Just checking in tonight to let you all know I’m doing pretty well. The new meds are working wonders, and I can see without the veil of crazy now. The world looks different. The sounds inside my head are different. It’s much, much quieter, clearer. There’s still some remnant buzzing, but I feel like I’m solidly and singularly inhabiting my mind now, and it’s such a relief.
Someone was talking in the comments about spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, whom I adore, and his feelings on psychiatric meds — namely, that they keep us from breaking ourselves down to the point where we can access nirvana. I assume Eckhart’s right about that one; he’d know better than I. Maybe I was one day away from accessing nirvana. Maybe I was one day away from offing myself. I can’t be sure. What I know for sure is that I feel 100 percent better right now, and I don’t much care how that happened.
Tolle says something else, I think in A New Earth, but possibly in Power of Now. He asks, “How do I know that I’m having the correct experience right now?” And his answer is “Because it is the experience you are having right now.”
I’m paraphrasing, probably poorly, but the message — one I embrace — is that you are always exactly where you are supposed to be, feeling and doing exactly as God intended. If it’s God’s will for me to achieve nirvana (or whatever you choose to call it), then I will, and it’ll be on His terms and on His timeline. If it’s God’s will for me to find or at least seek relief through psychiatric medicine for the rest of my life, then that’s what will happen.
Does that mean I don’t believe in free will? I think it might. It’s a question I’ve asked myself time and time again. Have I managed to embrace some maimed Calvinesque concept of predestination? I think I have, and it doesn’t bother the 26-year-old me nearly as much as it would have bothered an angsty teenage me. It certainly doesn’t mean I never falter or fear, but it’s easier this way. I never second-guess anything. I move through the world with the assumption that everything is as it should be, and that all decisions have been made correctly, because they are the decisions that were made. What I know — what I see around me every day, in my life and in the lives of those around me — is God’s grace working small miracles, tinkering and toddering with this and that, funneling us all quietly into exactly the experience we are supposed to be having right now. For that, I am grateful.
