Not My Will

I think that I'm far more afraid of suffering than I am of death.

It's possible that I'm wrong, and I'll find that out the day I actually come face to face with death or am told I have a small window of time to live. However, at the moment, what really shakes me up is picturing long-term cancer treatments or thinking about Alzheimer's rewinding my memory a month or a year at a time.

Sergey and I started watching House again. Both of us had seen it–separately–in our college days, and we enjoyed it as a fun medical drama. Watching it together as late-thirties adults? It's far more depressing and frightening than I remember it. There's a lot of suffering in this show, and a lot of ways that people deal with it. There's a lot of calculations they have to make–good and bad. There's a lot of degeneracy in the face of anguish, and a lot of real gold shining through the crucible fire.

Something happened to me in my early thirties that I still can't label. I began having food-triggered fits that included nausea, fatigue, vomiting, chills, muscle tension, inability to sleep, and best of all delusional terror about existential issues. Everything but the vomiting would go on for four to nine hours at a time and this "weird fit" would take place roughly once every month and a half. We did not find rhyme or reason to which foods triggered it while we were in the US. We're watching the situation and how it is changing now that we are in Japan.

Sometimes we can get the frequency down to once every four months. Sometimes it becomes more frequent. It's never gone away completely. Usually the best thing I can do is sit down and glue myself to the Switch console and play games until it is over. It's the only thing that's proven to hold my attention just enough to ride out the weird fit. In fact, that's how my therapy games list came about.

The fear is the worst part. I've spent so long learning and honing my ability to think now, and then it all goes up in a flash. I can't think my way out of a wet paper bag, and the terror that already exists reaches out and fixates on things that make no sense, or aren't true. A few examples pulled from my logs over the past few years:

• Sergey deserves a wife who isn't a complete basket case like I am. I'm too soft and weak and miserable to properly support him.
• I hate all food. I hate eating. Why does this damn system even exist?
• What if I'm making this up for attention?
• What if I'm separating myself from God by playing Skyrim which has all these crazy dark stories about horrific god-figures that give you nasty quests to do???
• If we were wrong about who Jesus was to the world, would God ever forgive us?

I whimper and cry and freeze up like a petrified child. I feel like I'm walking around with no skin on, raw to even slight turbulences around me. Whatever shreds of higher thought I have left direct me to pick up the Switch, sit down, and do NOTHING ELSE until this is over, no matter how long it takes.

Because in the moment when I don't know how long this state is going to last and every minute stretches into infinity, I would rather die than live like that.

I'm definitely more afraid of suffering than I am of death.

Sergey and I rely a lot on the thoughts of Jordan Peterson. Peterson has great anecdotes about helping people face the fear of death and the benefits of exposure therapy and how to go about such a thing, but I asked Sergey what he thought Peterson would say about the fear of suffering. How do you do exposure therapy to such a thing? How do you become less afraid of it?

Sergey reminded me that the likely answer was to find something that made your life worth the suffering you endure. While I agree this is correct, I could not find enough in that concept to hold onto at this time in my life, when I do not feel I have contributed enough to make that true for myself yet. Whether that statement is true or not is a matter of debate for another time.

Tonight I lay down and–as I sometimes do and wish I did more often–remembered to turn to God about this.

"I don't know how to find you in the middle of the suffering," I said. "Help me find you, help me turn to you in the middle of the suffering. Then maybe I can walk through it."

And a scene from one of the few unique older Jesus movies called The Miracle Maker flashed through my mind–a scene from the Garden of Gethsemane–and for the first time I realized something. Something obvious, but something that had never clicked for me.

1. Jesus was terrified of suffering. We have it in the scriptures that he was under such stress that he sweated blood. And if Jesus was terrified of suffering, then there is no removing the fear of suffering. Even knowing that much–that I'm just human and not exceptionally weak and despicable for having this fear of suffering–ameliorates the situation a little for me.
2. The suffering was not removed, but what Jesus clung to, where he found the Father, was, "Not My will, but Yours be done." Did he say this under his breath with every blow to his face? Did he gasp it out under the lash? Did he think it with every step as he carried his cross? Was it in every breath he fought for on the cross?

Put a pin in that. Follow me down another track.

The other night, Sergey and I watched an episode of House called Autopsy. In it, House is treating a 9 year old who is already a terminal cancer patient. She's going to die in a year no matter what, but she manifests bizarre new symptoms that are going to kill her any moment if she doesn't do an incredibly risky procedure. House comes to her room and asks her whether she wants to live and keep suffering, or if she wants it to be over. Her answer is, "I can't just leave (my mom) because I'm tired." He tells her that she can't do this just for her Mom, but she insists on her answer.

Sergey and I discussed this back and forth. There are situations where a person can live far too much for the sake of another person. However, in this situation, this response makes all the sense in the world. When I am whole and healthy, I am able to make decisions that will benefit a future self that I care for, as well as the present self. But the present self should always take lesser precedent than the future self, if all is correctly ordered. But in the moment of misery, everything shrinks to the present self. And when I don't know the time horizon for the misery–if it looks like it's never going to end–the good of my future self isn't even a consideration.

In that moment, other people may become the stand-in, as if they were speaking on behalf of my future self. If I were to hear from someone I loved and trusted, "I need you here," to me that would be no different than the person calling on my future self to be there for both our sakes, when I can't get that far myself. So I can substitute another person's need for me in place of what willpower I can't dredge up for myself, and drag myself forward when I would not have otherwise.

Go back to the pin.

Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Thy will be done.

Was Jesus even sure, at that point, that there would be a resurrection? We talk about his divinity and how much he knew, but if he was human enough to cry, "Why have you forsaken me?" then surely, in the midst of that same misery, he was human enough to think that no matter what he'd said before, there was no future in this. Only a humiliating, painful death and a cold grave.

Thy will be done. Thy will be done. Thy will be done.

Reliance on the word of the one he most loved and trusted.

How can I accustom myself to the fear of suffering so I'm not afraid of it anymore?

If the Son of God could not, neither can I. But if he could turn to the Father and use that as the motivation to put one foot in front of the other, maybe that is enough of a model.

For me, right now, that person is Sergey. I hope the Father will also teach me how to turn to Him in the darkness.

"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me."
Psalm 23:4