Just a Chemical Reaction

In preface, I really struggle with this one. Anyone with a "normal" comment about faith in what cannot be seen can keep their bible thumping to themselves. As for me, I am struggling to trust my own brain (I've always struggled with that because I consider my mind, emotions, and memories illusive; they like to betray me). Because if I can't trust my own mind, how can I trust anyone or anything at all?

Oxycontin, serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline a thousand other chemicals, bouncing back and forth to create emotion, reaction, love, hate, peace. It seems they are the underlying reason for everything. We feel too sad and we take a pill to make us happy again. We touch, we eat, we feel, we sleep, all in the wild of art form of creating a happy existence. We act as though faith, love, and happiness are choices we make in our life. But every action is only in search of a reaction. Nothing is done without the deep underlying intensive to cause a  good chemical reaction or to avoid a bad one.

So how can we be people? If love is just a reaction based on touch and attraction, if happiness is just a rush, if sadness can be so easily altered with  another action or drink or pill, then how are we people? Who am I except a chemical experiment? How can I ever know if what I feel is real or not? Is anything real?

Faithless people believe that "real" is simply what can be seen, heard, touched and felt. But how can we even trust our own minds? They are just a chemical ground, prone to failure and miscommunication. And if that is so, how can any person of faith have any faith in their own feelings? They say they feel God, but is all they feel just another chemical bouncing between receptors in the brain?

Then there is my mind. I know I am not completely mentally well, I know that my memory is far from fool-proof and that my emotions are a scattering of unrelated sensations that I am forced to constantly endure. So, if I have always lived and questioned like this, why now to write a post about it? I find myself in love and, now that the initial phase of complete chemical high at the notion of having another person so close has faded, I am left to question what is real and what is simply a chemical happiness created by physical and mental closeness.

I have been asked, "What could you possibly know about real love and lasting care for another person?" "You're too young, to unstable, to immature, to ignorant," and (my personal favorite), "You're too hormonal to understand what you're feeling." I am being asked to make some of the biggest decisions in my life (thus far and overall) and, at the same time, being told that I am too much of a hormonal, chemical reaction to know what I feel or want or even who I am!

So what is a person to do? Simply accept that we are all just chemical reactions and the sensations of living are not really to be trusted. If I know my mind is untrustworthy, how can I trust at all? How can I be close to anyone at all?

Conversation open,
DWF