I learned what I was supposed to believe and I couldn’t make myself believe it.
When the anxiety got bad, people of faith kept handing me the same prescription.
Have faith.
Sometimes the implication was that I needed to get right with God. I don’t think most of them meant harm. They were handing me the thing that worked for them, and some of them had a peace I genuinely envied.
One of my physicians is Mormon. I knew he had a lot of children and a lot of stress, so I asked him how he dealt with all of it.
He said something like, “When you believe you and your family are going to be together in bliss for all of eternity, what happens on Earth doesn’t matter quite as much.”
Well.
Yes.
That would help.
If there is a pill I can take to get my mind to believe that, please give it to me. Otherwise, unfortunately, my brain doesn’t believe things because I tell it to. If it did, my memoir wouldn’t exist.
So when people told me faith would fix the anxiety, I felt a bit like someone stranded in the desert being told water and sunscreen would be useful. I agree and unfortunately that doesn’t make Aquafina and Coppertone appear. If wanting faith that everything will work out and is held together by an all-powerful and all loving being was enough, I’d have gotten it long ago. Instead, it gave me one more way to be defective. Now I wasn’t just anxious. I was also disappointing God. Well, poop.
When my life started falling apart, my Audible subscription shifted to 100% spiritual writers. Kate Bowler, whose beliefs I don’t share and whose way of talking about them I love. Eckhart Tolle. Tara Brach. Buddhism, which helped, and which also has plenty in it I can’t get on board with.
It helped tremendously, and not at all in the way anyone said it would, and not in a way I can hand to someone else or even reliably repeat myself.
The best I can describe it: sometimes it made my mind stop without making the good parts of my mind go away. Medication helped in ways belief never could. But the medication only ever turned things down. Whatever my spirituality is, it’s the only thing that has ever turned anything up. Toward people. Toward being here for what happens next.
My mother asked me what I believe.
Nobody had ever asked me that. Ever.
My fifteen minute reply boiled down to this:
That anything existing at all is incredible and inspiring and I don’t know much beyond it. And that’s not nothing. There are people, and most of them seem to want to make things better. There is consciousness and love. I have three daughters. My youngest has a purple elephant with one eye. She gave me a piece of driveway gravel that became a gift because she transformed it into love. Look at the rest of the known universe. None of that. Nothingness and chaos. Something different is obviously happening here and that’s amazing and that makes me feel better when I lean into it. I’m not sure I have a religion, but now I have awe and when assholes make me feel like less of a man for trying to be more like Jesus, it doesn’t bother me as much, and that’s been very helpful.
On a trip to Costco with all three girls, as we approached the frozen salmon burgers that my wife Angela lives on, one of my daughters ran ahead and picked up some trinket that was on the floor. She sprinted back, handed it to me, and I flipped it over. Right as I figured out it was a Jesus-shaped pencil eraser, she yelled at the top of her lungs, “I found Jesus!”
God I love Costco.