Talk to Me

Is real communication with God and others possible? My personal experience…

Proper verbal communication has always been a struggle for me. My mom repeatedly tells me how I said "I love you" to her when I was two months old, then received my vaccines and didn't speak again for many months, until she added fish oil in my formula. I'm not here to debate conspiracy theories, nor have I ever received an autism diagnosis, but I do feel fairly certain I'm neurodivergent, as my thought patterns and psycho-neurological tendencies are more than a little nonstandard.

As a child, I became awkwardly over-conscious of how my voice sounded, with the result of slipping into selective mutism: basically panicking and remaining silent whenever anyone spoke to me. To this day I have to force myself to speak up in life, and have saddled myself with the additional burden of being generally afraid of everyone.

I dream of having a true, heart-to-heart connection with another human being or even with a higher power, but realistically speaking, with the shortcomings I have, combined with any number of flaws in others, I doubt such a connection will ever be possible in real life. If someone appears to "get me," or even like me or (hypothetically) love me, it usually turns out they were either manipulating me to their own ends or had no capacity or desire to give me what I was looking for.

I have a tendency to go with the flow and look to my peers for examples or cues of how to behave in any given setting… which always made my mom assume I was too easily influenced by others and required extensive sheltering. This led me to develop a counterbalancing tendency to be cynical, argumentative and indeed combative, viewing people as untrustworthy and to be avoided at all costs. I feel as if human interaction means breaking away from the comfortable default of solitude, being dragged out to the viewing platform like a wild animal at the zoo, to be gawked at, petted, criticized, misunderstood and used and then packed away again until next time.

This dualistic conflict of the desire for authentic connection and the fear of being too eager, clingy, submissive or overexposed, is deeply frustrating. Rather than work on developing my interpersonal skills and risk the abuse I so greatly fear, I prefer to be alone, busying myself with my own private world and remaining satisfied with "mud pies in the slums" because the few times I've been offered a trip to the beach, it was a scam.

The online world and the ability to write has opened up a new, more welcoming and accessible community for me. I only wish I could find a real life safe space similar to WdC, or at least be able to communicate as clearly, verbally, to humans, as I do online or in writing. And yet, even online community has its drawbacks. There are times here when I feel the limits of virtual communication, when people disappear, or misunderstand, or I say too much and receive the equivalent of a blank stare, or I say too little and miss the opportunity for a deeper connection, or I say something stupid and create unnecessary drama for which I have to profusely apologize…

Moving on to spiritual communication, the situation as I experience it is also rather bleak. I have always had a precocious mind. At six years old, I would lie awake at night wondering what it feels like to be dead or if God would cease to exist if no one on earth believed in Him anymore. At that early age, I didn't think anyone else had considered those things. I was surprised to discover they're some of the most fundamental philosophical inquiries.

I also have always had a certain rationality about me, an ability to distinguish the weirdness going on in my head from whatever's out there. Yet simultaneously I have a poor sense of time and continuity; I remember once, after a day spent in a noisy, crowded church environment, lying in bed in the stillness, wondering if any of what had happened was real if it was no longer in the present moment. Indeed, sometimes I struggle, even subconsciously, with solipsism, feeling as if the only real thing is my own mind and everything else isn't really real at all, because when I'm ready to fall asleep all I have is myself. In that moment, nothing else matters.

Adding these peculiarities together means I have serious difficulty grasping the real presence of God. If I pray, it feels like I'm just thinking in a funny way. If I work myself up into some kind of "warm fuzzies," it's just the serotonin or dopamine, and the same effect can be achieved by watching a music video or an interview with someone I admire, or even playing a video game. I then wrestle with the question of whether I substitute worldly things for spiritual, yet I'm afraid, to put it simplistically, of "losing my mind" if I try to seek after a spiritual experience without grounding it in the rational consideration of morals and worldview.

I tell people I'm "praying for them," yet I worry it's a lie if I don't feel anything other than words in my head: "Lord, please take care of this person." Do my prayers mean anything? Who am I addressing them to anyway? If I fancy I feel some form of connection with a higher power, am I imagining things? Is it all in my head? Would I feel more of a connection to God if I involved myself in a real life spiritual community? Or would the sheer difficulty of human interaction push me even further away from spirituality?

Moving back to communication with people, even if I had a therapist, I fear they would be the last person to understand me. Anything I say at any given time is only a tiny fraction of the endless thoughts and opinions drifting through my head. They may hear one soundbite I happen to blurt out, build an entire series of assumptions on it, and then tell me I must be lying if I say something different the next day. I cannot comprehend how one single therapist can handle dealing with the innermost thoughts of potentially hundreds of people who each imagine they have some kind of rapport with the therapist. It comes down to oversimplification, a formulaic triteness which would be more of a placebo effect than a genuine human connection. They have their pool of catchphrases, and I doubt what they have to say would help me in any way which I couldn't just figure out by myself.

Having said all this, and exposed my deepest vulnerabilities for the world, I reach a rather depressing conclusion: I seem to be walling myself off from any kind of real communication with people or God.

I would rather write a story or listen to a song than speak to a person. This wouldn't be a bad thing, if I weren't always so paralyzed around others. Perhaps I overthink everything. Perhaps I'm too afraid of what society can do to me. Maybe I'm terrified of my own naivete. Or maybe I just need to get my act together and practice talking to people.

There is some irony in the fact that when I started to write this monologue, I considered asking ChatGPT for an outline of some basic ideas to give me a logical structure to write to. I didn't want to ramble personally as if I'm babbling to a therapist. I intended to generalize, to write about how universally important communication is and the different ways to do it, with a look at the flaws inherent in each. But I ended up focusing on my own struggle with communication, because anything else felt insincere, as if I was presuming to share answers for others when I'm at a loss for myself.

Thank you for having the patience to read my unconventional approach to the question. I've probably said too much; I may make this item private later on.

Words: 1351.
Written for "Grill a Christian" 
April Prompt ▼

Can we communicate with God and each other? How is this possible?

How is it that you can share your thoughts with me and others? Are there limits to language and consciousness of another person? Can you share what you are with someone else? How can things that we cannot touch or see be explained with shared words? Do we always misunderstand the meaning of these words, converting them into our private languages? Is there something in our shared design that allows us to communicate without words? Is understanding each other just a product of shared experiences, or is it something more than that?