Originally written in Pittsburgh, about September 2010. In many ways this still expresses my efforts (though the struggles are different now), but enough time has passed that I feel alright sharing it. Tread lightly, speak kindly.
things are changing so quickly and yet so sluggishly, too. it's hard to believe how the time has gone by and pushed me to the brink of change. I've come a long way, but I'm still struggling with so much. not least because I'm just now becoming truly aware of what I've been struggling with.
last week I had my last appointment with my therapist before I leave my semi-permanent residence in utah valley for a graduate city life in the east. it was sad. partly because she has helped me through a lot of things and really helped me to change my life for the better and it's sad to say goodbye. partly because it's so frightening to contemplate trying to make it without her, or a therapist in general.
it was more than a year ago when I started having my first panic attacks. I didn't have that many actual defined attacks, but there was a period of about a month when I was constantly panicking, just barely keeping it under control, kind of like silent seizures. I went to an honors seminar lecture that talked about the psychology of overcoming fear - it was really great and I learned a lot, but just thinking about feeling fear, even positive thinking, triggered it. it was a constant spiral of anxiety and panic, of grasping for control of my own mind.
I managed, but barely, and I decided then that I would get help when I came back in the fall - there was no reason to go through something so awful without help. I was not going to go through that again.
after school was over, things evened out and I went to france to have fun. but I was in love. in love with a boy who didn't really realize it or what he was doing to me. in retrospect, I can see that I was actually in love, more obsessed really, with this idea of who I thought he was. but the emotion was genuine. I was ready to do a lot of drastic and brave/stupid (aren't they the same) things on that emotion. (and I did). it made for a rollercoaster of a year, a heart-breaking, excruciating year. that's the backdrop for april through december.
during my internship in france, after study abroad was over and I left all my friends, I found myself in toulouse, completely alone, depressed and heart-broken, working with poor, handicapped old people : pretty much all I thought about was death. and the boy. yeah, it was really healthy.
enter the food troubles. I had been gaining weight steadily since the beginning of the school year, especially in the winter. I had certainly gained some weight since coming to france, but it wasn't the end of the world - mostly from eating lots of good food all the time, since, let's be honest, if you're in france, you eat good food and you don't feel bad about it. but in my solitary, depressed state, food became the only thing to do. it was compulsive and automatic and I had never felt so out of control. and it was kind of numbing. a relief.
and I ballooned. I had only gained 15 pounds, but wow, it made a big difference on my miniature frame. when I came back to school in the fall, I was just as heart-broken and depressed, except instead of having almost nothing to do, I was the busiest I had ever been in my life. so I didn't eat. I simply didn't have time to eat. my appetite became non-existent. and all of the weight went away. which didn't convince me to change my non-eating ways because, well, it worked.
looking back, that's scary. looking back, that could have turned into something very serious very quickly. it was absolutely a case of thought-action fusion where the brain is incapable of distinguishing between the actual thought and the subsequent action. you think you are helpless to resist a thought. if you think about eating, you will eat. if you say you will only eat three cookies because you know it is bad to eat the whole box, yet you think about eating the whole box, you will eat the whole box. and I did. lots of boxes.
the same thing happens with my skin - if I think about messing with my skin, I will. I tell myself I will not touch my face today, but if I think about it, I end up in front of a mirror doing what I promised I wouldn't. it's getting better - I'm working on strengthening my brain against the habit, waiting 5 minutes after the thought before acting, or 10, or pushing it to 15. but I can be standing there after who knows how long, hating what I'm doing to myself, feeling so scared and helpless and say - stop it now. turn around. go away. go to bed. stop. - and I can't do it. I can't stop. and it scares me shitless.
you know how people tell you to build up your self-esteem? how you're supposed to stand in front of the mirror before you walk out the door in the morning and tell yourself - you're beautiful. you look amazing. go have a good day and be happy because you are simply smashing. - most of the time I feel pretty. sometimes I feel simply smashing. I'm ready to embrace this body of mine for what it is and stop wishing I was 16 again.
but when my skin is bad, it's the only thing I can see. when I finally stop, a long while after I try to make myself stop and can't, I look in the mirror at what I've done and I hate myself. I do what you're not supposed to do. I look at myself and say - good job. see what you've done? you look like shit. what the hell is wrong with you? you look. like. shit.
happily, I had more time winter semester - I ate better food and more meals and exercised twice a week. I was healed from the heartache, found closure, and took joy in the life I had - it was a miracle. and gratefully, these issues all seemed to disappear.
I am happy. and stable. and working on learning how to feel feelings without judgment, without fear, without needing to control them. otherwise, feeling things leads to anxiety which leads to feelings and more anxiety and an inescapable circle that feeds into panic. when I first went to my therapist, I was so worried about the compulsive eating and the obsessive damage I was doing to my skin - I wanted to work on that. I'm glad she had the insight (I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she's good at her profession) to know what was really causing those things.
it's a little scary to think that I never actually overcame those problems - they went away because their emotional causes went away. so it worries me what could happen again when life gets hard. but I'm actually overcoming them every day as I'm allowing myself to feel things and not being afraid of feeling and giving up my control over emotions. when I am unafraid of feelings, I don't need to numb them with binge endorphins or hours in front of the bathroom mirror.
I'm working on it.
9.07.2013
The Problem of Pain
Here are my notes from my recent study of The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis. I go chronologically through the book with quotes that highlight important concepts for me, and also serve as a sort of guide through some of his over-arching logic. If anything doesn't seem fully or well explained, it's because I took short quotes and I'll direct you to the book itself to figure out exactly what he's saying.
I've included page numbers, though my copy is a rather old and obscure version - it doesn't even have an ISBN number! Macmillan press, 1962 edition, 1975 printing.
"Food for thought" simply means that I haven't quite got my head around it or don't quite agree, but want to think about it some more. Asterisks indicate passages that directly relate to conversations Andy and I have had recently (sometimes multiple times, sometimes quite heatedly) and give some further insight (or validation) for our views.
If you don't want to read it all, skip to the last section, the Best Part Ever.
~
"That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world demands that these occasions should be extremely rare." (33-34)
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself." (34)
"Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness." (41)
food for thought:
"The place for which He designed them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained. When we want something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy." (52)
"Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty." (65)
If we truly were in a "creaturely" state to God, then, as Lewis's logic goes, it would be temptation and sin to become as a God, to have and desire independence and free will as separate beings from God. Granted, we cannot gain eternal growth, independence, and free will (that results in consequences) without becoming dependent on God and giving up our free will to Him - He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.
"The first answer then to the question of why our cure should be painful is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain." (91)
* "Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself. They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it?" (93-94)
"It is a poor thing to strike our colors to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms; but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had." (97)
* "It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. I emphatically embrace the first alternative. I believe ... that 'they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will.' God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good." (100)
food for thought:
"If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme trial or sacrifice it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength, which, if Heaven gave it, may be called his own.' Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it" (102)
"I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made 'perfect through suffering' is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design." (105)
* "Indignation at others' sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humility from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead." (108)
"If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees that world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable." (114)
"Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them." (114)
"Pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy ... Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the 'complex good' is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil generally."(like error and sin, as he describes) (116-117) Andy made an interesting point here that this isn't entirely true - that there are pains like abuses and trauma that continue to have lasting effects and cause more pain, proliferate it.
* "Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself, but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances." (122)
"The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is (wicked), is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness." (122)
hell - punishment, destruction, privation
fire evokes both torment and destruction
destruction = unmaking, or cessation (no more progress) of the destroyed (though I don't hold to the notion of becoming unmade completely, of no longer being a soul) (124-125)
~
Best Part Ever:
"I am considering ... why He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it." (147-148)
"What can be more a man's own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can." (150)
Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St. Paul that a body is a unity of different members. Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others - fresh and ever fresh news of the 'My God' whom each finds in Him whom all praise as 'Our God.'" (150)
"For doubtless the continually successful, yet never completed, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created." (150)
"For union exists only between distincts."
I've included page numbers, though my copy is a rather old and obscure version - it doesn't even have an ISBN number! Macmillan press, 1962 edition, 1975 printing.
"Food for thought" simply means that I haven't quite got my head around it or don't quite agree, but want to think about it some more. Asterisks indicate passages that directly relate to conversations Andy and I have had recently (sometimes multiple times, sometimes quite heatedly) and give some further insight (or validation) for our views.
If you don't want to read it all, skip to the last section, the Best Part Ever.
~
"That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world demands that these occasions should be extremely rare." (33-34)
"Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself." (34)
"Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness." (41)
food for thought:
"The place for which He designed them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained. When we want something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy." (52)
"Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty." (65)
If we truly were in a "creaturely" state to God, then, as Lewis's logic goes, it would be temptation and sin to become as a God, to have and desire independence and free will as separate beings from God. Granted, we cannot gain eternal growth, independence, and free will (that results in consequences) without becoming dependent on God and giving up our free will to Him - He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.
"The first answer then to the question of why our cure should be painful is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain." (91)
* "Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself. They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it?" (93-94)
"It is a poor thing to strike our colors to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms; but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had." (97)
* "It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. I emphatically embrace the first alternative. I believe ... that 'they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will.' God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good." (100)
food for thought:
"If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme trial or sacrifice it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength, which, if Heaven gave it, may be called his own.' Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it" (102)
"I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made 'perfect through suffering' is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design." (105)
* "Indignation at others' sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humility from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead." (108)
"If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees that world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable." (114)
"Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them." (114)
"Pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy ... Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the 'complex good' is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil generally."(like error and sin, as he describes) (116-117) Andy made an interesting point here that this isn't entirely true - that there are pains like abuses and trauma that continue to have lasting effects and cause more pain, proliferate it.
* "Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself, but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances." (122)
"The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is (wicked), is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness." (122)
hell - punishment, destruction, privation
fire evokes both torment and destruction
destruction = unmaking, or cessation (no more progress) of the destroyed (though I don't hold to the notion of becoming unmade completely, of no longer being a soul) (124-125)
~
Best Part Ever:
"I am considering ... why He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it." (147-148)
"What can be more a man's own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can." (150)
Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St. Paul that a body is a unity of different members. Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others - fresh and ever fresh news of the 'My God' whom each finds in Him whom all praise as 'Our God.'" (150)
"For doubtless the continually successful, yet never completed, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created." (150)
"For union exists only between distincts."
back again
Still lots going on around here, but not much on the blog :/ We'll consider this a random update.
- Went to Seattle on an MPA Career Trip and took a long weekend up in the San Juan Islands with Andy
- Graduated with my Masters in Public Administration, Nonprofit Management
- Landed a consultant position for the summer with AidData at the College of William and Mary
- Went out to Williamsburg, Virginia for the summer job, went without Andy for a month, then got to pick him up in D.C. for the second month or so
- Moved from Utah to Virginia, back to Utah, and then again in Utah, in the space of a month. Luckily, most of that was just with suitcases and not with all of our stuff.
- Kept loving Liana, the most adorable baby of all time, walking now
- Discovered J.Crew
- Celebrated year 2 with my lovely Andy, this time at a little B&B in Salt Lake, a yummy Mediterranean dinner, and a trip to the aviary.
Now I'm taking it easy while Andy gets ready to defend his thesis next month and we both look for jobs. I'm looking forward to moving somewhere awesome, finding a fun place to live, and starting our careers.
I've decided to beat the baby hunger by buying baby clothes whenever I want, and then I can just have a baby shower with the essentials - like diapers! - when the time comes (whenever that is in the distant future). It hasn't yet panned out because I just want to buy clothes for myself :) But with jobs will come the money and then I can buy baby clothes and fabric and all of the other unneeded and currently impractical things I want.
What I've Been Reading Around Here:
- The Tao of Pooh
- Angle of Repose
- Blink
- Ender's Game
- Wildwood
- I Capture the Castle
- Why Children Fail
- The Problem of Pain
- The Politics of Breastfeeding
and many more!
Also, my hair is super long.
- Went to Seattle on an MPA Career Trip and took a long weekend up in the San Juan Islands with Andy
- Graduated with my Masters in Public Administration, Nonprofit Management
- Landed a consultant position for the summer with AidData at the College of William and Mary
- Went out to Williamsburg, Virginia for the summer job, went without Andy for a month, then got to pick him up in D.C. for the second month or so
- Moved from Utah to Virginia, back to Utah, and then again in Utah, in the space of a month. Luckily, most of that was just with suitcases and not with all of our stuff.
- Kept loving Liana, the most adorable baby of all time, walking now
- Discovered J.Crew
- Celebrated year 2 with my lovely Andy, this time at a little B&B in Salt Lake, a yummy Mediterranean dinner, and a trip to the aviary.
Now I'm taking it easy while Andy gets ready to defend his thesis next month and we both look for jobs. I'm looking forward to moving somewhere awesome, finding a fun place to live, and starting our careers.
I've decided to beat the baby hunger by buying baby clothes whenever I want, and then I can just have a baby shower with the essentials - like diapers! - when the time comes (whenever that is in the distant future). It hasn't yet panned out because I just want to buy clothes for myself :) But with jobs will come the money and then I can buy baby clothes and fabric and all of the other unneeded and currently impractical things I want.
What I've Been Reading Around Here:
- The Tao of Pooh
- Angle of Repose
- Blink
- Ender's Game
- Wildwood
- I Capture the Castle
- Why Children Fail
- The Problem of Pain
- The Politics of Breastfeeding
and many more!
Also, my hair is super long.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)