About Me
My name is Chris, and I wrestle with what I’ve described as a “spiritual sickness”. My Dad has called me “lost”. I’ve been called out several times, by different people, for thinking too much and doing too little. It feels to me that my default mode is one of meaningless activity. Here are some common habits that I associate with meaninglessness:
Watching TV, addictively. I find it hard to stop watching YouTube or Prime Video once I start, and I can easily waste hours and sacrifice my sleep to the indulgence.
Not sharing my life with anyone. Most of my life, I’ve defaulted to spending time alone. It was only when I was somewhere around 25 or 26 years old that I met my first friend that would spend time with me in the good times and the bad. I remember being at first annoyed at his persistence to meet, and warming up to his presence when I noticed how good it felt to be forgiven for mistakes, seen in my bad moods (e.g. “You seem grumpy. Let’s eat.”), and be there in his bad moods (e.g. “I’m grumpy”).
It didn’t even register to me that one could invest in relationships, or that socialization was valuable, until then. My loner habits are hard to kick, and I easily lapse into an unforgiving, perfectionist, I’m-good-on-my-own mentality.
Spending too much time around people. I moved to New York City in 2018, with a goal of getting comfortable socializing. And I’ve overshot several times. A common cause was overcommitting myself with plans, every day of the week, until I felt like everything in my life was a “task”. Another common one was habitually joining my friends, without stopping to consider what I wanted to do, until I noticed that my life wasn’t progressing as I would want. At these points, I often thought that giving myself space, by stepping away, was the best way to course correct.
Ruminating. Time flies by when I daydream or am otherwise stuck in my head.
I’ve wanted to write a blog for a while. And I have, actually, years ago. But this is my version 2. I like to analyze things and build my mental model of the world. And I also tend toward perfectionism and avoid scrutiny of my ideas, except for close friends. This blog, I hope, will be a nice way to express my imperfect ideas for a wider audience than those in my circle. I’m grateful for the conversations that I have with my friends; I find them to be interesting, insightful, and, most importantly, meaningful. I wonder if you (whoever is reading this) will agree.
A second important factor is that I often forget to pursue actions that I once thought were important. In 2018, I was convinced that a “connection to the core” – an area just above the stomach, for me – was a fundamental skill for interacting with the world with a steady ground of emotional stability (interacting with the world through reason alone is unstable, for me). I didn’t master it, forgot about it over the years, and a friend only reminded me of it at lunch last week, while we talked about being addicted to dance, vs loving to dance. I hope also to organize my mental models in this blog, so that I can come back to neglected pieces when I feel ready to integrate them into my life.
You might wonder about the blog’s title: A Christian Agnostic. That’s a topic for another time; I’ve written for too long already. For now, I’ll just remind you that I’m a Christian Agnostic, and by no means the Christian Agnostic. I’m expressing my personal opinions, and I wish for you to do the same. Let’s walk in the light.