Uncle Says I'm Broken Enough

Well, it's all over but the benefits calculations. I'll get my first Social Security benefits check the first of July, thanks to a combination of mental and physical failings deemed severe enough together to make me unable to support myself by working. When I first found out, I was depressed for three or four days. Now, mind you, I'd been applying off and on for about two years, and this last bout was only being counted from December, but it hit me with that same old stunned-to-a-full-stop blow to the ego I felt back when what's wrong with me was called epilepsy and ended with my dropping out of high school. This time, though, it only lasted three or four days, during which I took a break from bathing and spent too much time eating ice cream in front of the computer while I found a way to remind myself I'm not a random collection of scattered thoughts and half-understood impulses struggling to make sense of a world that plays a very different game from the one I learned growing up. Somehow I missed the cues, or learned a good many false ones as well as a few that still hold true today.

Yet people like me, and I like them. I have friends, and the circles of acquaintance and soul kinship keep expanding even as the thought of the process boggles my mind. Some of them know about the voices that murmur and comment when I am tired and my eyes blink a moment too long. Some don't worry about it, some consider it a gift to have snatches of dream make themselves known in the middle of the day. I don't know. Even when I'm rested, I’m genuinely agnostic. Despite that, there are a world of people who need and ask for prayer and rituals to be done. So, agnostic and broken as I apparently am, I renewed my ordination in the Universal Life Church. Now I can do the stuff I do ad hoc legally. Funny, that.

I wonder if my coming clean about my agnosticism with Ryan has anything to do with this upwelling in religious curiosity, if not exactly fervor. Logically, of course, it's coincidental, but there is so much to be done in this world, and a lot of it is far beyond my physical or intellectual grasp. In such a case, what can I do but talk to the Being(s) that might not be there?

Your comments are, as always, welcome.