Where Am I? - Part 1

I have no idea, but I don't feel lost.

Photo by Ana Municio on Unsplash

Trigger warning: Nihilism, hopelessness, suicide. The darkest place I wrote about now feels a very safe distance away. Some parts include more detail and I don’t want anyone to be harmed by reading it.

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Once, my brother-in-law found my young nephew in a bathroom, behind a shower curtain, standing fully clothed in a dry bathtub. “Watchya doin’ bud?” he asked. “I have no idea,” my nephew replied.

Same, bro…

Take a meandering walk with me if you’re willing.

Half-Dead Man Walking

There was a point, in the middle of 2023, when it became clear that the 2x2 Church’s official response to a long list of things requiring action would be to do nothing (ok, next to nothing, to be fair). I realized I would soon be leaving the community and beliefs I had known from birth and walking into a lot of uncertainty. While still inside, many of my intuitions turned out to be correct and a large number of 2x2 “saints and servants” acted as if they were reading off the script my mind had written for ‘This Is Probably What Will Happen. If It Does It Will Suck. Oh No, It’s Happening. This Sucks. - Episode 147’. However, there has been one major thing that I was not anticipating at all.

I thought… I would make a few choices over a few difficult months, and arrive at new stability and certainty in my beliefs. The story would be, “I left there and ended up here and am in the process of living happily ever after.” Instead, I spun in slow circles, thoroughly examining every possible path and unable to start down any of them. The deconstruction started and never stopped. I escaped one box and barely had a second to enjoy freedom before a slightly larger box revealed itself and felt as suffocating as the previous one. The end of this process is well known to many and increasingly familiar to me— (cue Bernie Sanders yelling “Nihilism!” instead of “Socialism!”) where you are floating in an endless black void and everything you try to hold onto immediately disintegrates into meaninglessness. There is no way to ground yourself or gain traction. If you could, there wouldn’t be anywhere to go. Lately, I’m at a point where I walk around nihilism’s edges and occasionally dip my toes in, but I once nearly drowned in a very similar pool.