On Despair

Hey.  It's been a while.

It's been a while since my feet touched the ground.  It doesn't really seem to happen often anymore.  Now and then I stop, I see, I feel alive and okay.  Only on occasion, now.

Most often of late, I've been...stranded.  Spinning.  Drowning and dying of thirst all at once.

To be honest, I have no idea what's wrong with me anymore.

I thought I might finally be free, you know?  I had direction, and even though it was undefined, it felt like peace.  A reason.  A "purpose", though I'm finding I don't like that word anymore because it implies we have to be good for something.

What about when we're not?

What's my purpose when I'm isolated and falling apart and don't even remember what happiness feels like?

What am I good for when it feels as though every ounce of emotion I have ever felt has been spent?

When I'd rather just lay down outside and become a pile of dirt and let the grass grow over me forever, what's my reason for living?

Some days, I feel good.  Other days, I feel nothing.  And still other days, I feel nothing good.  The good days are sometimes few and far between.  And this is the life I've got.  So...what now?

This is the part where people would interject their answers, telling me that God's got a purpose for it all, that I just need to focus on the good things, that people really do care and I should just reach out to them; and the fact is, every single one of those thoughts has already gone through my head a hundred times over, and unless I happen to be in the place to hear it, it doesn't change a single thing.

Because what we really need sometimes is not to feel better, or to be distracted from the pain that feels like the final nail in the coffin of a bitter existence.  Sometimes happiness is not the answer to agony, anger, or despair.

Sometimes...we need to feel the full weight of it.

We need to feel it because, if we let it, it will lead us somewhere.  Through the darkness, we come, not to the end of the road, but to the wounds that desperately need to be felt, because only in acknowledging that we have been hurt (by others, or by ourselves) will they heal.

The light of a bitter reality is still more healing to hurt than leaving it in the depths of our forgotten selves.

But oh, how hard this road is.  How lonely it can be, if that's what it takes to unearth the unresolved pain.  But how wholesome the moments of release are.

Purpose is not always the answer.  If there is a purpose...it's simply to be, and to do so as sincerely as possible, even if that means falling asleep hoping we won't wake up again, ten nights in a row, or a hundred.  Even if it means the screaming and the tears of despairing rage.  Even if it means unjust irrational anger and rage toward someone or something we've been hurt by.

The point is not that our feelings are true, or right, or even lasting.  The point is that we feel them, and that we are deeply, passionately honest with ourselves.  We can't always give the weight of the emotion toward the person who caused it (irrationally raging at someone for the unintentional wounds they caused is not the answer), but we can always be honest with ourselves, and with the God who created our wild, chemical-filled, passionate minds and our tender, love-needing hearts that have suffered the nastiest of cuts and bruises.  He can take it, because he will always give it a home and a redemption.

"I am not fine.  At least sometimes, I am not fine."  And I won't pretend otherwise.  But my Father, he listens, and he loves me even when I am caught up in the smoke of my own despair and can't feel even a sliver of his love.  And I want to feel joy at the things that he has given me, but that joy is some days nowhere to be found, and to conjure up something that isn't real and true is more a crime than to cry for relief at pain that never seems to end.  Besides, like the poet once said, "The best letters are the ones written in tears that smear the ink."

So please, I beg you to feel the pain that keeps you awake at night.  It is a hard road to walk, but "be still my soul; thy best, thy heavenly Friend, through thorny ways leads to a joyful end."

I'm fairly certain that these past seasons are some of the most painful things I will ever walk through, but I would not trade away a day, for these dark days lead to the brightest and most holy of places.

"Praise be the maker of my fate for the suffering he ordains."

Finding An Entrance

Well...here I am.  It's a week from 5 months since my last post, and about 4 and a half months since I first began my current journal (which is now a bit less than half-filled).  I've met a ton of people, and gotten to know many friends I already had a little or a lot more.  I've discovered dozens of artists and albums I couldn't now do without, and I've learned an incredible amount about music from using my ears, creating, and the occasional video or read.

Despite all this I'm still here finding my fingers clumsily exploring the electronic keyboard nearby, repetitive in my examinations and hardly knowing what I did when I do find something worth keeping.  I have half a year of school piled on top of the oncoming senior year.  I won't be able to make music on the computer for likely another couple of weeks, although the new, much better computer my brother and I have been working toward for months is finally almost built.  I still find myself reluctantly dragging to bed far later than is wise, and I still wake up either completely exhausted or limp and dull from an overindulgent rest.

And I feel an urge to write in my fingertips.  Words flow so free and easy when I find something worth setting my mind loose on, but would that I could unravel schoolwork with such ease.

Spindrift by Biosphere on the headphones.

What am I missing?

Lately I've been learning a few things, or rather, things have been settling and forming solid pictures in my mind.  I'm learning that although people might have good intentions, and their advice is good to someone, it's not always good to me.  I'm learning that not everyone's anger, disrespect, dismissal is justified; I'm not always wrong.  Of course, I'm not always right either.  I suppose the lines between the two are growing clearer is all.  And that demands some action, some standing up for myself, some willingness to remove myself from the influence of certain places.

But it all has to be replaced by something stronger and healthier and better or I'm back to my own devices, and I'm not everything I need.  Far from it.

I understand music and God and the world a bit more, but also less.  I'm tired of everyone's advice that feels like bags of rocks I have to carry.  I'm sick of opinions.  The past couple of weeks have been a storm; Robin Williams, ISIS, Israel and Gaza, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the riots in Ferguson.  Who's right?  How much does my opinion matter?  Am I entitled to not voice my opinion?  I don't feel like I am, with the way others shout their opinions, their convictions, with such anger and volume that I, the teenager far removed from all of this, feel personally attacked for not saying something or agreeing with them or them or...

EVERYONE SHUT UP.

I don't have anything to give to you.  Leave me alone.

I'm sorry if I sound selfish, but I have too many things clouding my mind to let political heat and misguided advice make things worse.  Go away.  I don't wanna hear any of it.

It's about time I built a soundproof room in my mind to escape to in times like these.  I need a break from all this noise.

So, back to where I started...what now?  How do I solve the little mess I've made for myself?  It's a tangled mess that I don't know how to solve, and all my attempts at music, schoolwork, sleep just leave me tripping over my own feet in an attempt to even be adequate.  How do you untangle a knot?  How do you break down a seemingly impenetrable mass?

Find a hole, a loose thread, a door that still opens.  Start there.

So what's my door?

Maybe this is it, right here.  This freeform solidifying of thought that moves as fast as my fingers can type.

Is it really that simple?



Why not?

I'm beginning to realize that the key to almost everything, at least when it comes to my particular approach, is a steady flow.

Music isn't an indecipherable mass; it's a weave with strings.  But the strings have to start and end somewhere, flow through in a particular way, be a certain color, a certain strength.  Every string has to be set up correctly, and it can change, but it has to be treated as its own little rivulet, or single-cell organism among many others.  The information's made of start-and-stop, rise, diminish, filter, gate, sidechain, pan, fade; but in reality, it's much more than that.  It's a sound-creature, playing with other sound-creatures, or waves of noise flowing in and out among the rest.  Music can be truly a world of its own where each instrument is not merely noise, nor is it an animal like anything we can understand.  It is a gust of wind, a flow of water, a tremble in the earth, a twisting and gliding beam of light.  It is sound, and although it's just moving air, it has a life that can be directed, controlled, subdued and twisted, or egged on and let loose like a wild animal.  Structure, rhythm, tempo, key are all systems to keep them lined up in beautiful rows, and they can cooperate or fight.  But music behaves best when we let it find its wings as we work.

Heh...went a bit off on that.  Whoops.

Where was I...steady flow, yes.  It applies to a lot of things.  Life, thought, writing, schoolwork, music-making, sports, cooking...pretty much anything.  It's all about getting it down.

You've just got to find an entry point where you can get the wheels turning, especially if you're out of touch.  Maybe that's why small goals work so well; it keeps our momentum between start and finish.


Anyway...all of that oddity and rambling to say, I'm trying to get a handle on how to do things.  It's going okay.  The world's been too much for me lately and I've had to care less about the noise and the unhelpful words in order to get the ball rolling.  I feel so close.  Very soon, I know I'll break through.

Till then I'll be poking around for an open door.  It's around here somewhere.

Broken Music

I can't remember the last time I made a blog post on here.  I do remember that they always end up being pretty introspective and kind of depressing, but...maybe that's what this space is for.  I dunno.

Moving on.

I've been on a kick of emotionally-intense music for a while now.  I never understood why people liked music like this, until things started getting bad.  Then I realized that maybe it's a sort of attempt at shocking yourself awake with emotions, like taking an injection of brutal humanity straight into the bloodstream to wake your heart when it's feeling dead.

Whether it's through a poet screaming about God, at God, about himself, at himself; piano music that sounds like it's been run through a wood-chipper of electronic processes to shatter it into something that some might consider more noise than music; the dark, aggressive words of a band of the lost; or electronic beats, gentle backdrops, and everything in between that hold traits only 50% in common with the music most people like, there is something about music that is different that is powerful to a wounded soul.

In my case it might also be an attempt to somehow counteract the heavy dreams I sometimes have, the dark nights where I'm gasping for someone to acknowledge my existence, the long hours added up from every single time I wake up, dragging myself out of bed at a time so far from "morning" that my sleep cycle would fit better somewhere in west Asia, and who knows what else that screws with my head already.  As if the double negative of broken music and a broken life will somehow equal normality and I could start again from zero.

There was a picture I saw that represented depression in a simple graphic: a small white cube, falling through a gradient running from gray to black, and when the darkness seems complete the bottom drops out and you're falling from the top of the gray sky again.  It's like a disc that keeps skipping, playing the same bit of a song over and over and over again, and each time the end of the loop is more unbearable, and the start of it is more empty.  Sometimes it's a mercy just to be able to cry.

Anyway...I do way too much of this sort of self-pitying rambling these days so I'd better stop.

I just hope things start making sense soon, and the world has color again.

But I am deaf to all their threats.
I am silent before them as one who cannot speak.
I choose to hear nothing,
and I make no reply.
For I am waiting for you, O Lord.

You must answer for me, O Lord my God.

I prayed, "Don't let my enemies gloat over me

or rejoice at my downfall."

I am on the verge of collapse,

facing constant pain.

But I confess my sins;

I am deeply sorry for what I have done.

Do not abandon me, O Lord.

Do not stand at a distance, my God.

Come quickly to help me,

O Lord my savior.

(Taken from Psalm 38.)

Worship Isn't Just Singing

I just looked back over my last few posts for this year.  It's strange how the words I wrote in the past six months, though few, somehow seem to describe how I feel right now.  But I don't remember ever feeling like I do now.  I'm not sure if my memory is bad or if I was more hyperbolic a few months ago.

All I know is that a certain word came to mind recently that seems to sum up how I feel right now: autophobia - The fear of oneself, or of being alone.

Both of those definitions are pretty accurate right now.  I am afraid of being alone.  No, I am beyond afraid.  I am broken from being alone, or if not yet, then I soon will be.

And I am more afraid of myself now some days than ever.  But honestly, it doesn't feel like it's even me.  It's more like there's a psychopath or an inhuman monster living in the backdrop of my mind, and sometimes his whispers seep through the cracks of my mind when I dream.  And it's horrifying.

But a thought comes to mind...what if the antidote is simple, easily found?

Because the most soothing thing lately is...beauty.  Strange.

As a favorite author of mine once wrote, beauty costs us nothing, and there is no desire within us to consume it or do anything about it but stare, and wonder, and simply take it in.

Which leads to another thought.

Maybe the deeper answer is worship.

But I haven't felt the desire to sing those songs filled with Christian clichés for a very long time.  Why does beholding beauty do more for my soul than singing?

Maybe it's the fact that singing songs has become convoluted in my mind, and it no longer feels like worship.  Maybe I need to go back to the fundamental essence of worship.  Maybe I need to forget myself and simply let the beauty of every aspect of life lead me back to the one who created it.  It's all just a reflection, after all.

Okay, but saying that it's "just a reflection" makes it feel wrong to admire anything else.  It doesn't feel wrong, so...

Oh, of course.  Reflection, not imitation.  There's a difference between a fake that is the object of worship, and a mirror that allows us to see the real source when the mirror is the only thing our eyes are clear enough to see.

That's a good thing, because my heart hasn't known how to worship God sincerely for a very long time.  It's comforting to know that the mirrors of pure and innocent beauty are lenses to see him.

Because sometimes, our minds are so frayed that we don't know how to worship God through the lens of descriptive terms.  Sometimes singing about how holy and beautiful God is feels so empty; sometimes the only way we can worship is by admiring flowers.

Hah...this is feeling a bit rambling and taking a while to get to the point.  But then again...maybe we don't always need to be so hasty about getting to the point.

Maybe...we have to stop and smell the flowers sometimes.

(...I swear I did not plan that...)

Inner Darkness, Self-Addiction, and Loneliness

I haven't been here in a while.

A lot's happened since I last wrote.

I can't really get into it, partly because of how complicated it is, partly because it's not just my story to tell.  But I can say that something's wrong with me.  I'm not completely sure of what it is, but I have a good guess.

It's me.

There's a chapter in Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz called "Community", in which he describes his experience of living with a group of guys under one roof after living alone in the country for a while, and how difficult it was for him to get used to it.

Something about feeling alone creates a very odd thing in the human soul.  On the one hand, we begin to crave contact, contact that is deep and meaningful and sincere, that gentle touch of two human souls truly acknowledging each other's existence, if only for a moment.  Sometimes it's as simple as an honest, friendly smile, and sometimes it's as deep as a conversation that lasts for five hours and delves into the deep details of life, and all its pain and joy.  It's a connection we need with at least moderate frequency to survive.

On the other hand, we become addicted to ourselves, to the silence of being the only soul within reach.  In the company of ourselves there is no reason to look beyond our own mind, and the convenience and comfort of this is a very strong thing.  We come to believe we are the only thing that truly exists, that the rest is just a background for our drifting consciousness while we keep ourselves company.

And it is so very poisonous.

I think long-term loneliness, the kind that has gone on for long enough to have a serious effect on the mind, is a kind of insanity, less severe and much more easily cured than a mental illness, but still powerful enough to be concerning.

My dad told me he was worried about me.  And as that question hit the air, I was suddenly very afraid.  I had been lying to myself about how I was doing, whether I was going crazy.  The haunting dreams of relationships with my friends and family gone wrong, usually focused on one person in particular in each dream, have been shaking me for a while now.  They're not all that frequent, maybe once a week.  But in them I am confronted with either the monstrosity of my narcissism in its full force, or the soul-crushing weight of being left alone, so very alone.  Both of them leave my mind flailing for reality for at least a couple of hours after my eyes are pried open, and for those first waking moments I wonder if this is what it's like to go insane.

The bitter thing is that the only thing I really need is human interaction, something that is always present in too small a quantity and too shallow a depth, with the curing potency always out of reach.

And I wonder to myself, where do I belong?

I don't belong with the other homeschoolers.  I'm too broken down and too much of a stranger to fit in with them at this point.

I definitely don't belong with public schoolers.  They scare me, because I feel like their whole world is based around evaluating others, and I will certainly fall short of their standards.  They're well-established in groups by now too, anyway.

The people who care the most about me, who I feel I could really deeply connect with, are either adults with busy lives or people living so far away that I barely have a hope of ever even seeing their face without the aid of a wireless signal.

So where do I belong, really?

I think searching for the answer is the only way to climb out of this ever-worsening dream I feel like I'm living in.  I long to live in reality for longer than a day, to breathe the air of the living world through the darkest hours of the night and never slip back into the nightmare of my lonely mind.

I have had enough of being alone.  It's time to start the search.

Retreating

I am so tired.

I feel as if I am drifting away from who I am, somehow.  Or maybe all of the structures that I built are just fading into nothing, and who I really am is the only thing that is left.

But there is one thing that I do know.  I am so very tired of Christianity.

As all of this falls away, the cliche statements and ever-repeated lines, the fancy vocabulary and typical words of advice wear increasingly thin and unhelpful.  My mind is just too weak to even hold all of this within itself.  I can't do it anymore.

And suddenly I realize, I can let it all go, and the relief is almost overwhelming.

I can let it all go because what I believe is dependent on only one person.  Well, okay, two people.

The first one is myself.  I have chosen what I believe, and no one else can truly tell me how to believe or how to live.  Ultimately, I must choose whether I believe what they say is right.  And in so many ways, I want to let all of the doing go.  And I think I will.

Because it is finished.

Which leads me to who the other person is.  He's the one that's kept me alive and breathing and moving, even if it's merely a crawl.  He's the one who saved me.  He has quite a few names, actually.

The most well-known one is Jesus.

When I say I am tired, I mean that I simply cannot - and more than ever, simply refuse to - listen to the voices that speak these overused statements, these exhausting methods of "doing it right".  I am so very tired.  I can't do anything anymore.  I have to close my ears and open my heart, shut down my mind and let my soul simply exist within this place, and try to hear the voice of my rescuer once again.  It has grown so faint at times I fear that it was never there at all.

But all these "coincidences", these strings of events that are so very elaborate and beautiful, that have yielded so much joy...I cannot explain them in any other way.  Either I am inside of the most meaningful story of all, and someone is directing all of this, or life is madness that no man will ever understand, a ball of tangled string that will eventually unravel, meaningless.

I cannot accept that.

And so I must withdraw my heart from everything that would seek to speak all these conflicting "truths", everyone who seems to know what the world means, and I must remember who I am.  I must also remember who rescued me from the maddening empty and cold.

It may take some time, but if I listen any longer to those voices that demand that I listen, that tell me that I must do or not do, that I must believe or not believe, then I will surely collapse into my soul and succumb to insanity.  I can't handle it any longer.

My heart needs to bask in the Truth for some time before I am strong enough to recognize it out in the world again, and deny the lies that are mingled with it.  I must learn again the voice of my Father before I can deny the whispers of the Father of Lies.

Here's to regaining the truth.

When Life Gives You Mountains

It's late at night.  Sometimes there's snow, strangely enough, although usually instead it's rain, or it's dry.  In reality that has little to do with anything, but in a way it's a rather important fact.  The night and I seem to be spiritual twins, for whatever I feel, the night seems to reflect.  Maybe it's just my own projections.  But the cold, dry nights are some of the most bland and empty times, and the rainy ones are either times of relief or times of sadness.

I glance down at my hands, watch the veins that continually supply these multi-branched limbs with the fluid that keeps them functioning.  Why are they so useless these days?  Why is the mind on the other end of the bloodstream so empty of inspiration and meaning?  What's wrong with the world?

No, not the world.  Just me.

What's wrong with me?

Although I see that face staring me down every night, I don't have an answer.  I think it has something to do with love, or rather the lack of it.  Where does motivation come from?  I think it used to exist somewhere in the skybox of the mind, but it's flown away, and I haven't heard hardly a whisper for months.

What's wrong with me?  Why can't I be bothered to actually live my life?  Since when did minor inconvenience become an impassable obstacle?  Why is inspiration so hard to catch?  Why does everyone seem to be better at this than I am?

I don't know.  It hurts to know that I'm here because of me.  It hurts more to know that I'm not strong enough to get myself out of this, and even more to think that it's only impossible because I believe it to be so.  Why am I so gullible, content to live this miserable lie?  What is there to be gained from this that I can't live without?

Lord, make me human again.  Let the flesh that you gave your breath to breathe your Spirit once more, not this stagnant miasma of procrastination.

If my heart were connected to my brain, I might realize that this time just proves what a sinner I am.  But that link is nonexistent now.  Maybe that explains the emptiness, the lack of soul I feel in my day to day life.  I want to know what it means to actually be a man of God; at least those snippets that I once had.  This is almost nothing at all.  My heart is alone, and my mind receives no validation for its faith, and overall it just makes believing harder and harder every day.  Who knew that the 12 short inches between the two could be farther than the distance from one end of the galaxy to the other?

What's going on here?  Who is this man who lives in my body?  He sure isn't me.  Not anymore.  The man of God I once knew wouldn't tolerate this.  But this man does nothing to even try.  I can't even kick this impostor out.  I'm out in spiritual no-man's-land right now, and my brain's getting maybe half a bar of connection to my heart every fifty miles or so.  But we can't stop at gas stations, because we're on foot, and every moment leaves us further behind where we should be in life, further behind where God "wants us to be".

Why am I not comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me?

Maybe it's because I think I have to do something to earn that planned life.

Maybe if I do what I should instead of lazing around, I'll finally be the perfect student, the perfect artist, the perfect brother, the perfect son, and the rest of my life will come together, and I'll get married, and be happy forever, and go to Heaven at the end.

Something's wrong with this picture.

I remember now talking with my good friend just yesterday; I remember him telling me that at the end of this tunnel, God has my perfection and my ultimate good in mind.  It doesn't make it any easier, but every single tear that falls is water for the growth of new life, and every storm that I encounter is not by accident, for it will give way to new seasons.  The lightning strikes serve only to help me wake up, and the gloom of the rain is not meant ultimately for my misery, but for my transformation.  Only by the dark do we truly appreciate the light; only through pain do we recognize beauty; only by being alone will I realize that I have never been alone, and I never will be.

It isn't easy, you know, sitting alone, painfully aware of every wasted second, mind too weak to break from routine.  Willpower is a muscle, and disuse may wear it down to the point of breaking.  Only when I truly think of this do I realize that each step rebuilds it, and that the only way I can defeat these demons is through the Lord's grace that lets me take those steps.

I don't know what I would do without him.  I don't know how I could bear it if I had never known my Friend.  He has saved me so many times, probably more than I can realize, and he's guided me toward much more joy than I could have ever found on my own.  At times, he is the only thing I have to hold onto, to keep living for.  This Rock is the only thing that has kept me from going under.

Time to raise the sails.  This storm is fierce, but I'm not alone this time.