INTRODUCTION
This essay embarks on an ambitious journey: to explore two subjects of immense complexity and profound personal significance. My aim is to coherently and concisely articulate the nature of my mental illness—its origins, its tangible physiological and psychological manifestations, and the profound ways it has shaped my life and led me to this present moment of reflection.
Simultaneously, I intend to intelligently and comprehensively contemplate the existence of God. This is not a detached philosophical exercise; it is an inquiry deeply informed by an acute awareness of my own human condition, the specific lens of my mental disorder, and a conscious recognition of the universal human search for meaning, purpose, and a sense of posterity.
I tackle these monumental themes—the reality of God and our potential relationship with such a Being—because they represent, perhaps, the most critical existential and consequential questions we can face.
The exploration is intricate, and the connections between personal suffering and universal questions are deeply interwoven. Because these topics demand careful consideration, the explanation will unfold deliberately. So, let us begin.
PART 1:
These thoughts, intense and insistent, demand to be articulated, if only for my own record—a message to a future self. I am currently navigating a hypomanic episode, a state that, while familiar, remains profoundly unsettling. Years ago, a bipolar diagnosis felt abstract, almost ill-fitting. Now, living alone, the patterns have become undeniable through self-observation; these cycles are an intrinsic part of my physiological reality.
Like many mental illnesses, mine did not arise from a vacuum. It has taken a lifetime to approach an understanding, or at least an acceptance, of what differentiates my internal world. Outwardly, I can appear "normal," even function as such for periods.
Yet, inwardly, a profound neurosis persists, coupled with a distinct lack of interest in the mundane. My energy is channeled with an almost singular focus towards what I deem truly important, often to an extreme degree. And the only pursuit that has consistently held ultimate importance throughout my life is the acquisition of knowledge.
This drive makes me highly conscientious, acutely aware of my own psychological landscape, especially in contrast to what might be considered "normal." When I speak of extremes, I refer to the dedication of my time and energy to activities I perceive as possessing the highest value—chief among them, the relentless pursuit of knowledge and wisdom.
I have always been a studier, compelled to take a topic and exhaustively research it, to spend my hours contemplating ideas and concepts of the highest magnitude, of the utmost complexity and inherent worth. This explains my deep dives into varied disciplines: science, philosophy, and, inevitably, theology.
To be entirely candid—and this bears heavily on the subsequent discussion—I have been, and in many ways remain, obsessed with theology. The logic is straightforward: if God is real, then God is, by definition, the most significant entity or concept in the universe. This theological preoccupation is a thread we will follow, but first, it is crucial to further delineate the contours of my mental illness.
I have been, for as long as memory serves, a "highly disturbed" individual. I cannot recall a single period in my life characterized by genuine happiness, contentment, or peace. There is a growing understanding that many mental illnesses have identifiable causes, and tragically, trauma features prominently among them.
As human beings, with our primal brain and a physiology wired for survival, we are acutely susceptible to conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A single terrifying or overwhelmingly complex event, or a series of them, can recalibrate our entire being. When faced with extreme fear, the body and mind instinctively prioritize survival, shedding all that is deemed non-essential.
Symptoms of PTSD, such as hypervigilance and an exaggerated startle response to perceived (though often absent) stimuli, are well-documented. As a disabled veteran, I often attribute my trauma to the experience of war—and this is true, though with an important caveat. Going to war, serving one's country, is often seen as a voluntary, honorable, and arduous undertaking. Perhaps it is, in some sense, the "coolest" way to acquire trauma, if such a thing can be said.
But the narrative of my life’s disquiet began long before any battlefield. My statement about never feeling content, happy, safe, or comfortable is not hyperbole; it is my consistent lived experience. I was an oddball in high school. A brief sense of "blooming" occurred during my undergraduate years, but by my graduation from SUNY Albany in 2007, a stark realization crystallized: I had never been happy. A profound sense of wrongness pervaded my existence, so distressing that I actively sought an escape. This, in truth, was a primary motivator for volunteering for war—an honorable exit, I reasoned, from the unrelenting misery of living with a disordered mind.
The logical progression here is crucial. If I was unwell before college, during college, and in the years since, the common denominator is an internal state of being. It's not a matter of physical unhealthiness in the conventional sense, but a persistent feeling that my brain operates abnormally. My intelligence, the one faculty I trust, is what drives me towards philosophy, science, and theology—the latter being a desperate attempt to find answers, to perhaps save myself.
After returning from Afghanistan, my vulnerability was acute. I found myself homeless and then, foolishly, rushed into a reckless marriage, neglecting the due diligence that such a commitment requires. It is often said that we attract a mirror of ourselves; I was a broken person, and so I found another.
Perhaps I wasn't as "messed up" then as I perceive myself to be now, or perhaps my self-awareness was less developed. It has taken four decades to cultivate the high degree of conscientiousness I now possess, and even so, an awareness of my own actions can still feel elusive at times, a testament to something within me not functioning correctly.
My prevailing theory points to childhood trauma. The specifics are hazy, likely a confluence of many things, but the outcome seems clear: my nervous system was fundamentally disrupted as a child, thrusting me into a state of hyper-overdrive, shaping me into someone neurotic and "weird." Adjusting has been a lifelong process.
That ill-fated marriage significantly compounded my struggles. I know, with a painful certainty, that with a healthy, loving partner, I could have thrived. The challenges of my mental illness, while specific to me, are not insurmountable given the right support—even something as fundamental as consistent positive external stimulus, like a nurturing relationship. This is a significant point of my angst towards God, which I will elaborate on. My system was damaged in childhood and never had the opportunity to heal.
My two most significant life decisions, aside from the pursuit of education (a realm where I feel competent), were joining the military and later, marrying while in a state of profound vulnerability. I entered that marriage partly on faith, believing God had a hand in it. I desired marriage; I have much to offer and require only moderate, primarily emotional, support. To be left to my own devices, living alone, is exceptionally difficult.
This unfulfilled need for partnership, for a life shared, is a primary source of my contention with God. I feel I should be married, and the absence of this makes me feel like a profound failure in life. What have I truly accomplished? Going to war stands as one of my few significant achievements.
The failure of my marriage and the subsequent failure to have children—this, too, fuels my anger towards God. Despite my mental health issues, despite a nervous system that often feels like a livewire, I am an extremely kind, loving individual, deeply attentive to the needs of others. I believe I would have been a fantastic parent.
I am detailing my mental illness and its theorized origins because I am currently experiencing serious issues. Bipolar disorder, I suspect, is often a consequence of compounded trauma. A healthier life trajectory, one without the added burdens of war and a traumatic marriage, might have yielded a different outcome.
My cognitive functions are intermittently reliable, but my body, this "chemical animal," often feels chemically imbalanced, my nervous system haywire. My entire life has been characterized by an intense, pervasive guardedness; it took years to recognize this as abnormal, and trauma is the only coherent explanation.
PTSD, and many mental illnesses, can be understood as coping mechanisms—the brain’s persistent signal of imminent danger. It's a survival mechanism, and in that sense, the system is "working correctly," as if I were an animal in the wild perpetually evading a predator. One chance is all you get not to be eaten, so a lifetime of high alert is, from a purely survivalist standpoint, preferable.
My problem is that the "high alert" never disengages. At least the war provides a socially acceptable narrative for this state, but the truth remains: I went to war because I was already primed for it.
It takes a certain kind of individual to volunteer for a war zone. Some are driven by honorable intentions. Others, tragically, by a desire to inflict harm. And then there are those like me, driven by a complex mix of reasons, one of which, paradoxically, was not a primal will to survive my then-current existence. I have thanked God for my physical survival in the war zone, yet, in truth, I wasn't scared there. I’ve always been on high alert, always ready for conflict. War, in a grim way, made a certain kind of sense to me.
This exploration of my inner world leads directly to the other critical theme. I repeatedly mention God, and my earlier reference to an obsession with theology was not an overstatement. That obsession was, and is, fueled by a single, consuming question: Is God real? I so desperately want Him to be real. I want Christianity, in its ideal form, to be true, because it speaks to so many fundamental human needs—the need to be loved, the desire for meaning, the hope for redemption.
PART 2:
Here is the rest:
I want to be saved. I want to be healed. I want to be prosperous. But again, I feel like I failed at life. I mean, I failed to have children. I failed to procreate; as an animal, that's really your only purpose. And I mean, I'm 40, so it's still possible, but I feel like I'm too old.
I don't want to be 60, you know, when my kids are 20 if I had kids now. And I mean, it's going to take years and years and years before I could be ready to start dating and then go through the dating process, where you get a lot of false positives, so to speak. You know, you have to go through a number of people to find the right one, and then when you find the right one... I'm not getting married to anybody, you know, without at least dating them for a year or more. That's the proper way to do it, I think. I don't know. It's a healthier way to do it.
I got married my first time in, I think, three [units of time/meetings] of meeting somebody—meeting another crazy brew. Comparison! Oh my God. So my obsession with theology was, I guess, I am highly intelligent and conscientious, so what's the most important thing? And that would be God, because if God's real, then—I mean, if God's real—then really you've got nothing to worry about. I mean, I guess if God's not real and you die, then nothing matters. I mean, if I died right now, I don't really have anybody in my life that would really be impacted.
I mean, a couple of people maybe would be sad for a little bit, but, um, that's why I say I feel like I failed at life. And part of the reason I fail at life is because, you know, my system has never been healthy. I've always... Man, you have no idea how stressful it is to be on high alert all the time. You know, if I was—if I wasn't messed up—I would have made way better decisions. The decisions I made were because I was messed up. And here I find myself, you know, assessing theology and philosophy and science, yet I can't even solve, like, simple things.
But it's not—it's not my fault because, you know, I didn't choose to screw up my nervous system before I had a chance to, you know, develop correctly. It's not my fault. Neither are any of the decisions I made after that. I mean, you know, of course, I take responsibility to some degree, but...
So my obsession... so, instead of doing normal things, like normal people—like relaxing, or doing more mundane things—you know, I have, when I say obsessed, I mean, you know, I listen to sermons and... I guess anti-sermons or debates; I like, I love listening to debates between, um, atheists, agnostics, and theists or believers. And here's my main point about God: I don't have confidence in faith anymore. I did take faith on as you're supposed to, you know, when I became a Christian, when I got married. You know, I got married to another Christian woman, and I believed that, you know, God was involved in her life, so everything would have been okay, but of course, it didn't work out. You know, and now here I am, barely functioning normally and obsessing about theology and philosophy and, you know, intangible things about the universe that don't have any impact on anything, instead of, you know, doing normal things.
I mean, this is partly the reason I'm a 100% disabled veteran now, and if it wasn't for that, I don't know what I would be doing. I probably wouldn't have survived.
So maybe this is all part of God's crazy plan for me: to go to war. And now, at least I survived. And, you know, the best thing about me having gone to war is now I'm a disabled veteran. And so now, because I can't do normal things and I'm obsessed about things I'm saying that are important to me, like philosophy, but, you know, it doesn't really have any impact on, you know, normal everyday life, except... this issue of God! Because it's so important! It's definitely the single most important thing! Like, this question of whether God is or is not even real.
Because if He's not real, then I can't have a personal relationship with Him. And, I can't expect any divine intervention. Then we really are in a naturalistic, deterministic universe that, you know, is just made of particles and evolution, and it's just, you know, there is no guiding force behind it. Which, to me, is sad. If that's true, then that's a sad reality, because then I can't help but project into the future that nothing matters if there is no God.
Now, one reason I think a lot of people are attracted to Christianity is (well, there are a lot of reasons) that they recognize that they're sinners (which is how Christianity puts it) or broken people, and, you know, they need love, they need restoration, and of course, salvation and wisdom and guidance, you know, and to have somebody on the other end of the prayer line when I'm praying, that somebody's actually listening; I'm not just a madman talking to myself. Which, if God's not real, then really all the people that do believe in God and pray are being foolish or, you know, they're delusional (for which there are a lot of arguments). There are also a lot of arguments for God.
Here's the confusing thing: I took it on faith, okay? But the existence of the single most important thing in the universe being unanswerable is beyond confusing because I genuinely sought after God. Like, I surrendered, I was humble, um, you know, I followed all the rules, you know, or I did the best I could. And, you know, look where it's gotten me.
I've accomplished nothing in my life. I feel like I've completely failed, especially at the single most important thing: I wanted to have children when I was younger. Like, I haven't accomplished anything. Like, I make no impact on the universe whatsoever at this point. I mean, there's still... I mean, this could be God's mysterious plan for me, or His plan could be to remain mysterious, which is beyond confusing because if it's the most important thing, it shouldn't be mysterious.
And I genuinely sought after God and found nothing, like in my personal experience and my personal relationship with God. And that's disappointing.
But again, I mean, here's the ultimate conclusion: I mean, nothing I do really matters, or nothing anybody does really matters, because no matter what, if God's real, then you're going to be living out God's perfect plan for you, no matter what. You can't escape your, you know, your fate. And if God's not real, then, you know, you're just an animal that's going to die someday, and at that point, nothing matters. A lot of people—one reason that a lot of people like Christianity—is because, you know, they aren't even afraid of death because death is just one stage.
You're happy because, you know, you get to go to heaven and be with God, which sounds pretty fantastic. And that, as opposed to, you know, just ceasing to exist—yeah, that kind of sucks.
So, in my heart, I want God to be real, but I'm beyond confused by His mysterious divine absence in my life.
I mean, maybe He saved me in war, but Him giving me the bad wife that claimed to be a Christian; you know, Him allowing me to have super, super trauma when I was a child, which screwed up my system—you know, the combination there is pretty unfortunate. I mean, the only good thing that came out of this was at least I got benefits from, you know, the VA, you know, for joining the military. I mean, that's the only thing I've done in my life that mattered. Sadly, that war didn't even matter. Stupid war, didn't have any purpose, really. But, you know, what is national defense?
It's going to war, and sometimes it's for a good cause, sometimes it's not. But anyway, my final point here is, um, I have found some peace because, I guess, I am firmly agnostic, um, because I have genuinely thought, you know, and I took it on faith for more than ten years, and, um, faith doesn't make sense. What does make sense to me is science because it's based on evidence and facts and, you know, a process, and it's not faith. It's the opposite of faith. And why is the single most important thing supposed to be taken without evidence?
Like, why can't God give me at least some vision or something, or some little bit of evidence or, you know, something? Give me a premonition in my heart that You (God) make me feel. Well, I guess He has, because the hopeful part, the reason that as an agnostic I have found some peace, is because no matter what when I die (which could come at any time; it could come tomorrow or 50 years from now), if there is no God, then I'm just going to wither away into nothing like everybody else, and there's nothing you can do about it if that's reality. But if God is real, then even though I doubt God's existence, you know, He'll judge me perfectly, and so I know I'm saved. I'm saved even though I doubt God's even real, because if God is real, perfect love will forgive and love me.
Right now, I doubt even the existence of love in the universe. But my point is, no matter what, you know, all the sinning that I do because my brain doesn't work correctly—you know, my drives, my primal drives—are completely out of whack, and all because of, you know, the broken nervous system.
So that's not my fault. So I'll be judged perfectly, and so I'll be forgiven for having doubt. One really, really interesting thing about Christian theology specifically is, in one part of the New Testament, Jesus says God will forgive you for everything, with the one exception of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. I remember when I first heard that, yeah, you know, whoa—that's a scary idea. Like, what does that even mean?
And it doesn't mean literally blaspheming, like the Holy Spirit, like saying, "Holy Spirit, you're not real." It's not that; it's in your heart if you reject God. You know, there are a lot of people that reject God. God will give that to them in eternity—which is Hell. It's the part of the universe without God. It's that scary!
But, I can confidently say I'm definitely not going to go to Hell because, in my heart, I believe I have the Holy Spirit with me, even though I don't believe in God the Father at all. I think He's a make-believe character. But the Holy Spirit, if it's like an essence to be kind, or loving, you know, despite your problems, and that's what I am. And I guess no matter how bad things get, you know, I mean, I can curse God all day long, but, you know, in my heart, I still want Him to be real. That's the better option than just, you know, disappearing into nothingness. Um, but, you know, even if God is real, then, like, it's still out of my control, whatever it is, whether it's real or not—the ultimate destination of our souls (or are souls even a thing?), you know, is the biggest mystery in the universe still.
But why is God's existence—why didn't He just make it, like, provable? And the fact that He hasn't made it provable kind of logically makes sense that there just is no God, and God is a human construct. You know, because there's a lot of survival throughout history—you know, religion and faith and all of that, humans trying to figure it all out—has had, you know, an evolutionary benefit, perhaps, so that, you know, if you have faith, then, you know, you're, maybe, more likely to survive. But maybe in modern day, science has...
Okay, so those are the two big things. My brain's messed up, I feel like I failed at life, and I can't even figure out if God's real or not.
Um, so, I guess at the end of the day, I'm firmly agnostic, but I'm still going to act, and I'm going to act as if God is real. And perhaps that is because the Holy Spirit—if That's real—that is within me and that, you know, like, guides me to be kind and loving. And, you know, let me tell you, I'm the kind of person that should not have gone to war. Um, I'm actually completely anti-war, anti-violence, or anti-killing of all kinds, so it's bizarre that I made that decision to go to war. But, you know, again, I explained it was just to find a way out. And so, the only other explanation is that God has some good reason for remaining mysterious and hidden.
Even hidden from... Like, why stay hidden from me? Like, why stay hidden from the faithful believers? You know, I was willing, and I still am willing; it's just, I've examined it all, and faith does not make sense. Faith is something that you have to have in the absence of evidence.
The only thing I'm going on is this notion that, you know, if God's real, then, you know, there is some mysterious, perfect plan for me: like I was supposed to go through all that to actually accomplish something and do something purposeful, which I have not done yet. And, you know, if I die tomorrow, then really, you know... But God will judge me perfectly as if I had accomplished something. But if He had just given me a better partner, then I would have accomplished a lot more.
Like, that would have helped heal me. Like, being alone, you know, I obsess about philosophy instead of taking care of my health. That's what I mean by I'm highly neurotic and not interested in normal things like normal people.
Like normal people are able to relax. Even if they are Christian, you know, they think about the theology and they either accept it or reject it. Instead, I just can't figure it out, even though I've, you know, done all the research. I mean, I've researched every single religion. I've heard every single argument for and against the existence of God probably a hundred times. I've heard every argument. That's how much I go over this stuff. And, you know, I tend to side with the atheists, but I hope the believers' view is the correct one.
So, wow, that took a long time to explain, but I think I just explained everything pretty coherently, I think. Um, again, I'm super intelligent, but I can't even save myself. That's why I tried to lean on God to help save me. At this point, the mysterious plan is, um, "You're on your own, kid." "Calvary's not coming." I'll make the best of it. I am planning on going back to school. I want to be a doctor, a doctor of psychiatric medicine. And again, it's a little selfish because I'm trying to figure out how to heal myself. And, you know, I've got to go to medical school, and then actually, I'll be taking better care of my health if I'm aware of it. I'm just not even aware of it because I spend all my time in philosophy instead of...
So I'm going back to school. That's God's purpose for me, maybe. You know, I'll end up helping people someday because right now, I haven't really contributed to anybody's life, really. Alright, anyway, I love you. If anyone listens, please leave me a comment. Let me know that you heard me and that I'm not just speaking crazy talk here.
I think everything I said, which makes sense to me, seems logical and coherent and pretty thought out. Alright, anyway, God bless you.
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