Belief

About 30 years ago I stumbled upon a book called Lord Foul's Bane. It was written in 1977 by Stephen R. Donaldson. At the time it was one book of a trilogy called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Later on it was expanded to a total of 9 books, I think. I have not read them all. This is not a book review, bear with me through the introduction :).

Covenant is a character from our world, a modern day leper, abandoned by his wife and no longer able to see his child due to unfounded fears that his leprosy may spread to them. He has a regimented life that is essential for his continued survival. At a point in the book he is knocked to the ground and loses consciousness and upon waking he finds himself in a fantasy world, where there is magic and the land itself heals him of his leprosy.

Throughout the series he holds strongly to a belief that the fantasy world he finds himself in is a fevered dream of his stressed mind that is fantasizing about being cured of the incurable. A dream that he knows if he succumbs to, will mean his death in what he considers the real world. He feels that if he falls into the trap, believing himself cured, that he will forget to do the things he needs to as a leper to prevent the leprosy from spreading and taking his life.

It's a well written series, one I've reread countless times. It is a hard read. Covenant is a very flawed, hard to care for, anti-hero. He makes decisions that are reprehensible. But the world is wonderfully built, and the other characters in the book are remarkable human beings, many holding characteristics that I had hoped to realize as I grew older. I was addicted to that world and the characters in it. Many things resonated with me in the books, but the thing I want to speak on today is belief. Or more to the point of me bringing up this book; unbelief.

I haven't thought of these books in a long while. What prompted it was a recent conversation I had with myself trying to find out why I regularly feel disjointed, why there is an almost always present undercurrent of incoherence and chaos when I interact with people and the world. I always have a hope that these internal conversations can find a pathway to smoothing out the chaos, creating consistent contentedness with longer lapses between bouts of melancholy. The data is still out on that.

But this self-conversation led me to the revelation that I just don't believe in most of what surrounds me. Capitalism, materialism, most of the systems of our society, I'm an unbeliever of them all. Like Covenant, I exist in a world that I don't believe in, that feels all wrong to me, that is trying to convince me that it is real, and that I need to accept it. And the entire time I'm walling myself in, keeping myself away from connecting to any of it in hopes that when I do wake up in the real world that I won't be so completely altered that I'll fail to survive in it.

My situation though is the reverse of Covenant's; the world I feel I come from, the one I desire to return to, is the beautiful natural world that has a magic inherent in its fabric. And the world I believe a fiction, the one that I feel will destroy me if I remain in it too long, is the world you live in.

It has been very hard to describe what this feeling of disjointedness is. Sometimes it feels like I'm the only person I know who sees the sky is colored red, and everyone else knows that it is blue. It is factually blue to them. It is factually red to me. To fit in, to fake like I'm normal and not sound like a madman, and to relate to people I care about and to not feel so fucking lonely I must constantly remind myself that red = blue whenever I'm talking to someone about the sky.

Like many others who recount their experiences of having a hidden self, I have to think inside of a lie every time I interact with another person. Like an anti-crazy filter, so that the words that come out of my mouth don't betray how fucking terrifying and alien I think their blue skied world is.