I feel simultaneously like I’ve never struggled so hard and that life’s never been better. I’m a mess of contradictions and paradoxes. I’m trusting my intuition and decisions more than ever, and creating my own meaning in life, but also and feeling so small and insignificant in a huge, uncaring universe void of meaning. Up and down goes the roller coaster of life. Sometimes I have experiences so meaningful I can’t put into words how amazing and ecstatic they are. Other times, I’m filled with despair that life will ever be anything more than one long, painful struggle. I’m tired of struggling all the time, of trying so hard to work on myself, of trying to “figure things out”. I feel so young and inexperienced, so much a work in progress, so much is changing, so much change still to come. I can never tell if I just need to get to the other side or change up my strategy. I worry that I’m wallowing in the pain but my shrink says as long as I’m not going into victim mode, as long as I remain open to change and taking responsibility for my life, I’m okay. Change is uncomfortable and I’m tired of the process, but I’m doing my best to trust the process.

I feel I’ve had several times so far in my life where I’ve broken everything down and built it back up again. So far, each time has brought growth and progress and more meaning and wellbeing to my life. I think this is the most fundamental one yet. I think I’m breaking everything down to its smallest building blocks, again, in order to rebuild in a way I want, in a way I choose. Writing this out is already helping. Maybe the real work of post-Mormonism has begun. Maybe I’m moving past the “defining myself in terms of something I’ve left” part, and hit the real work of figuring out who I AM. Time to go deeper still, perhaps. Dig even deeper in my soul for my “why”. Why, personally, do I try? What gets ME out of bed in the morning? What’s meaningful to ME? I think maybe I’m just seeing the immensity of how much work is left…. and struggling to accept it. Yes, I need to accept and love this too. Yes, even this much struggle. It is okay to struggle. Survival is winning. It would be a shame to see the dust of construction and rebirth and throw out the whole remodeling project before any actual progress is made.

I relate less to the exmormon label these days. I left, it’s been a couple years – now what? I’ve ripped out the tentacles from my flesh but now I’m facing the holes and the stunted growth they left behind and starting the real recovery work that takes years to replace the decades I went without a real, separate identity outside of Mormonism. It reminds me of the matrix, how the ones that were in it still carry the scars of being connected to the machine after being freed. “Why do my eyes hurt?” “Because you’ve never used them”.

I think meditation has helped me stop asking “why” and “what does it mean” so much. The why is shit happens and there is only the meaning we create. We exist cuz 14 billion years of random chance. I am nothing but a vehicle for a self-replicating DNA molecule that …. wants to keep existing. I find comfort in the abyss, in the meaninglessness of it all… in the impossible hugeness of the universe in both space and time.

If you compressed all of the universe’s 14-billion-year existence into one year, our species, Homo Sapiens, has been around for… about 8 minutes (200,000 years). For comparison, on this timescale, the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 4 days (160 million years), before going extinct. For 93% of our already-short existence, we were hunter-gatherers. We only discovered agriculture and settled down into villages and towns and cities about 30 seconds (14,000 years) ago. All of recorded history is 12 seconds (5-6,000 years) long. And the four centuries since we discovered science and started understanding all this shit is only… ONE SECOND. We are so very, very young as a species! And we think we’re so smart.

In this context, of course I’m a work in progress – all of life is. All forms of life are continually adapting and evolving and struggling to survive. Survival is winning.

Or, according to Alan Watts, you have limited time here, so enjoy what you can:

“If we thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at that end, and the thing was to get to that thing at that end. Success, or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.” – Alan Watts