The Freedom of Meaninglessness

In pure theory, nihilism should produce death, both actual and philosophical. Anything that attempts to answer "What does it all mean?" with the response "It doesn't mean anything" is a killing force. Life is meaningless, so why live? Philosophy is meaningless because it can't answer anything with certitude, so why think? And I, to an extent, subscribe to a kind of nihilism. I put on various religions and philosophies for a time and think within those terminologies and mindsets without ever completely subscribing to them. I live a life of mental and spiritual convenience. That sounds extremely meaningless. Why bother? Why even bother to continue in an existence that I don't feel has any point or any true worth? There have been gods, there has been God, there have been new gods of politics and humanism and ideas that are invested with all the power of the absolute. Those who live with or beneath these gods can't see what I am doing, don't understand. To them, even to Nietzsche, nihilism was the downfall of civilization as we know it. Nearly everyone elevates some principle or concept to a divine status. Nearly everyone exists with a certain perception of relativity but their relativity does not permit them to tear down their own deities and moral codes. I think mankind has a terrible fear of believing that their own thoughts might be wrong or, even worse, pointless. This may not be absolutely true but the way we live life is as a stream of thoughts and sensations and emotions. To cast those into doubt casts into doubt everything we believe about ourselves. Terrifying prospect.

There's the old song and dance about how if you say it is true that nothing is true, you've just contradicted yourself and what you said is a lie. That's an easy way to try to trip up relativists and nihilists and postmodernists and all sorts of nasty folk. But it doesn't hold water. It's a word game that people have been playing since the time of the ancient Greeks, possibly before. The fact is that underlying every statement about something not being "true" is the assumption that it is not absolutely true. We are born believing in the evidence of our senses and, as we grow, we come to trust completely the evidence of our thoughts about our senses. Part of what is so frightening about feeling you are going mad is that you have torn from you that security that you know and think about the world around you correctly. But one doesn't have to be slipping into psychosis to find evidence that the world around us is not what we think it is. Most people have experienced something along the lines of catching movement out of the corner of their eye and nothing being there or thinking their name was just called and turning around and no one did so. Just one such experience should be enough to cause us to discount the so-called "evidence" of our senses. And if we can't trust something as basic as our eyeballs seeing correctly, why are we supposed to put complete faith in an ancient holy book or some random philosophy or Marxism or Rush Limbaugh or anything else that we are expected to just accept as true? People talk about their various beliefs and frequently resort to attempting to prove its reality by claiming they experienced directly that it is true. God speaking to them, watching a town apply a new political philosophy and it works miracles, etc. I am not convinced by such arguments. It is the need for security and stability and trust in the world as we know it that causes us to give so much weight to what we experience. Because if we were to admit that we might be mistaken about the causes or our perception of our experiences, we might just become a little more nihilistic and that's not good. But, in spite of what Dr. Phil says about "Would you rather be right or happy?" I would rather be right than clutching to what makes me feel secure even if it is completely off-base. Many is the time in history that a general looked across the battlefield and saw a small force of enemies and rushed in to attack and found out that the rest of the opposing force was hidden somewhere and rushed in and flanked him and his soldiers and won the day. Our senses and experiences, no matter what our hearts may wish for, are like the crafty enemy general who knows how to divide his men and flank his foe and find victory.

So, I've just spent two run-on paragraphs demolishing what is, in my view, the grave error of clinging to the notion of absolute truth. We can try to deceive ourselves but, in the end, we will all reach the end of our sojourns in this world without the slightest clue what it was all about than we had when we showed up. So, what about my opening question about why do I carry on if I believe in a universe that is, as far as I can ever know, completely meaningless? Why do I read philosophers and why do I not put a bullet in my head or start running pedestrians down in my car? Simple. I do not know if freedom exists. I do not know if we are not predetermined to do everything we do by genetics and environment. So I don't claim to be preaching freedom. But, I have found that in a functionally meaningless existence, freedom is the greatest prize to be found. You are free to interpret the evidence of your senses and thoughts and emotions however you choose. If there is no overarching font of ultimate morality, then we are free to invent our own moral codes. Some people view that idea as a harbinger of the apocalypse. I'm fine with bringing about the end of the world as we know it. Because the world as we know it hasn't worked in eons. Those who see decadence and Babylon and Armageddon around every corner don't seem to realize that people have been saying that for thousands of years. It hasn't come yet, why do you think it will pop up tomorrow because some poor teenaged girl got an abortion or a dude got high or someone you didn't vote for got elected anyway? It's a kind of hubris to think that the end times have just been holding off until WE showed up to smash the wickedness of humankind.

This freedom we find in meaninglessness is the freedom to assign meaning as we see fit. Despite Nietzsche not being a nihilist, he did see the end of meaning foreshadowed in his day and, very wisely, set about constructing his own meanings. Whether we realize this or not, nihilist or devout Muslim, we all go about creating our own meanings anyway, in the unceasing stream of our thoughts and emotions. We won't stop finding meanings until we die and, despite anyone's evidence that their beliefs are true, we will never know how factual our beliefs are unless we die and suddenly find ourselves face to face with God and in his infinite wisdom, he deigns to tell us what we wish to know. I do not personally believe that but I use my freedom of choice to allow that I could be wrong to doubt it and I may show up at the foot of his throne one day, facing judgment or love or whatever other motivations could cause a divine being to create such a wonderful, flawed, dreadful and beautiful race as we humans. So, believe what you will but do not ask yourself or me why I think what I do and still keep on keeping on. It's abundantly clear that where I find my enlightenment is in the utterly free world of knowing I can think anything I wish and eventually, I may have thought everything there is to think and lived more lives than there are people on this earth.

Psychosis

This is a challenging blog post to write. In it, I will admit to some things that are either embarrassing or not at all flattering. I just told one of my adopted little sisters about some of this last night and breaking the barrier of not really telling anyone about it has sort of inspired me to really open up about it. I honestly don't know what my motives for writing this are. I think it has something to do with the fact that I want people to have a better idea of exactly what's wrong with me. I don't want to be completely defined by my illness but I also want people to really be aware of the fact that there's damned good reasons why I am on Disability and not being a normal, productive, independent, responsible adult. Most people don't understand at all how profoundly disturbed I am because I'm better than most at hiding it. No longer. This is to tear down the misconceptions that I'm just a regular guy who gets sad and anxious sometimes but is mostly okay other than that. It's time to be understood and see who accepts the real me and who doesn't want to have anything to do with me any longer.

I see a psychiatrist I believe on the 19th. I am not 100% positive I will make it that long. I may have to check myself into a hospital at some point before that. I don't feel that I badly need to right now. However, that could change at any time. I may need to change my meds in the near future. I don't think my old meds are doing the trick as well as they used to. Kind of sad, I had developed a great deal of loyalty to Risperdal. Maybe it's odd to have customer loyalty to a drug, but it probably saved my life. I need to talk to someone about something new because I think my body has adjusted too much to the meds I'm on now and they are no longer at optimal effectiveness. I have noticed some of my psychotic symptoms coming back. That is what this post is about.

I have always been paranoid. I have been afraid of people for as long as I can remember. I have thought that when someone laughs they are laughing at me for just about the same amount of time. I can be very nosy because I am always worried that people are trying to bring me down behind my back. My wife (yay that she's now my wife since my birthday!) has remarked on how nosy I am. I have a compulsion to look at her computer screen when she's using her computer. I am normally not paranoid about her but that is essentially the reason I do that. I also listen carefully whenever I hear conversations near me because I'm positive they are about me. At some point, years ago, these paranoid inclinations blossomed into full-blown psychotic delusions.

My mother used to get angry at God and scream at him to strike her dead whenever anything went wrong. I believe I inherited my inclination to paranoia from her but somehow learned from her the specifics. I don't even really believe in God, at least not in a monotheistic sense of one absolute all-powerful king of humanity. But I blame God for my misfortunes because the madness in my mind believes that only an omnipotent deity is capable of manufacturing the conspiracy that is operating against me. I also don't demand that God strike me dead when things go awry. Instead, I scream at him to come down from on high and, essentially, do battle with me so that either I can kill him or he can kill me and thus end the torment. Yes, when the insanity bursts through the dams of my mental defenses, I honestly believe I'd have a chance to kill the almighty Creator in one on one combat. I told you you wouldn't think I was normal after this. It gets worse.

So, I think God has it in for me. He has a plan too. He wants to drive me to suicide. I am convinced of this. I can't really explain why but I know it in my soul. God created me solely to (perhaps) get some kind of sick pleasure out of crushing me beneath his heel. Delightful. I am locked in a mortal struggle with the Divine. The Divine I only believe in when I am out of my gourd and convinced I am being persecuted unto death. So, how does God go about his evil plot? That's where it gets really nuts. See, God knows how much I want the stuff I order online. I buy myself stuff compulsively to make myself feel better when I am unhappy. That's a whole other post by itself. It's part of my whole sickness. But I digress. So, he knows I feel like I need those items I buy for myself to save my sanity. We've already established that he seeks to destroy my sanity. Thus, it makes perfect sense that he'd try to keep those packages from me. He goes about this by collaborating with African-Americans in the USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc. to delay, damage or lose my shipments. Yes, blacks in the shipping industry take orders from God to not deliver me my stuff in a timely fashion in order to deny me the satisfaction I derive from it and to ultimately drive me to kill myself.

I told you I was embarrassed and not proud. I don't even know where to begin with this. I mean, first there's the plain insanity of this thought. I could also point out the racism involved, even though I fight against being that kind of person with all my might when I'm not in the grip of psychosis. It doesn't make me feel any better about myself when I remind myself that I did, after all, vote for a black man in the last Presidential election. That isn't enough proof that I'm not a racist to my disgusted self. I don't know why my brain picked blacks specifically to be afraid of in this instance. No clue. Anyway, it's a mad, racist, sick thought. And I can't get it out of my head lately. And this delusion goes back years. Medication made it go away for a long time but I'm slipping back into it lately. Maybe, as I said, it's my body adjusting to my drugs. Perhaps it's the fact that I've been under a lot of stress lately. Stress amplifies mental illness out of control. Whatever is the cause, I think it's quite understandable why I have been considering checking myself into the hospital. I get anxiety attacks when I check the mail in case something I'm expecting hasn't arrived yet. Definitely not sane.

That's not everything. I wish it was. Sunday night, I was convinced I wasn't real. I didn't think anything was real. That's a common symptom of psychosis. I also have been terrified of all of my friends conspiring behind my back to break me and then abandon me in my time of need. I can't just trust my friends, I'm always so very suspicious. This is one reason why many schizotypals, schizoaffectives and schizophrenics don't like to make close relationships with others. They are too paranoid and afraid of what will happen. I decided some time ago to force myself to take the risk and it has been good for me but I can't honestly say there aren't times I regret it. If you are reading this, odds are, at some time in the not-too-distant past, I have been deathly afraid of you and what you will someday do to me. Sorry.

If you hate me or are afraid of Crazy Chris now, don't worry, I was prepared for that. You're just confirming my fears of people. If you pity me, don't. I fight this shit with all my might and don't want to be your favorite victim. If you support me, bless your heart. That's what I need. I fear someday taking my own life or ending up as a permanent resident of a hospital or possibly being a madman living on the streets ranting to himself. But I haven't given up. I will have to lose my marbles completely so that I can't even contemplate fighting before I give up. If you read all of this, thanks. It's a sign you care. Or else you're morbidly curious. I would be too. Madness isn't pretty, but it sure as hell is interesting.