Forgive me, I don't think I'm an atheist anymore [Oct.11]

It's taken a long time to read the book. I think I've had it in my bookcase since almost the beginning, or at least since the time when I started wanting to feel better. But for a very long time I've been scared of feeling better, because feeling bad had become comfortable – and less scary than the truth which is the title of the book, bad things happen to good people.

Because if bad things do happen to good people, if there was no rational, logical, explainable reason for what happened, except that sometimes shit happens and it happens indiscriminately, then it made the world an even more frightening place, and after that night I knew one thing and that was that I didn't want to be frightened anymore.

But I was. I was continually frightened, sometimes interrupted by brief moments where I forgot I was frightened, only to be suddenly reminded when woken from a nightmare, or when a panic attack would suddenly grip my body and my mind and hold it in a tight vice where I couldn't breathe. In order to ward against those surprises, I steeled myself to find being frightened normal, to not expect safety, even though I was continually in search of it.

I tried to get better, every time I tried, it felt like I got somewhere for only a little bit and then would slip back into the abyss of depression. I tried things which were outwardly positive but made me feel worse: therapy, group therapy, NLP, affirmations. I tried things I knew were only plasters over a wound that needed stitches, finding refuge in all the usual clichés: in pain, sex, drugs, alcohol, food. I cut so I could feel pain yet numb the pain inside. I ran away to Thailand because I was never planning on coming back, but I came back early because I realised that I had taken everything with me, and I had to find a way to get on with life. And that meant trying to find a way to feel safe.

Thailand was over two years ago. There's been a lot more of the coping mechanisms, there's been progress, there's been failures in that time. Trying to feel safe meant moving house a lot. Trying to feel safe meant putting all my energy into work and having something that I'd achieved to hold onto, and to help me feel normal. Trying to feel safe meant only socialising with known friends, never putting myself in new, and therefore risky, situations. Trying to feel safe meant transferring all the responsibility for my safety into the arms of the man I was with. For a long time, trying to feel safe meant blaming myself for what had happened, that if I had done something different, not drunk so much, not worn what I was wearing, it wouldn't have happened. (You know, I still don't remember what I was wearing, it's one of the big gaps in my memory of that night. I assume it was something nice but not too nice. It was a first date – I'd wanted to make a good impression but not be obviously trying to make a good impression. I don't know. But I spent a long time blaming myself for maybe trying too hard and sending the wrong message).

Trying to feel safe meant, for a long time, that I was unable to open that book. Because if bad things happen indiscriminately, there is chaos. For a control-freak like me, being comfortable with chaos, that's not easy. And I'm not saying I'm comfortable now. But I did read the book. And it's the only thing that's made any sense in all this time. And it took a Rabbi to say it.

I was able to read the book because I'm the healthiest I've been in a very long time. I'm still worried, that like the other times when I thought I was 'better', that I'll slip back into depression, that something will happen to kick me suddenly in the stomach and send me reeling back into the blackness. But, I do think that I am the healthiest I've been in a very long time. I'm making positive choices about living, about career, about health, about family, about friends. I'm making plans and, critically, for someone who before it happened used to be a massive dreamer, who'd forgotten how to dream, I'm dreaming again, big, complex, detailed, colourful dreams of what I want for my future. Like before, now I can spend whole afternoons, or indeed whole transatlantic flights, happily day-dreaming a future. And it's a future where I'm happy.

So, I picked up the book. Or rather, I downloaded it to my kindle. And on the train back from Cardiff this afternoon, after I'd finished 'the other hand', I tentatively clicked on the title and began reading. I got home, and I continued reading. I cried a little. All this time, and now someone was speaking sense, truth, understanding my pain, my feelings, my everything.

The book I read in my adolescence which hung around and preyed on my soul was John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Timshel, translated by Steinbeck as thou mayest, has always been one of the pillars of what I believe human nature is about. But, you see, I forgot. I forgot that if at the end Cal learns that he doesn't have to be bad like his mother, but he can choose how to be, he can choose to be sorry for what he has done, and stay to look after his father, I forgot that he could also have chosen to be bad. I forgot that if I was choosing to be good, and thinking I was living a good life, I forgot that others might be choosing to be bad. I was living in a naive bubble where bad things didn't happen to good people – because I hadn't spent any time thinking about the fact that whilst I was aware bad things did happen, I didn't think bad things could happen to me. I was living in a neat, ordered world, where if you worked hard, you got your house, you renovated your house and it became the house you'd always spent all that time day-dreaming about. Even divorce, whilst it totally threw me and started the first cycle of depression (although at the time, I thought I was invincible, I was actually falling apart) hadn't prepared me for the upset an event with no logical reason would cause. The divorce was logical – we fought, we fell out of love, we dealt with it rationally, we remained friends. What happened was not rational, logical, explainable.

Except I tried to make it so. I drank too much. I was wearing the wrong things. It was evidence of what I'd always believed, that God didn't exist. I must have done something really bad in a previous life, it was centuries-old karma. I blamed myself, I blamed the world. And then I got angry, at myself, at a justice system that provided no justice and just intensified the pain, at the world, at life. I could not have read the book when I was still angry, just as I could not have read the book when I was still hating myself. I think, maybe, I was just ready, ready to put it in my past, to move on.

It didn't happen because of anything I did, or didn't do, on that night, at any point in my life, or in a past life. It didn't happen because I deserved it, and it didn't happen because I was asking for it. It didn't happen because, as in 'the secret' I must have secretly willing it to happen (that is one offensive book). It didn't happen because I'm meant to discover I'm stronger now. It didn't happen so that I could do something useful with my experience, even though I might choose to. It happened because humans have a choice, and because one man, on that night, decided to do something evil to me. The only part of what happened that has anything to do with me, is that it happened to me. He raped me. I did not get myself raped. He. Raped. Me.

It didn't happen because God doesn't exist. And I haven't found a way to survive and move on because God does exist. But Rabbi Kushner, maybe he has a point. It's not about why it happened to me. Fairness has nothing to do with life. It's about what I choose to do now that it has happened. Timshel. I have a choice. And I do choose life.