I Wonder if God Hates Me
Or: the hits keep on coming.
Have you ever looked at your life and wondered if someone out there had it out for you? Like, some entity, human or otherwise, just wanted you to suffer for no particular reason? Not a paranoia thing, per se, just a series of unfortunate events, so to speak.
Anyway, on an unrelated note, I get to pay $76,000 to fix my house’s foundation, so that’s neat.
I have struggled with the notion that god hates me in the past. There was a point in therapy, for upwards of a year, that I would walk into my therapist’s office (pre-COVID, of course), declare “god hates me,” and then explain what happened that week to cause it.
This is an especially challenging notion for me to hold in my head considering that I’m agnostic, but I feel the need to blame someone, and an imaginary sky daddy is something that works well enough, I guess. It’s just one of those things that in the past seven or eight years, random bad things outside of my control keep happening.
Take the foundation repairs that I get to do. When we bought the house nearly a decade ago, we had the foundation inspected and it was fine. We started noticing cracks in our plaster walls about a year or so ago, but they started getting worse recently, so we had someone come inspect it, and it is getting to the point where our house is at severe risk because the porch is trying to escape from the house.
Granted, the guy who came out to inspect the foundation told me that the type of settling that occurred can literally happen overnight, so the notion that it started a year, maybe two ago is not unrealistic. As such, not noticing the cracks in the walls getting bigger until recently is not necessarily my fault, as I live in a house that’s over 100 years old and the walls get cracked sometimes. It’s just part of owning an old house in a lot of ways.
It’s more than that, though. For upwards of the past decade, life has continually thrown me curveballs. The winter of 2016/2017 was miserable, as one of my cats died, my family situation exploded, and I lost something like $15,000 trying to help my mother-in-law save her house. That was about eight months of hell that I could’ve done without.
While I was the one who caused my family situation (and it’s ultimately been a good thing), my cat was just over two years old, so there was no reason to expect that he would die. Additionally, the reason I lost that much money was not the fault of anyone involved, but rather from a 10-year-old loan fraud from my partner’s father.
The hits just keep on coming since then. In the summer of 2018, my wife had an accident while we were on a float trip and nearly died. In the fall of 2019, I was prescribed an antidepressant that completely wrecked my brain for almost a full year, the withdrawal symptoms of which were terrible. March of 2020 brought COVID, and my birthday in 2020 was celebrated in lockdown. The entire calendar year of 2021 was so busy and stressful that I nearly had a breakdown, and in 2022 I found my friend’s body and had to take a leave of absence to get my head on straight.
Life continues to get more expensive as time goes on thanks to inflation and other fun things. After finding out about the foundation, we had to replace our stove (that’s $900 right there) and fix several plumbing issues (another $1,000 out of pocket). I’ve been watching my savings drain for the past several years as things keep hitting my wallet, and at this point, I’m just so done with everything.
In a lot of ways, I am just venting here. I’ve talked this over with my therapist, and I’ve more-or-less come to terms with all of the catastrophes that have befallen me recently. The numerous events of the past several years have sucked, but we are not homeless or hungry as a result of any of this. Not only that, I’ve been able to afford all of them without paying credit card interest or going too far into debt (until the foundation, anyway — I don’t have $76,000 just lying around).
Part of it is just the capitalist hellscape in which we live these days, which I will not expound upon here because I talk enough about it elsewhere. Everything is expensive these days, prices are going up, and my pay is not keeping up with any of it. And, even though it feels like someone has it out for me in particular, I know that there are millions in similar boats as I am.
So, if you are out there and are suffering wave after wave of garbage and expenses, know this: god doesn’t hate you in particular. There are lots of people who are having the same troubles as you are, and you are not alone. No, god clearly hates all of us and wants us all to suffer.
Yikes, with that mindset, I guess I’m going to be a Buddhist now. Here’s hoping that nirvana is just around the corner.
If you liked this, please subscribe to my publication, Thing a Day. I publish something every day on a variety of topics, so you never know what you’re going to see!