So anyway, here's what happened.

After a mad dash to get everything ready amidst a depression-inducing busy work week, basically I started feeling sickly the night before the trip.

I woke up the morning of the trip feeling like someone stabbed me in the sinus and ran over my head with an SUV. Just as I was contemplating whether to go or not, one of the riders called me up to tell me he had thrown his back out and was in a lot of pain. I texted the other two riders and told them to go ahead without us, and tried to get back to sleep with my head pounding.

I was quite depressed over such an anticlimax after all this trouble, but cheered up later with some overpriced breakfast at a cafe. I used the money for the tour instead to buy a laptop cooling pad for the overheating Leviathan, which sadly doesn't seem to be making much difference after all.

Got to have an awesome chat with my church pastor, Tony, about art and life and creativity over way too much black coffee.

Off I go to church now for reasons I don't fully understand myself.

So, it's now four days before I set off on my first bicycle tour, a simple three-day trip to a wildlife sanctuary in Rajasthan 185 kilometers from home. It will be four of us riding together, a curious mix of personalities, backgrounds and ages. One is a friend I've ridden with once or twice, another is someone I've only met once at a bicycle rally, and the third is a stranger I've never met before. I've got my leave from work approved and the cash set aside, and will be buying some stuff and making last minute plans over the next few days.

So I should be excited about it but curiously I'm not. I think it's just stress from work and finances more than anything else. That and the fact that I spent the last three weeks slowly recovering from that bad crash. It almost feels like a chore.

But this is something I've been planning and trying to do for nearly a year with endless delays and setbacks, and something I've been wanting to do since I was a child and I first heard about bicycle touring (true story, I was about 8 I think).

I guess I don't really know what to expect. Which I guess is a good thing: going into this with no real expectations, good or bad, of how it "should" be. I guess it's better than being so excited about embarking on some amazing adventure and the reality falls short, right?

Well, time to throw together some breakfast and hit the sack.

The tour happens this Saturday, and I fully intend to blog the entire experience, good or bad :)

:/

"My life isn't as exciting as my website made it look." - Leela to her parents on the cult animated sci-fi show, Futurama.

Substitute "website" with "LiveJournal" and you've pretty much nailed it.

Just got back from a friend's wedding.  It was all really wonderful and all, especially since this wasn't one of those obnoxious uber-expensive lavish fucking-show-off weddings where the debt of a small nation is blown in one exhausting day, when most or all of that money could go into the, you know, living the rest of your lives together thing.  Like buying a house or something.  But what do I know about money, I'm crap at managing it myself.

They were friends of mine and it was all wonderful and sweet, but weddings generally are agony for me.  Sitting there dressed up formal pretending to be normal (hey that rhymes), and mainly, pretending even harder that I'm not seething and boiling inside, like a washing machine with complex ugly emotions all mixing together in a spin cycle.

I think about how wonderful this is for the couple and how happy everyone is for them (including me), and what they have.  And I do a pretty good job of pretending I'm thinking anything else other than the same tired old thoughts that will never go anywhere.  Of those same old questions with no answers.  The silence from God proving He doesn't care anymore. 

Wondering, ultimately, what specific magic quality made me different from all these other happy Christians whose lives turned out so perfect.  I watch my friends walk down the aisle and exchange vows and remember that once a long time ago I was almost just like them.  I prayed to, worshipped, believed in, followed and passionately loved the same God all my friends did.  I "did" all the same things.  I had the same big dreams and plans and hopes, and most of them even involved serving God and not myself.

But apparently I failed along the way, I screwed up.  Got something wrong, most probably failed some big test.  Went down the wrong way without even knowing it, all the while still hoping and trusting in God.  All my friends have been and still are all falling in love and getting married and heading towards purpose-filled, shining futures, one after the other.  But I guess I'm different and special or something. 

Me?  I fell in love, really, really fell in love.  Wanted to get married, have babies, be a dad and husband, I was all for it, could see it happen.  I had never been more sure of anything in my life. 

But something went wrong.  We didn't get married, and I ended up working for a church on the other side of the world, being abused by the most evil human beings I've ever met who call themselves Christians, mocked daily for everything I am and am not.  I'd cry out to God every day and my prayers would bounce off a solid black sky.  I realized God was getting tired of my whining and moaning, so I decided not to bother Him with my trivial human misery.  The only thing that gave me comfort in this time was the idea that I could escape this hell by committing suicide.  I'd get through each horrible day fantasizing of that wonderful moment, plan it out.  It was the only thing that kept me sane. 

Then that girl I was still in love with and still wanted to marry, even after all these years, I couldn't get over her.  So I tracked her down, against all hope, figuring I'd at least know for sure and be able to finally stop wondering.  I figured the worst thing that could have happened is that she could have gotten married to someone else, right?

Wrong.

Apparently she lost control of her mom's SUV on the way to work.  It flipped.  It then fell down a sharp incline, landing on its roof.  She died instantly. 

It happened a year prior, and I found out through one of her friends' myspace page.

For the next week I was not in any real functioning state.  I would have certainly killed myself as soon as possible, were it not for me calling one of my best friends and him taking care of me for a few days, helping me jump start the process of pretending to continue to live.

That was a year ago.

As I am still finding out since, a lot of other things died along with her.  Ever since I moved to India, my passion for my art has plummeted and run cold.  After I realized she was gone, whatever art was in me died permanently too.  Strangely I don't even care.  More significantly my passion for God died too.  And in an increasing number of ways, God himself, for all intents and purposes.  Or maybe I'm the one who's dead to God.  Again, it's interesting how little I care.

Every now and again something else happens that helps another part of me die too.  Every time I attend a wedding, the triggered thoughts and emotions that come out make me feel like my life spent serving and loving God was some childish, naiive dream that I am now waking up from.  And I wish I could go back to sleep and keep dreaming but I know that won't happen. 

I'm alive.

She's dead.

My art's dead.

And God either doesn't care or doesn't exist.

Our honeymoon's very much over.  The love has run cold, gone sour, and is evaporating to dust as though it never existed.  I was once His special one, the apple of His eye, but apparently I wasn't perfect enough.  I didn't pass the tests He set up for me.  Couldn't perform well enough.  And soon there are so many others who are apparently doing it better than I am, who deserve His lavish attention and favor more than I.  Maybe God finally got tired of waiting for me to get perfect enough for Him.

And actually, I agree.  I see no reason to pretend things are still the same when they couldn't be more unimaginably different.  I'm starting to see that more and more of my faith and hope in God were based on bad doctrine and faulty logic at best, and sick emotional manipulation, guilt, dogma, and blatant lies at worst.  And I feel sick, betrayed, and countless, multiple, shades of what looks like a mix of grief, anger and heartbreak.  And I've been wondering why "intimacy with God" has been ridiculously, stomach-churningly, nauseatingly terrifying all these years. 

Not that God's one to apologize or anything. 

Not that this is even His fault to begin with.

This afternoon when I was trying to sleep all of this was churning around in my head and I finally understood how married couples end up divorcing, coolly calling it "irreconcilable differences" when barely a few years prior, they were once so completely in love.  And you wonder if they were the same people. 

So God's not exactly going to apologize or explain anything and I'd be foolish to expect it.  I'm not going to pretend and fake like I love God when after all that has happened, that's become impossible (not like I haven't tried).  It's like a stalemate.  Except this stalemate ends with one player throwing the other player into Hell for not being able to win his impossible game.

Irreconcilable differences.  How apt. 

Also, when I said:

"People who have never experienced shit like this will have no idea how much stupid little things like this fucking hurt, and shouldn't even pretend to understand."

...in this post here, what I really meant was that I never thought it was possible to hurt that way.  I didn't ever think that reading a coincidental name in some random file at work could trigger such powerful emotions over someone I last saw and had any contact with over six years ago.  I didn't mean it could apply to anyone who would have been able to read that entry and figured that was self explanatory.  I'm sorry if any one of you precious friends thought I was saying that, but I wasn't.  <3

So here I was (er, am) at work, proofreading various files, letters and reports for our various clients, and amongst all this the name "Amanda Santiago" pops up.

That's the name she would have had if we actually got married, instead of so easily giving up on what we both wanted so badly, her out of fear of her parents, me out of the idea that it was "God's will." 

People told me that if it was meant to be / if it was "God's will," that we'd end up together.  People told me that all things work for good for those that love God.

I came to India and slowly lost my passion for art, which was the only thing I was ever good at.  She flipped her SUV off an embankment and died.  Yes, things worked out splendidly.  Happily ever after, etcetera.

I wonder if the day will ever come when I will no longer endlessly wonder about, and torture myself over, what could have been.  If only this, if only that.  I wonder how I'm supposed to cope with being unable to create art ever again.

More importantly, I wonder if I will ever be able to trust and/or love God ever again.  Or if I even want to. 

At least we can assume God's happy. 

People who have never experienced shit like this will have no idea how much stupid little things like this fucking hurt, and shouldn't even pretend to understand. 

"...I’ve known friends who were going through divorces and getting fired at the same time, and they said to me with absolute startlement: “I’m really depressed right now.”

“Don’t you think you kind of should be?” I asked. “After all, your husband just left you and you got let go from work in the same month. Isn’t sadness a natural response to a bunch of sucktacular events that have just eroded a lot of your self-esteem?”

In my life, I tend to draw two distinctions between the depressions I feel:

• Chemical sadness, wherein my body floods with awful neurotropics, making me feel awful for reasons that have nothing to do with how life is going
• Actual sadness, wherein I am sad about things that are actually bad in my life.

The thing is, there are people who get so slammed by the first kind of sadness that they view sadness itself as being something of an aberration. If they’re not happy seven days out of seven, they have this quiet despair that something’s wrong with them. Then they feel shamed and upset by the fact that they’re, well, shamed and upset.

But sadness is a natural part of life. Not everyone’s happy all the time – and more importantly, not everyone needs to be happy. Sadness is like pain; it can get out of hand a lot of times, but usually it’s the body’s way of trying to tell you that something’s wrong in life.

The good thing about actual sadness, as opposed to chemical sadness, is that you can usually change your life to remove the root cause of it. The bad thing is that said root causes are not always obvious...."

once again, theferrett explains some important truths about depression and sadness.  click the link to read the whole entry, it's really, really worth it.  i copy-pasted the first half of the entry in italics above coz i know most people won't bother clicking and reading a "here, click this link" entry with no further explanation given.