicide really is.
Phew! 😅
Didn’t plan on writing all that when I started this post. 🙃
I hope I can find the strength to do hard things again. I hope I can find the strength to choose my desire to spread love and joy over the desire to escape from pain, mental, emotional, and physical.
For those things I hope.
And in the meantime… taxes.
😅
Love to you.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 