I'm a combination of prodigy and late bloomer. When I was super young, I had a natural talent for some things, particularly in the realms of spirituality/sixth sense. My gaze had a way of unnerving people with something to hide. Some grownups found me to be unaccountably creepy even when I was being cheerful. Unlike my cousins, you were more likely to find me with my nose in a book than outside playing softball. If I did go outside, I was just as likely to be talking to a tree as another person.
For a while, the way I was different mattered to some people, either in that I had some spark of wisdom about me or I was totally crazy. Or both. For a few years, I was about as disconnected from everyday reality as it gets, all without the expense or legal troubles that accompany those who take drugs. It was wonderful and miserable at the same time. I was like one of those crazy Hindu savants on a good day, and on the bad days, well, yeah, not so much. As you might gather, it kinda depended on whether I was in an accepting environment or not. Much of the time I felt genuinely haunted, as much as a person can resemble the haunted Tower of London on the inside. I had some accomodating friends who took care of me essentially. While I am grateful to them, it has rendered those friendships unbalanced, perhaps for life.
On a few occasions, I delved into my natural inclination for Eastern thought and New Age hoodoo and really got somewhere with it. I managed to become both more grounded and more profoundly connected to whatever force animates me. I got a little full of myself, perhaps, but at least I had perspective. Whatever spiritual forces were at work on me had some meaning and I felt more at ease with it. I meditated. I came up with some framework for how my head worked. I started to act (be?) more "normal". I learned how to shut the door on those clamoring spectres and tried to get on with my life albeit with a late start.
Cut to today.
When I went back to school for my nursing program prerequisites, I didn't know I would have such a knack for Biology. Go figure, I'm now doing as well at science stuff as I used to do well with other more creative things. My lab reports amuse as well as inform. I get a real kick out of doing things you can actually PROVE.
But something has happened to me in the intervening years vis a vis my spirituality. I was already agnostically leaning, but something has happned to make me utterly disconnect. Not in a haughty, "I'm a scientist now, therefore athiest." kind of way, but in ways that make me almost as uncomfortable as being too connected did.
I feel like at least one turning point came to me in the Anatomy lab. I had really worried about how seeing and handling the cadaver was going to affect me. However, unlike some of the other students, I took to it with ease. Some of them thought I was creepy because I was willing to be in there with him for long periods by myself. There I was, back to being unintentionally creepy, for totally different reasons. Or maybe the same ones?
You know what was comforting? There was this dead man, and there was no LIFE in him at all. While I had feared that I would find some remnant of who he was clinging to him, there was nothing, only the facts of his biology. He had a stent in one of the arteries of his liver. The first time I held his heart in my hands, I felt really grateful to him. Here was a guy who had given his body so that I and countless others could learn something. That's awesome. We were all really respectful of him.
But as I have moved into a place in my life where I have been under a lot of stress, having even a pinch of simple faith would be handy right about now. And I lack it in a way that feels like an estrangement not only from my old friends but from God/Goddess as well. My mother keeps telling me to pray, but I feel like I did such a good job of closing that door, that now I find myself outside it, dying to get in but terrified to knock.
I'll forge ahead, regardless, even if it isn't very good for me to be as coldly scientific as it was to be floridly spiritual. I also don't want to look back on my past and see nothing but pathology there. As such, I find I just have to not talk about it, or not talk to people who frame their view of me with the timber torn from my temple.
Maybe that longing goes away in time. Maybe if I spend more time in the presence of the empirical, the logical, my yearning for a place in the mystical will fade. I fear that it won't, mostly because other things or people I have longed for are still with me.
Somewhere outside that fear is likely where the truth lies. I'd hate to be the world's most uneasy athiest, because to deny that God exists is a lie I don't dare tell myself. I know for a fact that there is something out there, outside the permissions of my consciousness. Just because I can't hear it speaking to me anymore doesn't mean it doesn't whisper, hoping I will strain to listen.
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