The Itch in the Soul.

When a person becomes or has been seriously ill, it is, perhaps, a normal response for the person in question to ask, "why me?" Before the intrusion of such things in our lives, we probably, most of us, go around thinking "it'll never happen to me." I can honestly say that I was the same. The thought that one day I may become what is, somewhat inhumanely, referred to as "a schizophrenic", could not have been further from my mind. I suppose the thought of "losing your mind", so to speak, sometimes goes through the brains of most people, being, as it is, perhaps one of our deepest, darkest fears. But, it would appear, many of us dismiss the idea and we are unable to identify ourselves as ever being "one of them". Thus spring up all the old stereotypes of madness, perhaps the embodiment of our fears, the psychological projection of what secretly haunts us.
But, to return to the original question of "why me?", I suppose it is one almost ubiquitously asked by those who have suffered any, not just mental, severe illness. And, it seems, one can launch out on countless lines of philosophical speculation in attempting to answer this question.
Speaking for myself, I have often wondered why I got ill when others didn't. Was it just my fate? Was it just, as psychiatry would have us believe, a simple matter of a chemical imbalance in the brain? Was somebody "up there" trying to tell me something? Was I being punished for something? And if so, for what and by whom? God? I probably asked all of these questions upon first experiencing mental illness. Later, I have come to ask the similar, related question, "why did I get well when others don't?" Again, has it simply been my fate? Have I been suitably punished and finally atoned? Or, again, was it simply a matter of chemicals, in the form of medication, working on my unhinged brain?
At one point I came to think that there was something, just something which had helped me through it all. As if some hidden hand had guided my path and decided it was not my fate to remain deluded and unwell. Call it chemicals. Call it God. I thought that something ineffable had taken place which had resulted in what appeared to me to be bordering on the miraculous.
And then it struck me that this is perhaps what all of us do when trying to answer some of the above questions. It is as if our minds reach out to somehow try to impose order on what can only be described as chaos. To seek meaning where there might, perhaps, be none. It is as if we have an itch in the soul, forever wanting to be scratched.
I once attended a talk by the psychologist and author Dorothy Rowe in which she broached some of these issues. Although I cannot recall all of what was said, her stance seemed to be that, eventually, we have to accept that some things just happen to us, and there may be no rhyme or reason to it. The universe is perhaps a capricious and, even, meaningless place, where, to put it bluntly, shit happens. To me, this is, now, enough of an answer. And I am happy with it, or perhaps even because of it. I was not being punished by some omnipresent and omnipotent force. I was not a mere puppet dancing at the end of the strings of fate. No, I just got ill, then I got better. Shit happens. To be free of my previous probing is liberating to me, and although mine and Rowe's conclusions may seem to lack profundity, they have enough meaning for me to give me a modicum of happiness.
So, it seems, most of us will continue to put our faith in...something. Whether it be God, or medicine, or if you're like me, just the vagaries of chaos. But, it could also be said that it is the searching itself that's the point- that itch in the soul, which, as Philip Larkin put it, continues to send "the priest and the doctor/ In their long coats/ Running over the fields."