I'm really struggling with this post and I'm not quite sure how to proceed except to just say what I know to be true and what I experienced.
I entered college as a naive child and unarmed to face the American college experience. While I "identified"as an Orthodox Christian, I had very little knowledge as to what that even meant. Other than a comical encounter with a well-meaning member of Campus Crusade for Christ, and one trip to a local Orthodox Church for Pascha my sophomore year (I showed up late and was there for maybe 15 minutes), that was pretty much it for God in college.
Without going into the details of my four years, it should suffice to say that I left college deeply wounded. I made the same choices as many other college kids but for some reason, I seemed to have come up much much worse for the wear than everyone else. My relationship with my parents was dysfunctional at that point. My father was trying to make a go of a new business venture and there were so many stressors involved with that. My mother had her own struggles that interfered with us having a close relationship for many years, so there was no trusting relationship that so many of my other friends seemed to have with their mothers. Nor did I have any older siblings or family members or trusted adults that could help. I really had not a single person in whom to turn. My close friends did not understand and their advice was "you shouldn't feel that way." I know they were only trying to be helpful and we all existed on the same plane of maturity, but that common phrase didn't help at all . Sadly, the end result of all of this was extreme anxiety and feelings of abandonment and isolation.
I kept trucking along though. I moved to the big city and got myself busy. And when I wasn't busy, I depended on music and TV to drown out those incessant thoughts that told me how unworthy of a human being I was. I could not bear silence because those painful memories would rush back to attack. And although I still remained nonreligious, I was in a panicked state that God was now looking for the opportunity to throw me into hell. Paranoia at its finest. Thankfully, I was never suicidal although I fully understand how many people could end up in that place. The paralyzing fear of divine judgement from a vengeful and unforgiving deity was so deeply ingrained in me that it wouldn't allow for such thoughts. I did NOT want to die.
In this distressing spiritual and psychological state, I continued to push onward. I married and had a child who was brought into the Church because that's what you are supposed to do. I worked full-time until we moved to a place that would allow me to stay at home to raise a family. However, after the initial busyness of the move was over, the thoughts returned and churned over and over and over. Fear continued to rule my life. A few months after moving into our new home, I had a difficult and scary miscarriage, and then almost four months later, 9/11. September 11, 2001...the day that forced every human to confront their mortality. The very thing I had been avoiding for the past ten years.
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