Thank you all so much for your replies.

I’ve found the source of my unhappiness, confusion and depression, my ‘everything is meaningless,’ I think. It’s still really troubling me, but thanks to all of you I am trying to find positive ways to work through it.

For years now, I’ve been suffering with the thought that God does not exist. Bad things happen, we decide that if there is a God, things like that would not occur. It’s a childish way of thinking, but it’s one we fall into when we don’t really know any better.

Now… well, I’ve quit smoking, so I decided if I was capable of that, I was capable of other lasting change. I was miserable from the pain and withdrawals, I was experiencing a flood of emotions I couldn’t remember having and didn’t know what to do with, so I went to Google and looked up how to deal with anxiety and so forth, and here was Tiny Buddha.

So I read blog articles, and forum posts, and they led me back to my old curiosity about Buddhism, because it’s concerned with eliminating emotional suffering and suffering being ‘cyclical’ — having dealt with cyclical depression from the age of ten, I could relate all too well.

I was not only reading about Buddhism but devouring whatever information I could find, until: it got into karma, which lines up, to me, with Christianity’s ‘you’re a bad person, you’re going to hell, there’s not much you can do.’

Then I stopped. Because as much as I hate to say it, I have done many things I have hated myself for most of my life. It wasn’t so much the pain and issues I dealt with in life that made me decide ‘God doesn’t exist’… it was my fear of judgment, my feelings that I didn’t deserve God. I was low-energy, I was depressed, I was afflicted with wrong, negative thoughts that obscured my ability to understand the way back, I gave up.

I sank into smoking, not caring about anything, allowing myself to act in horrible, irresponsible, unstable ways because nothing mattered, and what was the consequence? Nothing, as far as I could see.

After reading about karma, I was deeply troubled. I started thinking I could possibly still use Buddhist teachings to overcome my suffering, but they told me that no, unless I accepted all this pain and learned to really take responsibility for my life, work at it, deal with the things I’ve done if I can’t make up for them — I couldn’t.

Then, out of curiosity, I researched Eckhardt Tolle and his ‘stillness.’ I tried to find it for myself. I accessed a silence in my mind that made me feel not joy or elation but NOTHING. It felt like it existed behind my ‘mind,’ behind my mental chatter, and it scared the hell out of me. I kept thinking ‘that’s where you’d find God, if you knew Him. That’s where he’d be. Right there, in your head.’

That morning, I had a panic attack. I was convinced I was losing my mind. I’m still afraid that I might be, because I’ve always been unstable, right? What if this is just me being unstable again, chasing after something that isn’t real just because I want to feel better?

And then I look at that, and I think that question is wrong thinking. I put it there, and it sits in the way of my making progress, my learning to be a better person, to forgive myself, to feel self-love and extend it outwards. I am trying. So. Hard. To realize that. To have faith and trust even though I keep falling backwards into ‘this can’t be real.’

Why can’t it? I’m not the only one who can’t shake a belief that something exists besides us.

And now that I’m looking at all of this, at different religions in which too many things coincide, and realizing that research and thought are ENCOURAGED, and that no, God doesn’t really look down on me or hate me or find me lesser because the lesson is that God is right there, in me, part of me, even if I’m not ready to accept His love yet because I haven’t put the work in … I can see that it isn’t that nothing matters.

It’s just that I was afraid to let it matter before.

If I ever get to where I’m going, I’m sure I won’t need to say or think things like this:

I hope I’m not just going crazy.