Tired

If I can be candid: this year has been rather miserable for me. I won’t describe my predicaments in detail here, but I’ve been struggling with many health problems that, most days, leave me feeling very sick and barely able to function. Week after week, month after month. It’s a ceaseless refrain. Occasionally I have a “good” day, and it seems like everything is perfectly normal, but those kinds of days are oddly unpredictable and few and far between.

What’s more, my relationship with God has been reduced to something scarcely recognizable. I still believe, but I’m holding on by a thread. I used to be so close to God. Even in the darkness (and there were years of darkness), He was always, at the end of the day, my most intimate Friend, the One I loved.

But now, who knows where in the hell I am? I’ve probably drifted far downstream, to a place where goodness is but a glimmer and the fruit on the vine is all shriveled up. In this place, dozens of existential confusions vie for my attention (as they were always wont to do), but these days I’m too tired to contend with them. I spent so much time, and so much yearning, seeking truth and love – only to end up in this crooked, lifeless place. The bleakness of my disappointment is hard to render.

I think to myself: “Maybe I’m just tired of trying to be good.” Indeed, sometimes, in my disillusionment at what life has revealed itself to be, I feel like abandoning the whole project of being a decent human being. “Wouldn’t it be easier,” I think, “to take my messed-up humanity and run with it?”

Yes, in the more exhausted moments, it’s easy to wander into this sort of logic. As a case-in-point, I offer the following journal entry from a particularly worn-out day in late July:

I’m tired.

I’m tired, I think, of the endless questions in my mind about how to live and what to do. I’m tired, too, of the striving for goodness, the chasing-after a seemingly unattainable goal. I’m tired of the intensity, I’m tired of the longing for simplicity in the midst of complication. I’m tired of the strife, I’m tired of the suffering – and I’m especially tired of the meditations on suffering which are delivered with good intentions by other people but which ultimately deepen the darkness and the disenchantment I feel.

I’m tired of trying to fit into a box, especially when the box has been packaged and labeled and covered in pre-paid postage by someone who’s not me.

I’m tired of finding faults in myself, and I’m tired of denying my humanity in the act of trying to be physically, morally, emotionally, and spiritually perfect. I’m tired of walking the straight and narrow line, and I’m tired of trying to discern where, exactly, that line lies. I’m tired of the hundreds of prescriptions and proscriptions involved in the pursuit of what is considered a good and selfless life.

I’m tired of people deciding how I ought to live and feeling at leisure to critique my soul and straighten out, as it were, my perceptions of the world so that they will more closely align with their own.

I’m tired of trying to understand people’s circumstances and points of view without feeling like they offer me the same dignity in return. I’m tired of being walked over by people who know that I will forgive them, and I’m really rather tired of the assumption that, just because I feel things intensely, I must not be rooted in a “real” or “correct” way of “doing life.”

I’m tired of looking for GOD when it doesn’t seem like He’s looking for me, and I’m tired of missing Him.

I’m tired of being sick, and I’m tired of trying to figure out how to be well.

I’m tired of apologizing for myself when I have nothing, in fact, to apologize for. I’m tired of justifying my existence (whether to myself or to others) and I’m tired of suffering the side effects of being a highly sensitive person.

I’m tired of caring when others stopped caring a long time ago, and I’m tired of being the one whom people seem to forget.

There you have it. A tired mind, spilled out on the page.

Perhaps it all sounds a bit self-pitying, and maybe it is. But I guess that’s part of what journaling is for – to get out all the inward-turning angst so that, afterward, you have a little more room inside to accommodate all the other people and events of your life.

That’s why I’m writing this, I suppose. To lift a weight so that I can keep showing up for my life.

For, despite the many temptations I feel to throw up my hands in despair and dismiss this whole business as a fantastic failure, I haven’t actually, at the absolute bottom, given up on God. (That doesn’t mean I don’t have questions about Him, or about a variety of religious ideas, but my impulse to believe refuses to be completely snuffed out.) Neither have I given up on finding truth, or love, or any of the other transcendental virtues I used to wax poetic about.

I still desire these things, still hope for them.

But I’m also very tired.

So while I’m taking a break from looking so desperately for goodness, maybe – just maybe – goodness will come looking for me.

Image credit: a crop of Fra Angelico Visited by Angels by Paul-Hippolyte Flandrin.