Despair doesn’t feel good. And for some reason, I can’t seem to get enough. It’s like I’m addicted to despairing more. It’s like quicksand. When you start going in more, you just have a tendency to do it more and more. It’s like a drug that you know is not good for you, yet for some reason, you still take it, knowing it will make you feel worse. And the worst part is, it doesn’t make you feel good in the moment, it just makes you feel awful!
My despair the last couple days went through the roof, especially this morning, making me feel more miserable and miserable, leading to anger, resentment, and more negative feelings towards Islam and Allah. Why? Because I felt that I was always trying to get closer to God, yet these negative feelings and ability to study got worse and worse, till I became in the state I am in.
Despair seems to alter your emotional intellect, the intellect of the heart, where you start seeing everything in a dismal, abysmal light, or darkness I should say. It becomes nearly impossible to look at the bright side of things in the midst of it.
As I mentioned in last post, the shift in my my mind and heart is reversed. The reason why I am feeling so much despair doesn’t have a whole lot to do with Islam or Allah. That’s just the cover up. The reality is, the reason why I feel so bad, is because of my own beliefs about myself and my despair that I have had over who I am and how I dealt with anybody in a higher authority my entire life. That’s the enmeshment, and that’s where it keeps getting stuck.
And of course, let’s not forget the little devil, that also does his share of emotional influence and evil waswaawis. The one who gave us the wrong ideas about ourselves as we were growing up to begin with.
So this morning, after suffering all morning with these feelings, I took to heart what my wife keeps insisting on; namely that the reason that I suffer with this despair is primarly because of my childhood belief I established with my mom. It is BECAUSE of the belief I have about myself with never being cut out, or good enough as I am, that I have winded up in the state that I am in, and NOT because Allah is pushing me away, as much as it feels like to be the case. Rather, with all the dua I’ve made to try to address my core beliefs and despair issues, Allah has allowed this to happen precisely so I would be forced to address this core belief that has been with me from the beginning.
Being able to accept and recognize that this belief as the primary culprit to my emotional issues and relationship with Allah, it got me into a slightly better mood. But just because you make a mental shift, doesn’t mean that the issues disappear right away. What builds up gradually, must die out gradually as well. So when I went for zhuhr, you better believe that I was feeling pretty awful despair issues and chest tightness, and what you would call abnormal amounts of negative feelings and thoughts that seemed too numerous to try to tackle and mentally break down. And with my quran reading afterwards, yup, it was pretty darn uncomfortable reading my quran, stomach and chest tightness, no good feelings rooted in despair that had built up, and stress headache from just reading. When I was trying to take a nap, it made me realize that I still have some level of emotional effects from the shaitan that hasn’t completely vanished. it’s a mixed conglomeration.
When I went to the mall today, my son fell asleep in the car. And then it was just me, some of the most dreaded times, me feeling all by myself. It felt very difficult to contain myself from despairing more because of how awful I was feeling with the built up despair. But from what I decided, despairing more about my despair won’t make it any better. As I entered the mall, walking by myself, I had a shaitanic emotional attack of feeling that I’m a loser. And it was very strong inside me that it seemed nearly impossible to dismiss, bringing me to the verge of tears, because it was something that I seemed to always believe inside at heart. And with the other symptoms of despair towards my religion, again I had no real inkling to study, and so I answered an email or two from someone in this community. Then the loser attack subsided and it was time to pray asr. I prayed and things were better as compared to earlier. And that is what I found helps the whole issue, when I find it in me to hold my emotional self at bay.
So the slogan of today for me was: My Islam has zilch to do with my despair issues. It is my old beliefs and despair that I brought into my relationship with Allah that eventually caused me to be brought down to this low state I’m trying to climb out of.
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