Time Flies

Time flies at a far swifter pace than I can forge wit and so months of my life wave past unaddressed in this journal. Reoccurring themes get to know newer ones as I grow older and the un-expected happens as life reminds me of its unpredictability. I try persistently, stubbornly to understand how to do it all properly—how to live.  I’ve learned that patience applies to more than just waiting in line, but I struggle none the less. My new weapon has been flexibility. Breathing and flexibility. My resolve to be more flexible has been challenged and I have been called to let go of things I thought came default. We really can’t take anything for granted. I have firmly come to believe that when we do let go we’re rewarded with much in terms of the new and fabulous. I consider loss an upgrade from the status quo and so I am able to sleep soundly at night.

My advice: go to therapy. Since abandoning whatever residual pride I had left after decades of living and started going to therapy my life has improved immeasurably. Once a week I meet with my new friend and we dissect and discuss my fears, frustrations, hopes, and dreams, victories and perceived failures. And we laugh. What’s so funny? Well, it’s the irony. In therapy we learn that we’re not as damaged as we thought we were all along. It’s beautiful, really. Beautiful and funny.

After nearly four years of writing I have come to the magnificent conclusion that life is about far more than meeting a girl who will let me melt into her and forget all the homework life set in front of me to begin with. Another irony since it was my one and only goal for so long and yet while I could accomplish so much I could never accomplish that. God truly does save us from ourselves. I find myself dwelling substantially less in the country of resentment and depression because of this realization. And I perceive that there is less of a rush to find her and much more of a rush to find me.

Good.

Even I can’t deny that I have grown up a bit. Honestly it doesn’t feel so magical at any given time when I’m in the thick of it, but when I take a step back to survey my work the obvious is brilliantly clear and my heart feels light. Yes, all the signs point to it all being alright, a prediction I never thought would belong to me. But, flanked by the affection of my family, esteem of my friends, and guidance of my therapist I have finally come to agree that the best me is yet to come. 

Coloring in the Lines

I lay out tobacco and dark liquor in hopes of luring out inspiration to write. I sweat because work creeps up closer and closer with every minute that passes and dammit, I still can't write. But my good friend, Hana, won't hear such excuses-- she says to leave what I feel on the paper ("paper") and stop waiting for the right moment. I know she's right, and I fight off temptation to apply that 2-minute lesson to other areas of my life. One battle at a time I tell myself.

I disgust myself for as much as I can feel others' misery, and my much smaller portion of it, I can never seem to connect with my own good fortune and blessings. It's as if I were to realize how fortunate I am, I would wake up from this dream, and so I act accordingly. Though, I can empathize with the cruelty of this neurosis because I also know how hard I worked and how much I wanted exactly my position once upon a time. But for as long as I can remember I haven't known pride nor its little brother, confidence. After all, I think, my eyes are entirely too large to not see the luck-- or divine intervention-- in my life. So I devour the days as they come as if they were prepared for me rather than if I had whipped them up myself. So if someone compliments my cooking I feel compelled to tell them I had nothing to with it. And perhaps the first lesson of the coming fall is to take my fair share of the credit. The truth is I'm afraid to embrace the reality-- my education, my job, my friends, the girls who find something worth seeing in me-- I'll never feel worthy. And that bit of uncertainty, restraint they sense in me is just that-- guilt, while I want their affection I still feel like I'm misleading them. Like they are buying something defective.

My ideal self doesn't just sit there and watch on, he yells that I can do better. And for such a contradictory and troubled person, I've done a good job of not destroying my life. And the way I see it, I have an outline that simply needs to be filled in with substance. I have interests that can be pursued, I have a job that I can learn to build a career out of, I have friends that I can appreciate more, I have a family that I can communicate with more, a healthy body that can be better taken care of. I take comfort in the fact that whenever I am mentally ready, a stable, healthy, and successful life awaits me. And I am racing against the clock before the expiration date on my outline passes-- I drink or smoke myself to illness, I lose the opportunities I've been blessed with, my friends find someone more reliable.

I'm tempted to believe I can turn it all around in one day, but I have to remind myself that is simply the mood's unrealistic allure. And to get too excited would only mean a nasty discouragement on a bad day or setback. So I've been learning to grow at a slow, steady, and deliberate pace. Although, recent lessons have not been lost on me, and I haven't missed my little graduations. One very notable one is the lesson of letting go. My inability to let go is the reason I started this blog in the first place. Back then to find my own affection unreturned was an accost to my very being, and I would react viscerally. Now, I am happy to report, I've come to let go far easier. I realized that if I graciously decline the courtship of one girl, I must be prepared to be graciously turned away just the same. I found a certain beauty and fairness in the circle of love-life. And I found that I could now relate with my never-to-be-paramour's position far more easily as I would most likely have to play the same part in the future just as I have had to in the past. Now rather than looking to my unilateral feelings for a girl as the signal that that girl is worth fighting for, I wait for a mutual agreement before falling in love. It makes the pursuit of the girls I have an affinity for all the more pleasurable and the bad news that I deliver to others bearable as I truly believe now that no one really loses-- at worst, we're all forced to wait for that bit of heaven a little longer. But my degree was not only in the area of relationships, but also in the visions I had for myself. For example, I've learned to let go of a dream I stubbornly had when I was younger, to allow it to be replaced with something new and foreign. I used to see that as giving up, now I see it as simply growing up. Of course, I'm still only a student, and in certain areas I still have trouble, I still get frustrated, I still muster false hope for a lost cause, but I know-- oh I know, that no matter what I feel like I lose out on, there is something just as good I will get in the future and so my pangs of jealousy, regret, and frustration are merely flare ups of a disease that I have just about defeated.

Yes, in accordance with the previous post, something is growing in me once again. My therapist and I agree that my depression was no illusion, but he believes that it can be the intermission that leads to a far better second act. And though I'm tired of hearing the words echo in my head, I do still want to be a good person. And lately, too many people have been treating me as if I already am. I won't take their faith in me in vain. For an eternity, I have had this ultimate vision of who I want to be. At one point in my life I thought I was working towards it, I thought I was on the right track, and soon enough the weight of the world showed me how little I knew and how unprepared I was to be that person. I went through a phase where I was convinced I would never become that person-- indeed that there was no such thing as good in the first place. Now, I am emerging from that quiet despair and seeing the path in a way I didn't see it before, better yet and somehow, I find myself in an even better position to attain it. A rare occasion where I'm glad to feel like a hypocrite.

good

I write with the same urgency as if I had escaped some prison and had gotten a hold of a scrap of parchment and pen. In four months, I haven’t been moved to write, though, with the exception of a few months, I wrote at least once a month since I started my blog. I seize this moment now, unsure of when the next time I will feel drawn to write will be. The truth is I’ve been trapped within a dark time in my life. It comes as no surprise after the last few posts in which I become more desperate while searching for answers and more honest in digging through my mind and past. But right now, I have reached a hiatus in the desert that has become my life, and I can write a brief message as myself, or as the person I believe myself to be.

I don’t know when exactly or how I lost my way; though one day I awoke to find all that I drew comfort from to be washed away with the morning tide. I learned the true meaning of building one’s house upon the sand; and where once my warm and familiar home lied, now was nothing but uncertainty and fear, loneliness and disillusionment. I came to believe that all life had to offer was work, anxiety, and rejection all the while I was tasked with avoiding any one of the endless number of ill fates that could befall one through their own fault or the faults of others. I became bitter, and further indignant that life had forced me, once such a bright and cheerful young man, to become bitter. And I have been languishing in these feelings for a couple of years now, using most of my energy to keep me afloat in school, though even in that, no one will ever believe how close I came to failing multiple times.

I was saved. I was saved by an unlikely motley crew of people, some I’ve known for what seems like my whole life, others a couple years, and still others I have only known for a few months. Through my interactions with them, I have been able to begin to piece myself back together. And perhaps they will never know how much of an effect they have had on me at such a crucial time, still even if I expressed my gratitude towards them they would only be uncomfortable. To them they were merely venting, or defending their beliefs to me, or being themselves and weren’t trying to have some sort of profound effect on another human being on some arbitrary night when they were in a bad mood or just felt like talking.

And none of them could have done it alone, but together, the snippets of their stories interconnected with my own mended a series of lessons that seemed so particularly tailored to coerce me out of my depression—to guide me out of my pessimism, gentler at times, more forceful in other instances.

The lessons taught me that the hope, or good that I thought I lost—that I came to believe was never really there to begin with—still existed. They illustrated to me that my perception, heavily influenced by disappointment and fear, showed me a false reality. I became disillusioned because I had a make-believe idea of what the world ought to be like. Once I left the safe womb of college I was put in shock by what I perceived to be reality. At first I couldn’t understand what my problem was, and the descent wasn’t immediate. It was gradual, taking place over a series of months as one after another my expectations were ignored and life continued on, indifferent to how I believed things were to play out in my life after leaving college and entering the pearly gates of law school. Unable to defend myself against a world that I never imagined to be so cruel, and in some places, downright evil, I lost all hope after seeing the true beast. Out of pure terror I rejected the idea that there was any room for good in such a visceral world and turned my attention to the serious business of mourning the loss of any joy or happiness I could have ever hoped for in my life. I also took time to feel sorry for those who seemed to see good in a world where I couldn’t because I knew one day they, like me, would be crushed.  

My rehabilitation came in the form of getting to know a number of new people and others, who had been around, better. In some instances I would be a direct actor in the conflicts and scenes in their lives, in others I was merely a confidant, others still, an advisor. In their stories and the stories that we share I saw good people longing for good. They looked for companionship, they looked for love, they looked for success, they looked for validation, they looked for simple friendship at times, they looked to just be understood by those who didn’t know them that well at other times. They all had their own unique weaknesses and baggage, collected from childhood through their teenage years and college. They all had their strengths, traits that I am in awe of and challenges they overcame that I feel would have crushed me.

I’ve watched them go through good times and bad. And when times get hard, if they look to me for advice or comfort, all of a sudden I can summon words of positivity and hope that I honestly believe. I believe they will get through this or that or find that girl they’ve been looking for or make friends that are trustworthy, get the job, or make their parents proud. All of a sudden, when I see life through their eyes, I can imagine how everything will fall into place and how they will have a happy ending, but when it comes to me… When it comes to me I only see gray and dark skies.

How many amazing people do I have to meet that are doing their best before I believe that good still exists? I watch on as a person who I once knew as a boy, now a man, wrestles with the same disillusionment, while growing deeper in his relationship with a girl he adores. I can see the contrast between the joy that she helps to create in him alongside all others he loves and the fear, frustration, and confusion that the state of the world produces in him. I don’t think he believes that life is as bleak as I would, left to my own devices, but he certainly can see the monsters under my bed. He wouldn’t say it’s “just your imagination” and tell me to “go back to sleep”. Nevertheless he would remind me that this world isn’t entirely made up of villains, idiots, and the apathetic, there are still people who are trying to be something positive, to be something good in the lives of others—and who are longing for something good in their lives—lovers, community, success, friends, contentment, simple understanding.    

The realization doesn’t fix all of my worries and concerns in life, but still it is a sapling rising out of what was once believed to be salted earth. I still have to rebuild my perception of life brick by brick, remaining cautious not to allow some past childhood or adolescent trauma to falsely color it, nor to allow individual and insidious acts of hatred and evil destroy it either. But not too long ago, I thought there would be no good in my new perception. I was wrong. The evidence of good I have missed for so long was always there, though in my disillusionment I became blind to it. And yes, the world is a lot darker than I had imagined it to be—the officials are more corrupt, states war far more easily, the media is far more unreliable and ridiculous, sexism, racism, homophobia, and hatred are far more blatant, prevalent, and institutionalized than I could have ever expected from humans with the ability to empathize and a conscience. And it is truly terrible, but the good that I have seen is enough to make this harsh state of affairs tolerable, at least for as long as it will take me to find more. This rediscovery of goodness is enough to give me hope that in readjusting to reality I will find far more good than I thought could possibly exist when my perception of the world was first shattered. 

Troubleshooting: Faith

I never had faith. I remember certain episodes in my childhood, which at the very least had something to do with it, if not the reasons themselves. The older I get the more my childhood feels as if it were a lucid dream of sorts. It feels like I experienced that whole portion of my life last night, and now I can only make out bits and pieces, though those bits and pieces are very vivid.

I can recall that when I was younger I was disappointed many times. At a young age I developed a strong sensitivity and desire for pleasure. It’s no wonder that I would come to be highly disposed to addiction once I came of age. I longed for pleasure like I was starved of it. I longed for cartoons, and new toys, and parties, and cakes, and candy, and friends, and laughter, and sleepovers, and Disney world. I needed it. I suspect that this was because I always felt slightly unhappy or unfulfilled and so I kept having to feed that emptiness with anything that I found pleasure in. There was a point that when I perceived pleasure over the horizon I would get terribly excited and expectant. I would look forward to that pleasure. For example, if my parents said they would take my sisters and me to a movie on Saturday, I would spend the rest of the week salivating over seeing Hercules. But if for whatever reason my parents had to cancel I would take it extremely hard. Like I said, I was awfully sensitive. I remember the feeling of disappointment after unrestraint faith that whatever I was looking forward to would come to fruition would fall through. I hated it.

After a few years of these kinds of disappointments I developed a particular hypothesis. My hypothesis was that if I allowed myself to look forward to something it would surely not happen. And so at an early age I became a pessimist. Of course at the time I didn’t think of it as pessimism. I thought of it as a sort of universal reverse psychology. I believed that since I was raised in the church, but, in my opinion, was a very naughty Christian, God was ready to punish me at every turn. I reasoned that God would take from me what I wanted the most, be it a day at the movies, or a particular Christmas present. And so I felt that if I got excited about something in my future, it would tip Him off and He would take it from me as punishment for not being a proper Christian boy. Instead I thought I would trick Him by continually telling myself things like, “It’ll never happen”, “It probably won’t work out.” This served two purposes, it could either successfully trick God and my little pleasure would fly under the radar and find me “to my surprise” or else if it didn’t happen, my expectations didn’t have far to plummet and I could console myself with an apathetic, “I knew it wouldn’t work out” Interestingly, one of my parents’ method of punishment was to take from me something they knew I valued when I misbehaved.

That mindset followed me throughout my life. It certainly played a substantial part in one of the other headlining issues in my life, relationships. My confidence with the girls I like is a close cousin to my reverse psychological pessimism. Rather than to speak to a girl who I would like to date confidently and expectantly, I speak to her as if she would never want anything to do with me. Because I believed she wouldn’t. I believed that because I liked her, she would automatically not like me. So to me it was already a lost cause from the moment I perceived my attraction to her, and my efforts to talk to her were a mere formality. This is an obvious form of self-sabotage. I still believed for most of my teenage and adult life that God was waiting at every turn to compromise all of my undertakings for anything that I wanted. This was my way of coping with Christian Guilt I believe almost every child who is raised Christian but doesn’t “follow the rules” harbors. And so, when I would be politely (or otherwise) rejected by one girl or another, I would immediately think to myself “I knew it…” and several things would happen in my mind: my self-confidence would decrease, my pessimism would increase, my disesteem for God would increase, and my fear of loneliness would increase.

My pessimism for all things that had to do with my future grew. By high school, it was certainly pioneered by my relationship with women, but certainly not limited to it. I felt that most anything I would get excited about would not work out and so as I grew older I became paranoid. I excelled at school because for the most part I could control the outcome. I found comfort in the first half of college through this kind of control. I knew that if I knew the material in my classes inside and out, I would ace the exam, and receive guaranteed pleasure. This I did. Of course there were times where I fell short, but for the most part, I rarely felt threatened about the future of my grades. It wasn’t until law school that my, nearly religious by this time, pessimism in academia was provoked again. The subjective grading system of Law school put me at the total mercy of fate, and in my experience that never goes well. Unfortunately, “I know I won’t get good grades” is not the thought one wants facing an employment season that one has been told is entirely dependent upon grades. Employment, by derivation, was also out of my hands, and so I was naturally convinced that I was not going to get a job, only for the fact that I wanted one. My mom would work to calm me down as I mourned not getting a job 8 months in advance of my first interview. She would remind me that everything would be alright, and that God was in control. Upon her saying this, I would become all the more inconsolable—she’s right, He is in control. And since I can remember, that’s been my greatest fear. To me, He never gives me anything I want. I wanted to go to Tulane, and a hurricane destroys New Orleans and I go to FSU, I want to go to Harvard and have a perfect college campaign, then I fall flat on my face at the finish line with the LSAT, I want a girlfriend and instead I get a million girl friends, all who tell me I will one day have a very lucky girlfriend. He’s going to ruin this for me too, I thought.

So it would seem that my misgivings were not merely me protecting myself from disappointment, but an all out mistrust of God derived from the belief when I was a child that God was going to punish me by taking away anything that he perceived I desired. But later this expanded to God actively punishing me by allowing the things I most fear to happen. Using another relationship example, if I did get a date with a girl I was interested in, I would not find relief. I would become even wearier. Because I feared that something was going to go wrong to ruin the evening. I developed a this-is-too-good-to-be-true mentality in addition to the others. In my first year at law school, aware at how fortunate I was to have been accepted to Columbia, I felt it all to be too-good-to-be-true, and was terrified that I would somehow manage to fail out or else be kicked out. Another area of my life that this has manifested itself in is in my crippling fear of flying. Since I was a child I have had a ghastly fear of falling to my death. I remember reading the myth of Icarus in middle school and how profoundly it affected me when I learned that he plummeted to his death. I remember having a dream in middle school of being on a tall tower with some friends and one of my friends losing her footing and falling over the railing, and before I could grab her hand, she would fall to her death with a blood curdling scream that would have me wake up in a sweat, breathing heavily, scared to death. I had that dream twice. To this day I can’t watch news footage of 9/11. Despite the statistics of how safe flying is, for a long time I was convinced that every time I boarded a plane, it would be my last time boarding a plane. I believed that for the simple fact that I felt that falling would be the worst way to die, it would be the perfect punishment for me. And the fact that I had no control over the flying of the plane, to me, was the final indication that it was certain to happen. It wasn't long before I believed that I could never let my guard down. It was bad enough that I was not living like God said I should, to allow myself to become comfortable would be outright cocky. I learned to never relax, for I knew that the moment I did I would provoke such a reaction from God that I was sure He would never let me forget. Indeed the times I did allow myself to get comfortable in life I would perceive a catastrophe to happen that would scare me out of my comfort and back to vigilantly waiting for the next tragedy. This was especially true when things were going well for me. I thought that at least if I was anxious and stressed all the time He would take pity on me. So it was that I would never allow myself to relax and "trust" that things would be alright. It took tranquillizers to get me to and from Asia the first time I went, because I refused to allow myself to relax and trust that I would arrive in one piece.

By law school I had figured most of this out, though I don’t believe I had put most of the pieces together yet. I remember confiding in Mike that I always felt as if “something bad was about to happen to me”. And this could be in any form, physically, emotionally, and most dreaded of all, spiritually. This had caused a number of mental maladies within me. I mentioned earlier it led to low confidence in any undertaking I took, but it also led to chronic stress. I would stress about everything as I worried about all that could (and what I perceived would inevitably) go wrong. Of course this made me miserable on the inside. On the outside no one would be able to tell, I made sure of that. It was always important to me that everyone perceive me as perfect. Occasionally, though, people would tell me that I stress too much or that I’m too anxious. I couldn’t explain to them that God and I had been fighting for a couple of decades and that I have been looking over my shoulder waiting for His next move. They would think I was crazy.

So how is this resolved?

In a number of ways: organized and laid out here into words, it’s tempting to believe that this should have been easily recognized and dealt with at a much earlier age. But I must remind you that all of these feelings developed subtly over several years and manifested in dark feelings, not black and white words. It wasn’t readily apparent to me that my phobia of flying and my low confidence when talking to girls I was romantically interested in had a common denominator. In accordance with human nature, rather than turn around and face the demons chasing me, confront, and resolve them, I opted instead to push forward and try to act like a person who didn’t have very severe and debilitating emotions and beliefs. And Alcohol and Tobacco went a long way in helping my acting.

It’s certainly not easy to read what I have written here. It’s sad. It makes me sad that I lived like that. It makes me feel like a terrible person for allowing my mind to become so run down with lies and faulty thinking. But I have learned that the first step to growth is understanding and accepting that we will all emerge from our childhoods with unique issues that will show themselves in our adulthood. For the large part, much of the things that went on in our childhood were not necessarily our fault. And so as adults, we just have to suck it up and look under the hood to see what’s wrong. It may not be pretty, but if we wish to lead better lives as better people the only choice is to pull over and pop the hood. If we attempt to continue driving like the engine light isn’t furiously blinking we put ourselves and others in danger as we risk crashing.

To me the solution to this problem is clear. I need to develop faith. It begins with acknowledging that the pessimistic mindset I developed when I was younger to defend against disappointment is no longer required. At this age, I can understand that sometimes, often times, things don’t go our way. When that happens we’re presented with an opportunity to practice flexibility. But I can also understand that it wasn’t long before I began to selectively perceive events in my life, focusing on what didn’t go my way and simply overlooking the innumerable amount of times things went just as I would have liked.

The second and most important element to my pessimism, and what makes using the term “faith” appropriate, is my view of and relationship with God. My relationship with God remains the center of every issue I have thus far discovered. Looking at this entry alongside previous entries in which I mention my relationship with God, we can see the problem. I felt that I was leading a life outside of the “rules” of Christianity and therefore was “bad”. Also, my perception of God when I was younger, as with the vast majority of people who grow up in Christian homes, was one of a strict God who punishes. That’s what happens when one learns about Hell in Sunday school. At such a young age, no matter how the Sunday school teacher explains it, all that a child is going to remember is “bad”, “sin”, ”evil”, “Satan” and “Hell”. I came to know God as someone who was watching me and not pleased with what He saw. I rebelled from Church because I found it suffocating, not because I didn’t believe in God. I have never been an atheist. And so even when I was living as I pleased, I was very aware that God was watching me. And so when I found myself in positions where He was in control or where I needed His help, I expected that He would use it as an opportunity to punish me. So in that way I did have faith— faith that he would punish me for my rebellious lifestyle.

Many would be interested to know that the lack of confidence that they perceive in me and befuddles them is not so much a lack of confidence in my own abilities, but a lack of confidence that my abilities will have any weight on the outcome, as I felt for a long time life was fixed for me to lose.

I mentioned a couple entries earlier that once I entered college I underwent a time of spiritual growth and transformation. Indeed, I learned I knew not the first thing about Christianity, and after much research, fell in love with it—like falling in love with a friend you’ve known since middle school and never noticed much until you actually took the time to get to know her in college. My understanding of God was transformed as I learned about a real loving and understanding God. And for a while much of the weight of my pessimism was lifted from me as I saw the world through new eyes. But as I also said in that entry, something would always come along to distract me from God and all of this spirituality business, and I would turn all of my attention to her. It was always a “her”. I would follow her to my own destruction. And the negative feelings that would result from my relationship with her would fully revitalize my pessimism. I would blame God that it didn’t work out. And spend the next year or so mad at Him, not talking to Him. In that year I would forget all about the loving God I learned about, convincing myself that I was going through a “phase”, and regress back to my primitive belief in a God who was going to punish me for again wandering off the path in search of “worldy pleasures”.

This has happened several times. This is the first time I have been able to see all of this though. To no-one’s surprise, it was always me and not God behind my misery. I believed what I wanted to believe, and Gods nature never changed. I would say I wanted to go to Tulane and Hurricane Katrina’s timing ruined my dream, but I would neglect to reflect on the fact that I was able to stay close to my best friend by going to FSU and but for going to FSU I would have never found my love of languages—I would have been a philosophy major. I talk about not getting to go to Harvard, but I fail to think about how I was accepted to Columbia with an LSAT score that left much to be desired. I talk about lost loves and rejections, and I gloss over the fact that it was my own lack of confidence that turned many girls off to me, and a vast number of those girls would never have been right for me anyway, and that at a certain point I was just going through the motions and didn’t have an affinity for many of the girls I flirted with. I go on about getting a B- my first semester of law school and stop just short of saying I was offered a job that I, by no means, earned.

I have never died in a plane crash.

The truth is, my whole life, God was looking out for me, and I twisted all that He did into a sob story to protect my pessimistic beliefs. I believe I did this because that mindset became so ingrained in me that I felt like it was a part of me, and secondly, I hate change. Also I would have no one to blame for all of the disappointments I have had. I would have no one to direct my anger toward. And being angry for not getting my way is far easier than accepting the life truth that life isn’t something we have in our back pocket— we will often not get our way and no one will be to blame. And I would have to admit that I was wrong. That I spent the majority of my life believing something that was dead wrong. And it would be just as irresponsible to blame the church. No one in the church had the intention of driving me, very literally, crazy. To be sure, my sisters, to my knowledge, have never struggled with the kind of pessimism and depression that I have though we three went to church at least twice a week together. Perhaps they didn’t even harbor a Christian guilt.

Thank God that I have finally learned this lesson. I am ready to perform life-changing surgery. I am going to remove a cancer thats roots run deep so that I may live life without this pessimism. I am excited to look forward to my future confidently and expectantly without wincing. Most of all, I am ready to learn about faith, faith in myself and faith in God. It involves relearning much of how I perceive reality and I expect it to be painful, frightening, and, at times, frustrating, but I know that I will come out on the other side transformed for the better.

When I don't hold back.

There is no good time to change, I found. No matter when you do, your body and mind will reject it, your friends and family will inquire as to why you have changed and sometimes challenge those changes, and you will constantly wonder if you’re making the right decisions.

I guess we have no choice but to either change or not at all as there is never a perfect time.

Good.

In the past when I sought to change, I would make some progress, but I could tell the whole experience was crippled. I made progress, but I could have, or should have, grown at a far more rapid rate. Looking back I can see that each time I held back. I drew the boundary lines for my projects around the confines of what society deems “appropriate”. I didn’t know it back then, but while I wanted to grow, and experience a new way of living and seeing life, I wanted to do so without alarming anyone to the actual changes in me. Indeed, I tip-toed about, careful not allow anyone to notice the subtle changes in my beliefs and demeanor. I shutter at the thought of explaining to someone why I have “suddenly” decided to stop doing this or start doing that. I’m afraid of what they would say to me in response. And even more terrified of what that would think. It’s a personal weakness—the fear of man. It will also be on the chopping board in the coming years as I sweep through the valleys of my mind, razing all the villages that were built on lies and insecurities to the ground.

It occurs to me, and this is humbling, that I will never become who I truly want to be if I hold back even in the slightest. And so this time I won’t. I’ll allow truth to permeate to every area of my life. I will be brutally honest with myself. I will allow the light to be shined upon every dark corner and when my flaws, those demons within me are exposed, I will not look away. I will acknowledge that they are my doing and they belong to me. And when I need to catch my breath, I’ll catch my breath. And when I need to cry, I’ll cry.

What surprises me is how many people confuse growth with growing older. Some people believe that without actually doing the leg work that they are growing simply because as they age they are able to check off the hallmarks of life—graduate high school, graduate college, get an advanced degree, start a career, get married, get a promotion, coast… It’s my opinion that this is not growing in and of itself. Some people believe life is just a series of events that one completes, they stop spiritually maturing when they are good and comfortable. They see others who aren’t yet at their level as immature and anyone working to reach even higher levels of consciousness as “overly-spiritual” or “self-righteous”. They themselves are in the sweet spot. They look for nothing outside themselves except someone of the opposite sex to love them. And if they aren’t religious they constantly put off making the decision of whether there is a God or not. Or they simply say they do not know, and put it out of their minds, as if to say that if there were a God it has nothing to do with them—the creation. Or they could possibly be atheists, quite comfortable in believing there is no such thing as God, just death. Just nothing. And perhaps when I can understand atheists and how they are content in the belief that all life is, in the end, meaningless, yet still lead a life like it means something, then I will have reached a certain level of maturity, or at least understanding of things otherwise illogical, myself.

I know things have gotten rather serious since my first blog entry. I think I revealed more about myself than I originally intended. But I’ve grown comfortable with this arrangement. And as I go into the next year, the theme of the entries will once again change. As I grow I will blog my musings. I hope that a year from today I would have finally taken a real step towards becoming the man I know I was meant to be.

I’m interested to see what growth looks like.

when I don’t hold back.

To Ride the Fence

I spend much of my time wondering whether I am among the worst of the best men, or rather among the best of the worst of them.

I Got Lost Trying to Find Myself

I was taken hostage by life at an early age. I found that in my childhood my true personality was defective, faulty, and would need to be changed if I would ever want to be happy. I’ve always had a soft-hearted nature. When I was younger, I was quick to befriend the kids who everyone made fun of or seemed lonely because I couldn’t bear the thought of them crying alone because, for no real reason, no one liked them. Of course at the time I couldn’t verbalize so articulately how I felt, but I felt.

So I was bullied too.

I could never understand why some of the kids were so mean, so aggressive. Why they found so much joy in the misery of others. Why they wouldn’t simply listen to the teachers instruction. I mean, we all got into trouble, but where as with me it was because of a lack of focus or more of a child-like negligence—I would spend more time goofing off or in my head, with those kids it was a calculated intent. It was like they reveled in their bad behavior.

As we all got older, the acting out became more extreme as they got physically stronger and learned more, strengthening the tools to inflict misery on those they deemed weak around them. What guy doesn’t remember the first time he got put in a choke hold, confused, tapping vigorously on the assailant’s arm as a silent plea for mercy. There was no reason to ask “why?”, it was just because. I can remember lying on the floor coughing and sputtering, struggling to catch my breath, my eyes filled with tears because I didn’t do anything to deserve this treatment, I would never do this to another. I felt frustrated, and weak. I didn’t want to fight back, I wanted to be left in peace.

At home I lived in an extremely psychologically healthy household, perfectly balanced with morals and love. But unfortunately for my sisters and I, our neighborhood and school life did not reflect the world to be about morals and love. I’m not sure how Staci and Jodi coped with the disparity, though I know for a fact that neither of them had a smooth road to maturity either. As for myself, I observed a few factors and came to a conclusion. Around the fourth grade I observed that I was unhappy. I observed that I felt dissatisfaction in life. I felt like there was something essential missing. I felt isolated from my peers because my parents made me and my sisters spend a third of the week in church where I was taught lessons that I did not see observed in real life. I felt awkward. I began to recognize that everyone in my school, church, and neighborhood were all black. I started to associate most black people with violence, aggressiveness, insensitivity, and poverty. And I struggled with my identity because though I was also black I didn’t think, talk, or act like any of the people I was coming into contact with, nor did I want to. And I didn’t know how to deal with my growing curiosity toward girls, who for the most part ignored me. My conclusion was that there was something wrong with me and the natural feelings I had as to right and wrong and how to treat people. In elementary and the first half of middle school, I spent most of my time feeling out of place. I did my best to fit in among the friends who I did make, though I remember most of the time I felt a discomfort at a lot of the things they did and said as “wrong”. I just went a long with it and suppressed how I felt and laughed instead.

As I grew older I dedicated my time to learning how to stay in sync with the motions of society, how to blend in, how to become a “normal person”. I emulated and acted out a lot of what I perceived a “cool guy” would do from different things I saw at school, on TV, and in movies. By middle school, I learned that the most aggressive, most obnoxious guys were the ones to win the attention and affection of girls. However, incapable of being intimidating and Alpha; loud, animated, and obnoxious came out in the role of the “funny guy” when put through the filter of my God-given personality. It did succeed in winning me the attention of girls but not their affection. I again felt ashamed and defective.

As I grew older, into high school, I was still struggling to feel “normal”. I had learned a lot by now. The vast majority of lessons were in stark contrast to what I was learning in church, which I had all but abandoned by this time as useless, though I retained many of the morals and my belief in God. High school was about learning to unlearn my morals, and I completely put God out of my mind. I learned to curse more, I learned that I shouldn’t take girls so seriously if I wanted them to respect me, I learned that respect was earned by doing something sexual with a girl on the weekends and then reporting to your friends on Monday. I learned that you could do or say anything as long as you assured everyone that you were “just joking around”.

Indeed I was learning all that I needed to become a normal person and finally not feel so unfulfilled, so broken. Soon, I thought, I would be accepted and I would be happy. All my lessons in school were reinforced by cable television and movies. Sex and relationships should be my number one priority, followed by abusing substances and bragging about it, followed by not taking anything too seriously. Those three things came together to make a person normal, I thought. Not church, not morality, not spirituality, not taking the countless issues out there seriously, not even thinking of our future really. Not only were those things not fun in and of themselves, I would have no friends. Of course “good” was still done in its appointed capacity. The vast number of us wanted the opportunity to party on a varsity level so we did what we needed to do to get into college. At the time going to college wasn’t about our future education it was about more sex, more drugs, and more “fun”.

I completely failed at all of these. I failed to lose my virginity in high school. I had somehow gotten it in my head that I wanted to lose it within a relationship to a girl I really cared about. We can already see my personality getting in the way of being normal. Not only that, but I wouldn’t get into a relationship with just anybody, I had to “love” her. So I spent all of high school looking for her, and when I finally met her she wanted nothing to do with me romantically. Her story is one for another day. Also, even though I partied and drank a lot, it only made me feel worse about myself. Sure there was the occasional drunken make-out that would gain me some respect for myself, but drinking did more harm than good. And finally, there is “fun”, or joking around, or not taking things too seriously. Perhaps the greatest reminder that I would perhaps never be a normal person was because I could never naturally enjoy “having fun” or “just joking around”. I would get uncomfortable when guys would talk about other girls like they didn’t have feelings, I would get upset with myself when I would laugh at their jokes and make my own. I didn’t want to believe the world was like that. I wanted to believe in romance. I didn’t like peer pressure, and I didn’t like pressuring others. I didn’t like hearing a sentence composed only of curse words, I didn’t like hearing people mock God and religion, I didn’t like how guys would compete to prove they were the most macho even when it led to physical fights. None of it made sense to me. None of it felt natural. My biggest question was always “Would he like that if someone said/did that to him?”. To me people were huge hypocrites who knew how to deal it, but became aggressive and indignant when someone did them wrong. But I did my best to blend in, to give myself a chance to let it all sink in. Honestly I felt like I was two different people. I just kept laughing, hoping I would one day actually find it all funny.

By college, soon my hunger to fit in was fueled solely by women. I had succeeded at winning the respect of most guys I met, but only the friendship of girls. I just wanted a relationship like the ones my other guy friends so easily slipped in and out of. To be honest I had put all my hopes of fulfilling this feeling of emptiness into finding the one girl. I figured once I met her, everything else would get colored in. But I still didn’t feel worthy. I still wasn’t normal enough. I still felt different than what I knew a real man was supposed to feel. By now I had everything down pat as far as the basics-- how to talk, how to party, how to drink, and how to smoke. But I was only becoming more confused by the day. And after being emotionally destroyed by the girl I had a crush on senior year of high-school, I felt pathetic. It seemed no matter what I did, I still didn’t feel like girls acknowledged me. I was riddled with insecurity. And I was broken on the inside, broken and divided.

I never successfully pushed God out of my mind. At rock bottom over my high-school crush’s rejection, desperate and alone, I was forced to self-reflect for the first time and ask myself, “What is going on? Why do I feel like this? Why am I even alive?” First year of college launched an intellectual and spiritual renaissance for me. For the first time I saw life for being much more vast than the closed eco-system of high-school and chasing after temporary pleasures. I started to think about a career, started reading books on psychology and religion, and started to see signs that a lot of what I naturally felt wasn’t a defect or weakness but were actual gifts from God like empathy and a natural kindness and a warm personality.

I found God personally during the renaissance. But from there my problems would only get worse. I had a hard time assimilating my Christian beliefs in God, with my actual day to day life, much like when I was a child. And society largely scoffed at the idea of God so now I felt more alienated than ever as I joined a small minority of believers. I felt like doing something drastic anyway and so I pressed on. I gave much over to God as a lot of what Christians believe in I naturally did too. But other things, I did not. The classic case for most Christians, I would not turn over the books of my sexuality to be audited. I completely glossed over that. And so I was spiritual in everything else, but when it came to relationships, I kept that out of the reach of God. I instead decided I would “figure it all out” on my own as I went on. And for some reason I felt like God would take all the fun out of my coveted future relationship. I just couldn’t bring myself to look at sexuality and romantic relationships through the fish-eye lens of Christian values. It was too much and I had a vivid idea of what it would have to entail to make me happy, and I knew for a fact some of that ran afoul with Christian values. Throughout college was a series of lessons. I would get caught up in one thing or another, forget about God, get hurt, run back, get comfortable—cocky, find myself in a new situation, forget God, get hurt, and run back. I grew frustrated with myself because it seemed no matter what I did or believed I still felt like crap. I still always felt pulled in both directions, a spiritual direction and the direction that society was telling me was normal.

I never found what I was looking for. None of my sexual experiences were particularly satisfying, though when I was a virgin I was told that sex would be the ultimate high. I found it more clunky, awkward, and out of place than anything else. And it didn’t feel right at all. Maybe because none of my experiences were with someone I was committed to and was more filled with friends and sometimes acquaintances when we “had one too many that night”. For me this would serve as the source for a deep, sad, dissatisfaction that would last for a couple years. When I told some of my friends about my experiences they would tell me that I just need to relax and let go and not be so tense. In other words, they said it was me. I couldn’t understand how they were enjoying it so much. How the characters on TV were. How the rappers were praising hook-ups in their songs. To me it was the worst. The ultimate let-down. Though I found dissatisfaction in sex, I kept trying anyway, hoping that it was just that I was getting with the wrong girl each time. But as I came to find out, it was same script, different cast.

It all leads up, all the experiences, the stories, the tragedies, losses, failures, disappointments, frustrations, and anger, it all leads back to me. The formula to my misery is a simple one. I was born, as I grew older I noticed a natural feeling or spirit inside of me. I noticed that when I lived by what this feeling guided me to do I drew unwanted attention and was made fun of and bullied. I observed that people who acted opposite to how I felt got everyone’s attention and praise and seemed happy. I decided that whatever I felt was wrong, and that there was something wrong with me. I struggled to retrain myself to act and think like I thought a “real man” should according to what I saw in media and in my environment. I failed often, reinforcing the idea that there was something wrong with me. The more I tried the more miserable I became, further reinforcing the idea that there is something wrong with me. A part of me felt ashamed at the things I would do or say to fit in, but when I tried to learn more about God, a part of me felt like I was giving up on really being successful and turning to religion as a crutch. I became even more miserable because I didn’t know what to believe or what to do. I was lonely, and confused, and unhappy, and I felt like a failure. And all of this was because when I was younger I felt like there was something missing and I set out to fill it.