When I was twenty years old, I fell in love for the first time. He wasn’t my first boyfriend, or my second, or my third – and while I had previously believed myself in love, I had never truly experienced the depth of feeling, the intense ravishment and rapture of a true meeting of souls – until I met him. There was only one minor problem: I was struggling with a huge, terrifying, demonic force inside my own self. I’m sure there are a variety of labels for that particular condition – depression, mental instability, negative animus, demonic possession … take your pick. I just know that it was horrifying and it was systematically sucking the life force out of me. It was like a voice, but not a voice. It was like something inside me that whispered incessant messages about my innate worthlessness and how I only deserved to be annihilated. Undone. Erased. The evil described in People of the Lie had somehow wormed its way into me, and was insidiously and relentlessly working to sabotage any chance I had at a healthy and happy life. But I didn’t know that then. I had no labels yet. I was simply struggling to keep my head above the dark water I was in.
Strangely, it was as though that voice had been lying in wait inside me for years and years, but it wasn’t fully roused out of its slumber until I fell in love. As soon as that incredibly powerful light was directed into my soul in a pure and undiluted form – which was a completely new experience for me – the demonic serpent finally reared its ugly head and the battle commenced. The more I struggled to be free, to surrender, to give myself over to this life force, the more intense the darkness and inner sabotage became. It’s hard to explain just how it operated on a day-to-day basis; suffice it to say that it made normal life virtually impossible. If I tried to go out for dinner or a movie, for instance, I became immersed in such a dark and deep depression that I was virtually catatonic. He would speak to me, and I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I couldn’t think of anything except that I needed to go home, lock the door, and let no one inside. Except – that option was also terrifying, because I was all-too aware that I was then letting the demon win. I was trapped. Imprisoned.
I had already started psychotherapy at that time, and I would go to my psychiatrist’s office and pour it out – what was wrong with me, why couldn’t I live like other people, what had happened to make me this way? I was unrelenting in my search for answers, for the truth that would set me free. I was going through a deconstruction process – unlearning all my old patterns and conditioning, painstakingly sorting through the rubble of my childhood [and in fact not only my childhood but the lives of the generations that had gone before me] to find the truth that would release me.
The simplest things in life eluded me completely – I saw people who went out to the bakery on Saturday mornings, bought bagels and a newspaper, then went home to their loved ones, had breakfast and read the paper together. I pined for that. It wasn’t much. My longings were very modest. But there was this voice inside my head telling me constantly, incessantly, relentlessly that these things were not for me, would never be for me. Love, family, serenity, peace, security sunlight pouring in through the windows on a Saturday while drinking coffee at the kitchen table – those things were for other people, not for me.
The man I was in love with saw my struggle. While nobody else saw what was going on with me, he did. He got it. It was very hard for him, watching me flailing around like that, unable to take his hand, but he totally got it. And he helped me define it in a way that made me feel less alone, as the battle between good and evil – as a struggle that was as old as mankind. That age-old war was not fought out in some remote location – it was right here, inside my own self. God and Lucifer, darkness and light, life and death, were fighting it out in me. It was that simple – and that complex.
And so I began reading the New Testament. I was not brought up with religion: in fact to this day I shrink from organized religion and abhor religious extremism. But to my surprise, I found that identified with The Book. I found a particular affinity with Paul, who seemed to struggle the way I did. My favourite passage, at the time, became this:
For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
[Romans 7:19]
That described my condition in a single sentence. I desired nothing more than to surrender to the relationship I had found, but instead of doing that – instead of giving myself over to it, nurturing it, reveling in it … something in me was bent on destroying it. And it wasn’t me, it was something else. Some other force, that destroyed life. Evil is live spelled backwards.
Eventually, what I feared most, happened. The love was obliterated by the darkness. The man I loved wasn’t strong enough in the end, and our relationship was destroyed. It broke my heart – and took me years to get over.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. Although the relationship ended, my own deconstruction continued. All the old parts of me needed to die – the old, debilitating, destructive, non-life-giving parts, before a new self could be born. I would learn that it was a process that couldn’t be rushed, and that couldn’t be forced. But eventually it did happen. Out of the rubble – out of the desert – came a new person.
Today is Easter. The day when Christ rose from the dead. My personal belief is that much of what is written in the Bible is allegory – and something that mirrors the human condition. I do believe a man named Jesus from Nazareth lived and that he was a remarkable human being, a pacifist, a truth-seeker, a man with ‘flawless mental sight’, a man who should be an inspiration for anyone. As for whether he actually rose from the dead, I do not know. However I do know that it is possible for human beings to die a certain kind of death, a spiritual and psychological death, during the course of their lifetimes – and be resurrected as new people, into a completely different life, a life that they could never have envisioned for themselves before. I know, because today I have the life I thought I would never, ever have. I’m living proof.
[Back to the weather tomorrow.]
Labels: dirty laundry, Reflections
