Late Night Thoughts of A Runaway Ego

(Brief mentions of child abuse, mental health issues, and inter generational trauma)

Finding God isn’t a chronological event. Finding God is cyclical; a collage of experiences that unite into one brilliant and terrifying mosaic.

My grandmother died in my sophomore year. My mom, a chronic case of untreated, anger-issue-prone narcissist, experienced a great deal of distress from this. My grandmother was the one person who loved her unconditionally. Not just because she was her mother. Meme was kind, and didn’t deserve the suffering this world brought her. She married once, and gave the man three children. He repaid her by sexually abusing the middle child, and then bowing out when he was discovered. Meme worked night shifts as a hospice nurse and supported three children into adulthood, but my mother especially.

Watching mom grieve was something I found intriguing more than anything else. It wasn’t until a month after the funeral, when I was telling a coworker about my Grandmother that I realized I would never see her again. I started crying in the middle of that shitty first job. I started looking for God around that time.

I was introduced to a theory in a class about the psychology of prejudice, called Terror Management Theory (TMT). It posits that everything we do, to some extent, is a coping mechanism to distract us from the chronic fear of death. The idea is that we build societies, develop religions, organizations, have sex, start families, and go to work, all to distract us from existential terror. I remember really connecting to this theory, but the rest of my class cried bullshit. I don’t know, though. I think there’s something to it. We’re all just searching for answers.

Most of my “finding God” story takes place in college. College is more about finding yourself than finding a career path. It’s normal for people to search for answers around this time. That’s something I learned in a psychology class about emerging adulthood. The class got me a credit I needed to complete my degree, so I was all about it. It was about being a twenty something. Particularly, about being a twenty something privileged enough to go to college. 

Being a twenty something has never been so complicated. There’s just too many potential futures. I went to college to see all the things that I could possibly be, and I panicked when I found out that I could be anything of forty-eight different majors, but I could only pick one of those if I was going to stick within the financial parameters of no “Parent-Plus” loan. 

There were too many options. I didn’t like possible futures being taken from me. I knew what I didn’t want to be (a soul-sucking lawyer), but figuring out what I did want to be—who I wanted to become? No way in hell did I have the answer.

Leading psychologists in the emerging adulthood field refer to college as “institutionalized moratorium”. A place to go explore, without commitment to who I was going to be for the rest of my adulthood. The idea that there are words to quantify the experience is something I found reassuring.

And, God, there really was so much to explore. Relationships, careers, majors, sexual preferences, gender identity! A plethora of possible answers to the question: “who the hell am I?” 

The aspect of identity that plagued me the most, however, was the question of faith.

I’ve had depression since I was probably three, when my parents divorced. The source of my depression was in wondering why God would let bad things happen.

Why was dad addicted to alcohol?

Why did mom throw tantrums, and my dragon sculpture on the tile floor? 

At the risk of sounding whiny: why couldn’t I have Gary Renford’s parents, who’s mom was the middle school nurse, and then high school nurse, and drove our carpool to school every day? She was the epitome of a fifties house wife, out of her time. Kind. Gentle. Nurturing. 

Mr. Renford was the president, or maybe Vice President, of some sort of popular tractor company. He made enough money for a beautiful 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home with a pool on Davis Island. Why couldn’t I be as talented as Addison Renford—who could write, draw, paint, dance and render a broadway-quality costume at the snap of a finger? (On top of that, Addison had a symmetrical face, and tiny body, too). It seemed unfair. 

Not to complain, but GOD, what the HELL? Why are a few people so seemingly favored in the eyes of God? You all know the Perfect People with the perfect tans and Greek Statues for bodies. You know you do. And honestly, fuck those people favored by God.

Still. I got to grow up in a home with a dog, and I never knew an empty stomach. “There’s children starving in Africa”, hey— why is it always Africa? Why not the local black kid who doesn’t know about vitamins, or how to speak white enough, or write in a way that she’s going to be accepted to any college? Don’t get me wrong. I’m a white girl talking about issues that aren’t mine, but I’m just saying, suffering is happening within a 10 mile radius. We don’t need to distance all suffering to Africa. It’s here. 

I’m just saying, my stomach was always full of single-mom household staple: spaghetti. What made me more entitled to a full stomach than the kids who went without? And what makes it fair to minimize one person’s suffering over another’s? We ALL suffer. That’s literally what existing is. But also, orgasms exist, and chocolate.

But is the good good enough to outweigh the bad? Is it worth it? I wish more parents would ask themselves this before they became parents. I mean come on… 

Is it worth it? 

I was thinking, God can’t exist if the world isn’t fair and just. At least… not a loving God. Therefore, I resigned myself to agreeing with Camus, a French philosopher I read in AP Language way back in High School. 

Camus wasn’t exactly atheist. He just didn’t care (which, honestly is a mood and I respect it and think about his ideas a lot). He was all like,

“Trying to find meaning is all we can do, so we have to find meaning in the search for meaning, like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the mountain for all eternity, only for it to roll back down again.”

But, you know. He said that in French.

Camus made it clear that I had three options:

• Kill myself: Conclude that God is dead, this existence is pointless. 
• Leap of faith: Believe blindly in a God and hope to… well, God, that he exists. (Camus considered this a philosophical suicide) 
• Find beauty in the search for meaning, and willfully make it meaningful. Do not believe in any God. There’s no time to worry about what we can’t confirm. Just understand that existing is beautiful for what it is, finite though our time may be.

Still… existence without answers exhausted me. Every minute of every day: why try? What do I owe this world to act within it? Would it not be better to just die or renounce society and become some hermit in the woods? What is money, anyway? I mean really, what is money? What God would possibly allow for something as evil as money to exist? 

It’s a simulation of a resource, meaningless, and yet entirely capable of ruining lives or making them. 

I didn’t want to compete with others for a job. I still don’t. I didn’t want to get thrown haphazardly into a world I never asked to be born in, under the circumstances of a birth I did not choose.

I found my answers in an unexpected place (well, not that unexpected—still in college).

I signed up for a class called “Yoga and Philosophy” in my second semester of sophomore year. I was trying on a new personality: New Age Mystery Crystal Witch, Panromantic Asexual. Catchy title, don’t you think? Don’t laugh. For all you know I could still identify that way (don’t try and find me on Bumble, ladies). 

Honestly, I just signed up because the class fit the theme I was going for, but once I walked through the door of that old dance studio, my fate shifted beyond the view of even my most ~sassy~ tarot deck. 

I went to that first class with an environmentally unfriendly yoga mat, and an environmentally friendly, overly expensive “de-composition” book. I thought I knew what I was getting into.

I did not. 

My mom always quotes James Cameron’s Avatar, “It is hard to fill a cup which is already full,” as a way of saying, “You’re a know-it-all”. I wish I could be less dramatic about it, but this class changed everything I thought I knew about the world—about reality. My worldview vaporized, like yesterday, slipping through the fingers of time like grains of sand on Indian Rocks beach. 

If the words of a rambling writer mean much to you at all, do your anger with the state of the world a favor and read The Bhagavad Gita. My professor made us read this book first, and for good reason. If there were a copy in every hotel room of this, instead of something as oppressive, tainted and politicized as The Holy Bible… More lives could actually be saved. This is a book for people backed into a corner. You want a last place to turn to? How about a direct conversation with God? 

The Gita, first and foremost, is a story about two friends. They ride out into the center of a battle field before it begins. Arjuna, a warrior prince, looks across the battle field, and it transforms into the battlefield of life. His cousins, his family, his teachers prepare for the fight on the other side of the field. He doesn’t want to take up arms against them. He is paralyzed. Why live? Why try? Why partake in this war? (Sound familiar?)

Krishna looks at him, and he smiles. Then he answers. 

The message of the Gita is that everything is one. Molecular physicists will agree. The illusion of separateness is what binds us here in this world of space and time. There is a piece of unchanged divinity in everything, and we all have the responsibility, journey and destiny to recognize that light in all. That means having compassion and love for every one and thing. 

The enemy of compassion is the ego. The ego is sneaky. She slips in and out of thoughts because she is our thoughts. She is subject to change, she forces separation. The Sanskrit word for ego translates more to the “I-Maker”. 

My ego has made her way onto this page as I write, dripping like sludge in an old horror movie. Polluting my story. It would be easier just to write, “I found God in the philosophy class I took in college”… Ego sinks her sharp claws into the voice I try to infuse within this writing. I want to be authentic, I think authenticity is important. So I have to call myself out for my bullshit. 

The thing is, it’s not practical to go about thinking “I am everything”. Ego has purpose. She is not a monster. But recognizing that the ego is not me in the first place made finding an identity a far more lighthearted ordeal. 

Personality is not permanent. Jobs are not permanent. Health is not permanent. My thoughts are certainly ever changing and not permanent. So yes, it’s fun to say I’m a Crystal-Toting Witch, an Eastern Philosopher, a Woman, and an italics abuser. There’s nothing wrong with having an identity, I mean… it’s fun.

The thing is, the internet will go down some day, and the sun will swallow up the earth and this writing will disappear in a brilliant and horrifying burst of fire. We will be forgotten, our matter reorganized and repurposed. Eventually the universe is fated to heat death. Everything goes still and cold. And yet… this isn’t serious. It’s just inevitable.

The secret I learned in that class is that I am the universe dreaming of itself… and so are you. At least, that’s what I believe. So know this. I love you. I want the best for you. And maybe God isn’t real, but in the off chance that he is… wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all tried to see God in everything?

The part that endures, that is not subject to Space, Time and Change… that is where I find my security in all this existential terror. That is where I find my God.

Maybe God doesn’t exist at all, we don’t get reincarnated, we just curl up and die and the world doesn’t operate according to karmic law. It’s just an unfair pit of sadness where we exist until we don’t. But if we act like there is God in everything and everyone… I think the world would be a lot more compassionate. I’m trying to identify with the planet, with the people I meet and treat them according to that divinity within. That means being selfless in my actions, and that’s the hardest challenge I’ve ever had to face in a world that rewards selfish behavior.