Wednesday, December 19, 2007

The irritating people I used to call my friends

I probably developed some brilliant treatise on the way to or from work or school and now that I'm somewhere that I can actually write it down, I have forgotten it. Ok, here's something of which I was thinking recently.
I have found that I really don't trust people. Not in the least.
At any given time there may be one or two people with which I might be comfortable sharing my feelings, and so far all of those have backfired as people have disappeared. When I look at the really negative things about my life and my social network (or lack thereof) I can only think that it has some distinct advantages. And this comes naturally in my train of thought.
I start out thinking, "Dang, my family has left me, my other family has essentially cut me off, and the friends that caused them to do so have found other faults with me and likewise disappeared. The people and organizations to which I have given the most of my recent life have assured me that I was wasting my time. bla bla bla. I have nowhere to go no one to which I could turn. There is no safety net if everything goes wrong. I have nothing and nobody." at this point I have to append the disclaimer in the anticipation that if I were ever to attempt to air this out loud and had not up to this point been interrupted, I would most certainly now be interrupted by one of my spiritual siblings with a sugary-dripping standard platitude. This is the kind of thing that comes from people that mean well but have never known the hard battle against depression or the reality of homelessness. They mean well and they want to cheer you up and they succeed only in asserting their sense of spiritual superiority by committing the brownie-point scoring act of quoting a classic to you in the moment when it will be least helpful and has the least to do with what you are feeling. It's almost going to be something like, "You have God." Actually, that's probably exactly what he (I have a specific person in mind at this point) would say.
And I would refrain from punching him because, despite his pointing out indisputably by schooling me with this fact that I must be an entirely lost heathen that needs to hear the message, make the choice, pray the prayer and do the chicken dance of salvation because I forgot I had God, I really am a Christian.
So yes, my train of thought usually turns toward the necessary disclaimer to hold at bay those who would jump all over me with their sermons about how I need more of various fruits of the spirit.
And from there I would go on to think about how God is so much more real to me than he is to most of my friends that have several layers of safety between themselves and , well, the void where I almost live. Most of my friends have parents. I don't know any that don't at least have one, and as far as I know it's a good one. Many of them have homes where they still live with their good parents, or if not, in the event of disaster they could return there for safe haven.
i have no such thing. My parents are gone. If I lost my job and got kicked out of my apartment, I would really have nowhere familial to go. I feel like we live in a high pressure undersea dome. There are layers of strong bulkhead keeping the water out. If I had parents, they would be like one layer of bulkhead. If I had a great job, that would be another. Maybe if I had my own car it would be part of another. If I had savings or insurance or rich extended relatives, that would be another. But I have none of that. My friends and associates see walls of protection when they look around, and generally feel so safe that they forget about the water, unless an undersea storm shakes the dome and makes the wall groan. Then they look up, panicked, watch the walls hold, and go back to life.
But I see the water all the time, because I have no walls. All I can see it some supernatural force holding back the water in a perfect hemisphere above me, and I see it shake all the time. I see all the creepy fish with swimming by with their gaping mouths and giant glowing eyes. There are really constant storms, but the water always stays back.
in reality, all of the domes are held up this way, just by the power of God, not with the walls. The walls cannot actually hold the water up, but they do make their inhabitants feel safe. There is more to this but I really have to go home.

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