Change and Pain in the Brain

I am not tidy.
I'd like to be, but I'm tidy-challenged. Clutter enters my life at light-speed.

I try.  I really do.

But I find it very difficult to get rid of things.

I have friends who say things like, "Doesn't it feel LIBERATING!!! and FREEING!! and WONDERFUL!! to get rid of all things? Don't you just LOVE the feeling of tossing out things?"

Um, no.  No, I don't.

I find it difficult, painful and I often end up regretting having let go of something. Letting go hurts...and so I find it difficult to toss out things like a favorite dress that no longer fits or a card from a friend from five years ago.

Now I know why. A new study at Yale indicates that in some people the same areas of the brain that register physical pain light up when people are faced with getting rid of a possession: the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. Which means that no, I don't feel great when I get rid of things; I experience anxiety and pain.

However, some people, with different brain chemisty, have the opposite reaction. They get a high every time they get rid of something. So they get rid of as many things as they can, as often as they can because their brain registers the activity as pure pleasure.

Now, the two really big questions are:
1. Why people who experience pain with letting go of things so often enter into relationship with people who experience pleasure from it?
2. And why do the tossers of life seem to think that they are completely and utterly morally superior to the keepers when it all is just brain chemistry?

The Growth Chart of Life

When we are younger, or perhaps I should say, when I was younger, I saw life as a sort of growth chart, in which the natural progression was for things to get bigger and better.  What was difficult today would be easier tomorrow.  The latter part of life was supposed to be the "Golden Years" where a lot of the struggles of daily existence were finally at rest.

The last couple of years of my life have pretty much wrecked that operating theory. I never, even in my most driven nightmares, could have imagined that I would be experiencing the kind of challenges at this point in my life. It has been, without exaggeration, the very worst years of my entire life.  In fact, if you put the "worst-ness" of these past few years on a scale against all the rest of my life combined, these years would tip the balance.

To be brutally honest, I don't much like it.  A friend said today that God must love me very much and think I'm very strong to give me so many challenges.  I didn't say it, but I thought, "I'd just as soon he didn't love quite so much, thank you very much."

The hardest thing about the challenges...and they have ranged from the long journey to the end of my mother's life to a major betrayal that I'll talk about once the criminal aspect is made public (and it will be soon) to finances to health and a whole lot else is that the accumulative aspect makes it hard to have hope for the future. And that's what my mental concept of the "growth chart of life" had been about--the idea that even when things were static or negative, it would get better.

Now I find myself wondering if things will ever get better. And fearful that they just might get worse instead.

I've read (and written) enough inspirational material to know that this is the place where I'm supposed to  give some uplifting anecdote about how God has answered a prayer recently and hope has risen up in my soul.  Yes, God has answered prayers for me, but the darkness is still thick and the struggles have not abated.  I'm still in the Dark Night and there are no streaks of light that indicate dawn anytime soon.

Perhaps, in a few weeks, months or years, I will be able to look back and say, "There was growth after all.  And things really did get better."

Until then, all I can do is take a deep breath and be grateful for "One more day. Just one more day."