Ignorance is Bliss

It's the loss of innocence, I believe, that haunts me the most. The knowing. And the knowledge that once something is known, it cannot be unknown. You can't go back. You can't take it back.

You can't unsee things too, like the back of that lady who should not have worn skintight leggings with no underwear. That haunts me too.

Some people want to know. They would rather know than not know, and I think I've gotten to a point where the not knowing hurts less than the knowing. Ignorance is bliss. I've reverted to the belief that everyone deserves to be happy, and I hope they are, but I sure don't need it rubbed in my face.

For me, it seems like the more knowledge we acquire, the more miserable we seem to be. And it becomes addictive. The more I know, the more I want to know. And I can't rest until I know everything. But as soon as I know everything, I'm not any better off. I'm not any happier. The only difference is, now I know. Now I have to navigate the world with a little less innocence.

I think I was a lot happier before I was diagnosed with every mental illness under the sun (yes, I have a flair for hyperbole and tend to lean toward the dramatic). It just seems like now the more I learn about my host of mental illnesses, the easier it is to manage them, but I'm more miserable about it.

I don't want to be like this.

And yes, there are several ways to look at it. One can take the pessimistic view of, "This sucks and I don't want to be like this." Or one can take a more positive outlook of, "This is the way I am, and I will just do what I can to handle it and not make it everyone else's problem." After all, everyone has warts, everyone has issues, and no one is perfect. It doesn't mean we are broken. It just means we each have a unique set of problems to learn to navigate, and that's our lot in life.

Or maybe it does mean we are broken. I feel broken a lot.

My own personal view of the Adam and Eve story is that God didn't necessarily want to keep the two of them in the dark. He just wanted them to realize that there are consequences to wanting to know everything. They decided they wanted to know anyway, and thus found themselves in a world of misery and shit.

Literally.

I know my world is full of shit. Literally. Just ask my cat who takes a dump four times a day, and if he runs out of actual poop, he still manages to squeeze a drop of something into the litter box after I've just cleaned it.

My other world of shit is that my flash drive just died, taking a whole folder full of edited short stories with it that I apparently forgot to back up.

The fact, is now I'm well aware of how much work went down the commode because of one faulty flash drive. I know things. And I'm miserable.

I also know I should make sure I back up, and I still managed to somehow forget. I don't think that kind of knowing has anything to do with what I'm talking about, I'm just saying I know. And because I know, I'm angry. At myself. At this flash drive. At my computer.

When I was younger I would have thrown a small tantrum, shrugged it off, and gone immediately to work to rectify the problem, because when one is young and ambitious, one tends to see the glass as half full.

The older I get, the less full that glass is. And you know, it really isn't helpful when people keep pointing out that my point of view sucks and I need to change it.

Yes, thank you, Dr. Phil.

The half full side of this whole debacle is that I do still have the first drafts of the original stories. I just don't have the hours and hours of editing and formatting that went into them afterwards. Because that is all on my flash drive. That died.

Ugh.

But back to the mental illnesses. Over the last ten years I've had a host of illnesses tossed my way: hormone imbalance, gluten intolerance, adrenal fatigue, panic anxiety, atypical depression, low stomach acid, Candida, codependency. With each diagnosis, I am seized in an overwhelming desire to understand my condition and deal with it in the best possible way.

And so that I don't become a burden upon society. I just unleash it all in this blog, and if you don't want to know about it, you don''t have to read about it.

The problem is the more I read and understand my conditions, the more depressed I become because I keep thinking, wow. That's a lot of static and stupidity going on in one messed up head. True, none of my conditions are terminal (yet, there is always the possibility that I lose my will to live), but sometimes I wonder if that makes it worse. Because I know what I'm waking up to every morning. I know that each day it's going to be a struggle just to get through, and sometimes the thought of just not having to do that anymore seems like a better option. And instead of waking up to enjoy life, I'm waking up to another day of exhaustive managing of illnesses.

One thing in particular is the more I understand my codependency, the less I want to subject other people to it. I dismantled my relationship and engagement partially because my codependent traits got so far out of hand, I was making myself miserable. The only way to get out of the rat maze that was my head was to cut everything and run. My anxiety over the codependency was running at about a fifteen on a scale of one to ten. This all triggered a seriously deep funk of depression, worse than I've experienced before, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

So many people have to deal with such things. Some with mental illnesses, some with cancer, some with diabetes, or poverty or malnutrition or something. So many things can cause anxiety and depression. Anxiety is actually the not knowing that is causing misery, but one also knows that the anxiety is completely irrational. There is just no way to turn it off. You know, yet you don't know. It's the need to know everything right this minute at a much higher scale, and while you don't know, you obsess about how you don't know.

It's exhausting.

We know that cancer can be terminal, and often it is. We also know that cancer may not be terminal and can go into remission. And some people who are terminal learn to accept this and end up being joyful and living out the rest of their lives happily because they will soon walk into the unknown, a new adventure.

If I had a possible terminal disease I'd be having anxiety over that. I'm a mess just as I am right now. I can't even imagine how those brave souls manage.

Some people are in so much pain that all they know is pain and they know that is all they will wake up to each morning, so they too are eager to walk into something new and unknown.

Where they don't know anything.

And maybe they can be happy again. Maybe we can be happy again.

Spirituality works like that a lot. Much of the science world wants us to embrace the idea that spirituality and God and religion are just fantasy, and we are all going to be worm food when we die. They study and study and study and write and publish, desperately trying to prove the nonexistence of anything in their desperate desire to keep on knowing, knowing, knowing. And then they develop a kind of arrogance about it.

And you know what? They are probably just as miserable as the rest of us. That arrogance is a mask to cover up the terror and misery. Because even they don't know everything, and I bet that causes a bit of anxiety for them too. The vicious cycle.

Hell is the eternal separation from God. The definition of God is trickier, because He is basically whatever people want him to be. And knowing too much separates us from our spirituality, from God. And makes us less happy.

In other words, we might just be in hell.

Or on our way there.

Not because hell is a fire pit of endless torture because we have sinned and are "bad," but because it is the eternal misery. who wants an eternity of misery?

Not me.

I believe another fifty years of being a codependent neurotic mess spinning in my own head over and over sounds a lot like hell to me.

I just reread this post and realized it makes absolutely no sense. It is, however, basically what goes on in my head constantly. I can't seem to ever turn it off. Not even during yoga. Not even when I'm trying to fall asleep at night. Not even when I read my devotionals.

Probably drives God nuts that I can't focus for five seconds on talking to Him without being stuck in my own head.

I'm not trying to get anyone to feel sorry for me. We all have our own version of hell and we are all living through it. We try to distract ourselves. Sometimes we even believe we are joyful or happy.

All I know is that this isn't where we belong. If it is we are already doomed.

Padme: the original Star Wars codependent
I guess I don't have it as bad as her. I didn't get pregnant by a raging sociopathic narcissist