No Reason

Content warning: Language, sexual assault

Everything happens for a reason. Oh, you mean that perhaps I needed to be taught a lesson? Let’s explore that.

This, and so many other falsehoods are things that I was told or told myself to make the horrible things that have happened to me in the course of my life make some sense when they made no sense at all. It hurt more than it helped.

My parents’ fear of placing me into the public school system put me at something of a disadvantage. They thought that I’d be better off in the local Catholic school. In hindsight, I think they wasted their money. I don’t think that I would have had a very different experience at a school with kids who were bullies that looked different from me than kids who had the same pasty white skin as me but could still discern that I wasn’t the same kind of white as them… I wasn’t the right kind of white. I was eastern European, they were western European, and it was still the Cold War. Their parents knew it, so they knew it, and they used it as a reason to be nasty. The school used it as a reason to charge my parents extra for tuition because they weren’t parishioners at their church. They belonged to the wrong, different Catholic church. The school taught religion classes and in those classes, we learned that God had a plan for everything. God knew the outcome of our lives. Jesus died for our sins and knew all. He knew what sort of shenanigans we got up to and we couldn’t lie about them: that’s why we had to start going to confession in the second grade. We had to start taking the sacrament of holy communion, where we ate the symbolic body of Christ in the form of a foamy little wafer. Learn to carry guilt, kids! God sees all of your sins, and all of these kids know what a weirdo you are and will never let you live down being different from them. You suck for being smarter than them! My feelings are complicated. We needed religion in order to go to heaven, but it was also wielded as punishment at school. The fuck?

When I had a witchcraft phase as part of my midlife crisis (I really needed to deal with some stuff that I was going through after painfully separating from my scientist husband as well as my job at an engineering school, and learning about witchcraft seemed like a real sick burn), it hit me how much it seemed to have in common with Catholicism, at least by my perception: holding fast to harmful beliefs and making solemn oaths with props.

When things started going to shit in my life, naturally I had to wonder if it was some kind of payback. Nobody had so many things go so wrong all at once. Was God punishing me by destroying my marriage, separating me violently from my job, leading me to a situation where a man violated my body, and giving me breast cancer? What did I do to deserve all this? Did I not give change to someone out my window who was actually God in disguise? There were people at my job who seemed to be a lot worse than me at their jobs, but they had “Dr.” as a title, which I did not have. My husband cheated on me with a close friend, and I was the one who was hurt, but he blamed me. He said it was my fault, and she said it was my fault. Was I making excuses for myself? Was this all in fact my fault? Did I create this situation because I really was a horrible person? How was it that I was so bad at my job for 20 years that they were just now getting around to showing me the door? That was fishy. I blamed myself for being raped. The police said it was my fault because I didn’t scream or fight back. I passively accepted what was happening after he refused my pleas to stop. Why did I do that? Did I regret rough sex? I must have been confused. I obviously had bad judgment. The cops told my father that I had bad judgment, and I have carried that knowledge with me for months while they held it back for years. More time in therapy for me. Hmph. I bought more crystals and tarot cards.

Everything happens for a reason, does it? Was I supposed to learn something? Was it that God had a plan? God’s plan stunk. This didn’t feel like God’s love or God’s devotion. This wasn’t mercy. I had been more than humbled before God on all of these occasions. God wasn’t listening to me anymore. I didn’t really know who was listening, but it wasn’t the God that I learned about in elementary school. This God seemed indifferent. This is more like the Old Testament guy. The God I wanted was the New Testament guy who ran with thieves and prostitutes and flipped over the lender’s tables in church. I wanted the guy who said that the meek would inherit the earth.

Whenever I have listened to a story or read a magazine article thanking a husband or thanking God for being by the side of someone experiencing treatment, it’s painful for me. Where was God for me? Where was God when my marriage collapsed, when my relationships ended? Nobody is that interested in dating a woman over 40 with one breast and extensive emotional baggage. I’ve become a sorrowful, angry person who deeply resents the happiness of others because I feel like I won’t get to have these chances again. I’m not sure how or when I failed God, but if I failed God by missing church and doing everything else right, like leading the kind of life that I don’t need to brag to people about how good of a person I’ve been or how generous or kind I’ve been because I am not looking for validating or thanks, I am just looking to do unto others as I would like done unto myself. That’s all. I try to live by the Golden Rule. For 40 years, this is what I’ve been trying to do, and at age 40, it all fell apart and it’s yet to come back together at age 46… It is not for lack of trying. It is just not going anywhere, and I don’t know why that is, so perhaps I am a cautionary tale. Was it the dabbling with witchcraft?

Everyone’s relationship with spirituality is personal. I’m no different. Until my father’s funeral, I had never felt the presence of God at church in my entire life. It’s the only time I felt the briefest moment of some kind of inexplicable, powerful, otherworldly love and comfort that I can only otherwise describe to you, the reader, as the presence of God. For all the commonly held truths I was told in elementary school that are hard wired in my psyche, things happening for a reason is one that I’ve had to manually override a lot. I really do not want to believe that human suffering is the will of a loving God. I have too much trouble with this. I have more trouble with this than believing hematite deflects bad vibes.

Perhaps I just have bad luck. Perhaps it has nothing to do with reason and some people just have terrible stories. Not everyone gets a happy ending. You’re not guaranteed anything. If you make friends with cancer, that promise increases threefold. You will care about people and then you will lose the people you have come to care about. There are times when it becomes too painful to bear that I am going to keep losing the fantastic people that I meet through this community and can’t do a thing about it because there is no cause or fault for it other than shit luck when I desperately want to be able to blame someone for all of it. Maybe I blame myself. I’m the one who decided it was worth getting involved in the lives of others.

Nothing like cancer or any tragedy happens for a reason. Nobody deserves this. Don’t say this kind of cruel nonsense to someone.