What I am about to describe is uncomfortably personal. I’ve not yet been able to accurately articulate this in any meaningful way, and I don’t think I’ve gotten there quite yet. I consider this a step in the right direction.
I have a sick-soul. I know this, yet I find it very difficult to describe. I’m going to use passages from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience to try to state my case. Before I get into what a sick-soul means and where it comes from, I first want to talk about the symptoms. I think that’s the best entry point into all of this.
For me, one side of this malady is health anxiety. This isn’t your normal anxiety. This is a very specific form that eats away at the mind and causes all sorts of psychosomatic symptoms. For the past 3 weeks, it’s lived in my right foot. I can’t stop thinking about it. Is it dropping? Is something wrong with it? I haven’t been able to walk right - it feels heavy, wrong, out of place. See, health anxiety seeks out all worst case scenarios - think AIDS, cancer, autoimmune disease, motor neuron disease - and, under the right conditions, actually creates the symptoms of these illnesses. Two years ago I had something similar in my right arm, which led to a near-psychotic break that landed me on anti-anxiety medication. I since got off that medication, and have no plans to go back. I want to see what’s on the other side of this.
The flip side of this “thing” is ruminations. I want you to imagine some of the worst things you’ve experienced - loss, betrayal, crushed expectations. Those things you look back on, and immediately your throat sinks into your stomach. Now imagine replaying those things over and over in your head, day after day, minute by minute. Not because you want to, but because it just happens, like having a back door to your mind you can never close. That’s what I experience on a near-daily basis. Sometimes I can’t eat, sometimes I can’t sleep, and I most certainly can’t be present to those around me. It’s a debilitating mental prison of broken records that just keeps playing thoughts and images on repeat. What’s worse is it feels like I’m a victim to it, although logically I know I’m the one creating it. Talk about a mind-fuck.
I know there’s something underneath these uncontrollable, obsessive thoughts. I’ve always felt it, but I’ve never been able to find the words. That is until now, with the help of William James. See, these thoughts are tied into much larger concepts and ideas around how the world works - pain, suffering, morality, fate. It’s something James likens to a “nervous constitution”:
“For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil’s very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality. Such sensitiveness and susceptibility to mental pain is a rare occurrence where the nervous constitution is entirely normal; one seldom finds it in a healthy subject even where he is the victim of the most atrocious cruelties of outward fortune. So we note here the neurotic constitution, of which I said so much in my first lecture, making its active entrance on our scene, and destined to play a part in much that follows.”
As James points out above, “healthy-mindedness” is in direct contrast to soul-sickness. The healthy-minded, which I can only assume is most people, are able to quiet the mind, block out the noise, see the good and move on. On a fundamental level, I can’t. I can’t overlook the fact that debilitating disease and suffering exist. I can’t let go of the nightmares of the past. There’s something within me that has to acknowledge evil, that has to look at it (and not stop looking at it). James continues:
"Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world’s meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart."
"There are people for whom evil means only a mal-adjustment with things, a wrong correspondence of one’s life with the environment. Such evil as this is curable, in principle at least, upon the natural plane, for merely by modifying either the self or the things, or both at once, the two terms may be made to fit, and all go merry as a marriage bell again. But there are others for whom evil is no mere relation of the subject to particular outer things, but something more radical and general, a wrongness or vice in his essential nature, which no alteration of the environment, or any superficial rearrangement of the inner self, can cure, and which requires a supernatural remedy."
This second paragraph sums it up better than I ever could. There’s something within me that sees an incurable evil in this world (and in myself), and I have no choice but to wrestle with it. There’s no cure for it, there’s no apology or amends that will ever make it right. It flows incessantly, everywhere, always. It hides behind every good intention, every positive thought and affirmation. I see it, and I can’t help but think that what’s underneath is something akin to “the world’s meaning”.
James holds the soul-sick in high regard, and I can see why. In his view, healthy-mindedness is simply a guise for those who can’t look. There’s profound truth and freedom that comes with looking evil straight in the eye. Admittedly, I’m not quite there yet. I find myself in an interesting place - I’m more excited than ever for the future, but if I didn’t wake up tomorrow, I wouldn’t be too upset. The veil has been pierced, and there’s no going back. I’m in the process of finding out what that all of this means for me, one day at a time.
I don’t expect you to understand any of this or even relate. What I do want is to put my process of self-discovery on full display. Maybe that will help you in your own process of self-discovery. I’m no longer afraid to shine light on the darkest parts of myself - I’m no longer afraid to look.
Are you?
I very much relate to this. What’s the supernatural remedy?!
Relate to this bro! Amazing read, amazing writing, and rly is inspirational seeing your vulnerability. Thank you