Maybe I should just let it be, and maybe it will all come back to me.

O January, O. I think at least once a year this happens to me. At least. Usually more than once.

I want to talk to you since I don't think you'll read this anyway. Even if you do, you won't know it's you. You'd have no idea. Why would you?

I want to tell you how I feel without really telling you. It's something I've always wanted to be able to do - tell people things without them knowing. There is a sort of fundamental need inside of me to impart thoughts on other people that only exist in my own brain. I want to be able to think so hard that it gives the subjects of my thoughts some thin fog that floats around their heads and lets them have some smaller version of what I feel.

I want it especially in this situation. For a few years I have had an idea, or maybe I should call it a feeling, that has popped into my head, but I have been unable to tell you. In fact, I've never even mentioned it. I wish now that I had but to mention it now would really do me no good.

Sometimes I think that our meetings in my dreams are real, like maybe sharing dreams is a reality and not just something in a movie. What a dumb idea, right? That eventually fades, the longer I'm awake, and I know I'm stuck with this dilemma. It's an unsettled kind of feeling that sits, dormant, until another dream, or another remark you might make to me, or not to me - maybe it's just a remark.

If something lasts for this long, maybe it's real. Or maybe I just need to get over it. I don't mean to romanticize anything. If I shared the true meaning behind my words, I think you'd call me crazy or stupid, or childish. It's a fairy-tale sort of mentality that I'm chasing, and that never seems to work out for anyone outside of fairy-tales. Cliché much? Obviously. That's what I secretly am.

Here, I've stayed up way too late rambling about nothing.

Maybe I'll see you tonight in my sleep and I can finally get some things off my chest. That's never what happens, though.

Whoever you are reading this, it's not what you think. I know what I've written may sound like something that it's not, but it isn't.

Look how cryptic and childish I am. I just might be the next Taylor Swift!

Hey, you. I love you. All of you. Really. And maybe sleep will help me fix my brain. Goodnight.

END.

See, of everyone who called, very few said, "We believe in you." The overwhelming choice said I'm just a boy inside a voice.

See, I made it out, out from under the sun.
And the truth is that I feel better because I've forgiven everyone!

The problem with me is that I forget how much love there is in the world. I forget that I don't HAVE to withhold love from everyone whether I feel like withholding it from them, whether they're willing to receive it, whether they even like me.

I think I have been living my life in such a way that I give each individual person their own value, and I distribute love like it's a big pot of food and there is only enough to keep a few people alive - here I am, choosing which ones are the most valuable.

They are all valuable! What have I been doing? I have been depriving people of something that each person deserves. What has withholding love ever done for anyone? It has produced hate and anxiety and contempt and self-loathing and fear, man, just the FEAR it has created alone is so destructive! Nothing bad has ever been a product of pure, unselfish love, and each of us is so, so guilty of distributing love conservatively.

I spend so much of my time thinking about me. I am about to try redirecting that time to other people.

We'll see what happens. If I succeed, something good. If I fail, I'll try again. That's how failure works, right? Usually I just give up.



I have oceans of love, for everyone. I need reminders sometimes.



Now I'M NOT SCARED!

So come on with me - sing along with me!
Let the wind catch your feet!
If you love somebody, you'd better let them know.

END.

Gather my insufficiencies and place them in Your hands.

I need to cling to words like this. I am so weak that I find myself collapsing under any kind of pressure. It's not even the kind of pressure that weighs heavily on your chest - this is the kind of non-threatening pressure that makes your ears pop when you go to the bottom of the diving well. It's easy to giggle and just dry your hair off once you hop out of the pool, but not if you are afraid of the water.

I am afraid of the water, so to speak. I apologize for the truly abysmal metaphor, but it's the best that I can muster right now. Maybe I should have just stayed literal.

I found myself this past fall, beneath all the fear, the anxiety, and beneath the pressure, however big or small. I learned what it meant to die and to be reborn, and I vowed that I would be a positive influence on others, that I would act like I loved everyone even when I felt like punching them in the mouth, that I would (as stated in the "religious views" on my facebook) "Do everything in love."

In a previous post, I mentioned that being reborn is so much harder than it sounds. When you are born you have to learn everything, but you don't realize it because everything is new and exciting. Sometimes learning is hard, but you grow and you develop habits, you refine your own personality based on how others treat you, what you think of yourself, how you treat others. Then you want to change yourself from head to toe, wishing you had behaved differently from the first person you met to the last.

But old habits die so hard. They really do. It's easy to endure the pressure when there is no pressure.

The last week or so has been a serious challenge for me. Student teaching is something I am not enjoying - I'm not looking forward to any aspect of it and it has already torn me apart. I have slipped back into some bad habits and I need to fight them off a lot more. I have also realized that stumbling blocks can sometimes be avoided. If God does not seem to be speaking through me, if I don't understand enough to act and talk in a way that comes across as humble and loving, then I have absolutely no right to call myself a Christ-follower with that attitude - I refuse to misrepresent God in the way that I talk about Him.

It hit me kind of hard a few days ago when I found it impossible to refrain from reacting instantly to my anger at a ridiculous facebook argument that helped no one. Another problem with this other than the obvious ones? I still feel somewhat justified in how I responded. I need to beat out this mentality.

I feel like God is really trying to teach me something here. He allowed me a fairly easy, pampered semester off, and now it's time to apply what I learned.

I'm just really bad at doing that.

I have to do better. The first step is to stop thinking about myself all the time. I had gotten out of the habit of doing that as much as I used to, but it is now coming back with a vengeance.

I felt the need to purge a little bit on here. This is probably completely disjointed, but it is late at night and I care very little and will probably not even edit.

I just needed a reality check. And tomorrow I must force myself to be the person I want to be for God's glory, rather than the person I have become.

Step 1: concern myself with God and with others - stop making my own feelings the priority.

Wish me luck.

END.

Here today...

I became frightened tonight of how distinctly I still see the memory of that sickly, fragile person I used to be and how often I seem to forget about her completely.

It is good to be reminded of where I used to be.

She comes back occasionally. I hate her - really - and I hated her back when I was trapped inside of her. At the time, it just felt like me, though. It felt like I was genuinely that rotten, all the way through.

Is this confusing? Allow me to explain.

The thought of how destructive I was feels like a puncture wound. It is something I need, though, to understand how profoundly God has worked in me and how tragic my life would now be if I had decided to go the other way.

I listened to "Waltz #2" by Elliott Smith a few times tonight. (HERE it is - so raw and so hollow). It was a song Jackie was really into at the time and I think she and I listened to it on repeat for literally about a week non-stop. It's so good.

But it took on a new meaning to me tonight as I listened to it, just as it once took on another meaning, back when I was that other girl.

Months ago I listened to this song - I used it as a potent drug to numb my pain, to think, "Thank God there is at least someone who knows how to say what I feel."

The lines in the song with which I most strongly identified:

I'm so glad that my memory's remote,
'cause I'm doing just fine hour to hour, note to note.
Here it is - the revenge to the tune:
You're no good.
You're no good, you're no good, you're no good.
Can't you tell that it's well understood?

and

Here today,
expected to stay,
on, and on, and on.
I'm tired.

I'm tired.


I found myself thinking, "This is what it feels like."
The revenge to the tune - push the thoughts from your mind, hide the memories from your mind's eye, and your self-deprecation comes back even stronger when you slip up - "You're no good, you're no good, you're no good."

Like a mantra.

I felt that someone was forcing me to be alive - like there was nothing good about it - "Here today, expected to stay" - and it seemed like it would go "on, and on, and on."

I was tired.


Months ago, this is the person I was. My only solace was to curl up in a song like this and allow myself to be ripped apart by the relentless words that spoke to me as if from my own mind. My cousin, who is very insightful, identifies this kind of so-called "solace" more accurately as "emotional cutting" - intentionally inflicting pain on oneself in an attempt to get away from the more intense pain.


Tonight, I listened to this song and remembered my feelings about it from months ago. It scared me. I had very narrowly dodged a bullet.

I would like to remind everyone that Elliott Smith, while a brilliant musician and lyricist, suffered from severe depression, was a drug addict, and made multiple suicide attempts before finally succeeding and ending his life.

The idea that I ever identified so, so strongly with what were words likely influenced by thoughts of suicide frightened me terribly when I listened to this song again tonight.

Could I have gone down that same road?

I am not saying I was ever depressed enough that I considered suicide. I would never lie about something that serious - I did not consider it.

But the idea does still linger - if I had not finally turned to God and the church for help, would I be closer to considering it?

I think it is important for me to think about these things. Dwelling on them does no good, but I do believe that God rescued me from something absolutely horrific.

I am not writing this post to be depressing. I am writing this to be real and to share what I truly believe was the most important turning point in my life thus far, and I want to attribute it to God. It is all Him - everything is.

I am still trying to figure out where the turning point was, exactly. Maybe it is not God's intention to jog my memory on that anytime soon. It felt like an instant transformation at the time, but I know now that I am still being reborn, that I am still such an infant spiritually. I expect to be an infant until the day that I die, and I'm okay with that.

I hope I can write more about this later, and in a more organized fashion. I hope nobody took this to be a sob story - I just want to recognize how polluted everything about my life was before God and how beautiful and heart-breaking everything is now that He is a part of it.

He was always a part of it, really. It just took me a while to see that.

END.

My first breaths.

Sometimes you are struck so squarely in the face with God that you look at the people around you and wonder how they could possibly be so calm. Maybe they are like you and are struck by Him, too, and they just feel silly laughing out loud or dancing or crying for joy. But mostly they just seem stoic.

I wish I could be like David and dance without fear of ridicule. Anyone who does not dance in public shows the true signs of lunacy - how can one sit still and stare blankly when God is everywhere? Can any person sit idly by while Christ beckons for us to walk with Him through the Gardens of our lives, while he so patiently and lovingly teaches us children about what it truly means to love?

I tend to ignore his pleas for me to follow him, but every once in a while something will remind me to avert my gaze from the stains of the blood on my hands. I scrub and scrub but all I get is more blood.

And, when I finally raise my eyes to look anywhere but the sick tragedy of my own sin, the disgusting hatred I have in my heart for this world and its prisoners, the intense fear that God will see my nakedness if I come out of hiding, what do I see?

I see His arms stretched out in earnest, and He smiles at me.

"I have been waiting for you for such a long time," He says, "and I know you will leave me soon because it is in your nature to seek happiness where you cannot find it. But please, stay with me as long as your fleeting heart will allow, and maybe you will remember the shelter of my love when this world has finally defeated you again, and maybe you will lift your eyes from these terrible stains to find me. Do you see? I have washed them away already - your hands are as an infant's, and your soul is perfect again.

"My beautiful daughter, know that I will never stop being sad when you refuse my love and that I will always hold out hope that one day you will come home to stay. But for now, take the time to see me in the eyes of each person you meet, regardless of what they have done and how they treat you, and remember the depth of my love as you listen for my voice in each and every moment of your life."

And for that brief window of time, my soul cries out to be undignified like the humble king of Israel, to shout out in triumph over a mundane existence that is more like a nightmare than reality, to jump and dance and sing in public in front of judgmental stares, humiliated in my own eyes.

But mostly I am just stoic; I have figured out that stoicism is a desperate attempt made by the human condition to repair the fragments of humility that come from being vulnerable and naked in front of other people whose humility has also been shattered. We are never unfeeling - we are only ever hardened, and underneath there is a jubilant soul coated with the thick shell of pride, or there is a weeping child beneath the toughened skin of a hurt and angry grown-up.

God can soften any tough exterior and wipe away the tears of the child beneath, and he can shatter pride with a quiet little prayer if you let him, and he will rejoice in you and bless the jubilant soul that has been hidden for years.

It is strange the way God reaches us. For me, it was something so unexpected but so obvious it seems silly to never have noticed it. I am so fortunate to have people planted in the soil of the Garden of my life. But He does not just plant daisies, or roses, or even orchids. God plants flowers so exotic and colorful that they sparkle like jewels in His light. They give life to my Garden and they encourage me to keep the soil clean and fertile.

My friend Carter is one among many of these flowers. He reminded me of my good fortune last night at a concert in which he performed. I talked with J about how when he first started performing he seemed sort of reserved about it and not really all that sure of himself - even though he has always been an unbelievable musician - and how he now seems so comfortable onstage sharing his music. It struck me what an honor it has been to sort of see him grow from one great thing to the next.

It's sort of like, if you shake his hand, you expect to come away with your fingers coated in a thick layer of paint the color of rainbows (I think that's what concentrated creativity looks like, anyway: rainbow-colored paint). What a joyful reminder God granted me last night in the form of my friend's music!

We are all vessels for His glory, even when we might feel that we are just playing a concert at a hazy venue in Lynchburg for the pure joy of making music.
Even when we are in an unwelcoming town with nowhere more dignified to sleep than a stable.
Even when we feel that we might just be stuck in a boat catching fish to make a living.
Even when we are dancing in the street and being laughed at by others.

My first breaths make me wonder why my lungs have been here for the last twenty-two years and then I am reminded that I have always been a vessel.

I exist as proof that being reborn is possible.

"I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes." Samuel 6:21-22

END.

The kingdom of the heavens is buried treasure. Will you sell yourself to buy the one you've found?

My last post still stands. Please don't think I don't feel joyful in God's promise of eternal life - who wouldn't be psyched about eternal life? But I'm realizing that being reborn is harder than it sounds. You have to relearn EVERYTHING, and you have to learn to break habits that you've had for years, and think a different way.

I have problems with depression. I have had these problems since my senior year of high school and I've had problems with intense insecurity for years before that. Recently, I've decided that I can change this by thinking a different way and by fighting off any negative idea that passes through my brain.

Guess what? That doesn't work! Turns out, depression is one of those things that can tap quietly at a spot in your brain until it slowly but surely creates a bruise as big as your fist. At first the tapping seems innocent and you can swat it away or ignore it by acting happy and using a bunch of cliches, but eventually, it will hit you again.

It will come back, probably when you're tired, probably when you've been put under a lot of stress, probably when you've spent a lot of time by yourself... I'm basing this on what has been going down in my life recently. Nothing is terribly wrong, but sometimes I start to doubt things (me stuff, life stuff, school stuff, work stuff, boy stuff - not so much God stuff).

The most depressing and discouraging part about it is when you know you've done everything you know how to do to prevent it and it still consumes you - you find yourself dissolving into tears and wondering why. You've warded off the bared, yellowish teeth of this terrible monster for weeks now - even though at times you could feel his breath hot against your face, his jaws so close your hair blows back when he exhales, and all the while you must endure the stench of his previous victims, the growl deep in his empty stomach so low and terrifying you could have sworn he had already swallowed you whole. Even through all that, you were able to at least keep him at arms length. Then, just when you think the coast is clear and you can relax, you fall asleep, weary from holding up high your shield of optimism and positive energy, you find that the monster has merely sneaked up behind you instead of approaching you from the front. Suddenly you find yourself being chewed up to pieces, and you can feel each of his jagged, yellow teeth penetrate your skin.

You realize sadly as you are being digested that your preparation, your training, your suit of armor and shield, and your resolve made of steel was all for naught. You worked that hard and fought off the monster for that long simply to be eaten anyway. Two steps forward, two steps back.

The one step I have taken since my last bout of depression has been my reliance on God, fake as it may feel sometimes. I have spent the afternoon praying bitterly or hopelessly, rather than faithfully and joyfully, but I have still prayed. This is a step for me. I still feel a lump of guilt in my throat each time I say "amen." But I did not pray before the last few weeks. I barely called myself a Christian. Now I timidly push back at the enemy and hide my face in fear, hoping he didn't see me, but it is still an improvement over being curled up in the fetal position and quivering with abject terror at every new day. That is how I see myself when I look back to a couple months ago.

It's funny how, even when I feel that I have sunk the lowest I have in a while, I still have countless blessings, and I have progressed such an enormous amount from where I once was.

Writing this post has been liberating and it has reinforced my faith in God. It's strange how your thoughts sometimes seem a lot clearer when you stop thinking and just let your fingers talk.

END.

My before and after.

I wrote this in August and didn't have the guts to share it until now:

"2:00 am and suddenly something inside me stirs to write this, my head opening up a long-forgotten faucet of strange metaphors and clumsy creativity. I have missed this tired, unsettled feeling that leads me so readily from one paragraph to the next.

I write this as a kind of testimony. To what? I'm not sure yet. Maybe to depression or anxiety or insecurity, maybe to sadness, or brokenness, or that feeling of being forgotten. I hope that one day I can say it is a testimony to happiness; not the superficial happiness that reads across my face every time I hear a great song or laugh until I cry, but the kind of joy that has been tucked away in some undiscovered memory, or folded into a page of my Bible. Maybe it's still sitting in the brain of someone I haven't met yet, bubbling like a stew. I am scrawny and starving as the chef looks back at me, unsympathetically - "Just another five years and it'll be ready!"

What I really think this might be is just an excuse to write, something my own stupid thoughts have prevented for what feels like years now.

I think I want to start with the past two years. They loom over me every day and I fight them off like a dying animal might fight off flies or vultures. I've felt that way before - like a raccoon, riddled with fleas, lying on the side of the road and hopelessly swatting at the flies, knowing the whole time that I should just give in and willingly provide a home to some hungry maggots. I should have seen that truck barreling down the highway, and it was my own fault for stepping out into the asphalt in the first place. Even if the driver was asleep at the wheel, even if he had time to slow down, even if it wasn't really my fault, it was. Always.

I guess that sums it up, really. But I will try to explain, and more specifically and concisely this time.

My life at school has been a tragedy in my eyes ever since I started feeling a little off occasionally when i was alone at night. I was so ready to be of interest to someone that perhaps I gave in to the immediate drama of depression. It consumed me, and I let it consume me, more and more like a drug every day. I was suddenly very fascinating and dramatic, and so very "realistic" about things. (That was, and still is sometimes, my way of putting a happy face on the word "negative.") I was secretly a mess and that made me more interesting in my mind.

For as insecure as I became, I sure thought very little of others. The word "cliche" was bitter in my mouth, and anything it touched was bitter, too. It never occurred to me that being so very, very pretentious could lead to isolation, to fear, to anxiety, to an even deeper, more dangerous state of depression.

I did have one skill that, to this very day, has remained the fuel to my fire, the reason I can go on living that second life of mine - the one of the dramatic, tortured soul (who never really had anything to cry about) - I hide it. Unless you lived with me, you'd never know. And even then, I dare you to pry the whole story out of me.

Today, I have my symptoms rehearsed, fully without shame for the common affliction: depression, anxiety, insecurity, whatever this monster is (all of the above?). I can calmly have a conversation with someone else, my face showing only a confident, rational person. Sometimes I wonder if people think I do it for attention. There was a time that I might have blatantly done things to get attention, but I wouldn't have done that. Never that. And those days, I guess, are gone now, like I hope these days soon will be.

It might be wrong to wish that time would pass more quickly, but I have lived for several years now with the weight of this terror tied to my waist, struggling to go to work and socialize, to get up on stage and pretend to be confident, to get through one date without becoming accusatory, defensive, pouty or weepy. That weight killed me. I still don't know where it came from, but there it sat, like a hundred faceless shadows keeping their hollow eyes fixated on my brain, waiting for me to think the wrong thing so they could attack.

They wear so many different faces, those shadows, and they slip in and out of my life without warning. Sometimes I see the faces of professors - not the kind ones who encourage me and make me laugh, but the ones who take off points on papers to make me think I need improving, the ones who blatantly refuse to teach you when all you want to do is learn, the ones who take themselves so seriously that every living creature is beneath them - those professors.

Sometimes I see the faces of my friends, people I love, people I hate, people I don't even know - faces of people who are prettier than me, taller than me, shorter, smarter, more popular, more likable, less ignorant, more talented, more focused, more successful; people who are .BETTER. than me.

Sometimes I see the faces of boys from my past, some of them too wrapped up in themselves to know what real love is supposed to feel like, some looking for something else, but never willing to tell that to my face, some who threw away a perfectly good friendship without even giving it a chance, some who took my first true, beautiful experience with comfort and love and destroyed it for no reason, laughing at me so hard, it seemed, that I still blush with fury, with sadness, with utter shame and brokenness and embarrassment, every single time I think about it to this day, and some - perhaps my deepest point of shame - who I dumped on and left behind without consideration for how anyone else might feel, because I was too naive and selfish to know a good thing when I had it.

Sometimes I see the faces of faith - my own perfect image of God and my inability to satisfy Him with anything that I do, the face of a disappointed Caucasian Jesus Christ, a ridiculous picture driven so far into my brain that it has yet to come out, the face of my own certainty that my years in youth group were spent being committed more to music about God and Godless social endeavors than God Himself, the face of organized religion, angering, terrifying sometimes, but more often than not filled with love and sincerity in its desire to TRULY promote Christianity - to live life like Christ - and my inability to warm up to any of it.

But always, always, I see my own face, constantly changing from sad, to stupid, to broken, to worthless, to annoying, to frustrating, to mean, to irate for no reason, to sobbing absolutely uncontrollably, hysterically, and finally submissive, hopeless, beaten, defeated.

These days, I look into my own face and I see behind traces of fear and doubt defiance, hope, and courage.

Hope has worked at me like a virus for so long, like a parasite that squirms through my organs. It's something my brain tells my body to kill on sight - dangerous and unrealistic. I have come to realize now that my brain is wrong: full of lies - FULL of lies, barely a single truth left. I have to let the parasite grow bigger before I realize it is not a parasite at all...

I don't know how this story ends, and I am not sure why I wrote it down. This is a much messier and a much more pointless testimony than what I intended, and it is certainly far less literal than what I meant to write.

I apologize for the brain clutter that is written above. It has gaps and detours that I might one day be able to mend, but not right now. It all feels too unorganized anyway.

If anyone actually read this and got through it, I guess I should say "thank you." It's not like this really served much of a purpose. But, if nothing else, I wrote something, and that hasn't happened for a long time."



I read this now and wonder who I was. I don't know when it happened, but sometime between the beginning of September and tonight, I decided to be happy. I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment, but I don't know that I can. All I know is this: God took me out of the barren place and brought me to the place of peace, even while I am crippled. That statement can be explained here: http://www.hispcc.com/audioFiles/2010_08_29.mp3

I can attribute my struggle with depression - and yes, I consider it a struggle now, although I would have considered it that before (and I would have been wrong). What I experience in the past was not a struggle. In order for there to have been a struggle, I would have had to fight it. Instead, it just happened to me and I accepted it.

Somehow, at some point, God gave me the strength and the desire to fight back, and He has given me so much joy in my life that depression now has to fight its way in. My general attitude about life has changed, and I am beginning to see God's hand in each person I see - my love for my friends has grown, and people that I "didn't like" before are now people to whom I only want to be closer.

I still have so many things weighing me down - so many lies that pop up in my head on a daily basis that threaten to make everything collapse. But God has also given me people I love that surround me and remind me that my happiness is worth fighting for, that perhaps this terrible weight in my stomach is just another lie, or another unresolved conflict my brain has somehow created, chemically or otherwise. And, slowly but surely, each and every person around me, regardless of where I am, is someone I love, someone God loves and whose quirks that I ordinarily would have viewed as annoying or frustrating are now things that make them completely unique and lovable.

It is strange how intensely beautiful everything is when you look at it through the eyes of someone who knows God for what seems like the first time.

I feel like a child again. It would take me hours to write out all the things that have changed in me, but they are all worth mentioning at some point.

Right now, though, my brain is a little exhausted. I feel strange leaving this where it is because I just dropped such a bomb in what I wrote up there back in August. But truly, I feel like a different person.

And now I know to what I was writing that unfinished testimony - it was to happiness, yes, but more importantly, it was to the insurmountable joy found only in the love of God and in the joy of living for Him and understanding that His purpose for you is to be happy and so on and so forth. I really could go on for quite a while.

END.