I remember when Jars of Clay’s CD “Good Monsters” was first released. I was, essentially, obsessed with it. It was a bit idolic, but at the time I was more than a little disoriented. I still adore their music, but their music is not what this post is about.
It’s about that one line from “Dead Man” that I used to particularly love: “Do you know what I mean when I say I don’t want to be alone?”
But now, when I think of that song, I can help but think of how many times in the past year I’ve wanted to just scream at everyone to leave me the hell alone. To stop interrupting me with nothing to say, simply because they’re bored. To stop offering their opinion on how I should be conducting my life, getting a job, choosing a grad program, getting a date. Everyone’s got a goddamn opinion, and I’m sick of most of them. Especially the ones coming from people who I’d like to be able to respect, but don’t because their faults glare out at me like their announced in neon over their heads. There are very few people who I love in a sense other than the “required” loving of all people. There are even fewer who I respect, or like. (I have a hard time liking people I don’t respect, and maybe that makes sense).
There’s a chance this makes me a bad Christian- no. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean that I dread that my frustration with people and desire to embrace my introverted nature is contrary to what Christ would want from me. I do fear that.
But Jesus didn’t say that I have to put my family before everyone and everything else, and that if I don’t tell them every choice I make, and think/function as part of a group. And that I’m making people worry too much and running out of chances when I change my mind. No, no I’m pretty sure that all came from my mother. Or someone a lot like her.
I have no idea. NO DAMN IDEA what living like Christ actually looks like. And sometimes I get sick of fretting about it. Because I already feel like I have my very nature and personality against me-because it doesn’t FIT with what contemporary upper middle class American society thinks a college graduate should be like. And I’m sick of fighting myself, of calling myself “defective” because I don’t seem to be very good at this whole being alive thing.
Fuck that. I savor listening to Sufjan and the rain and sitting out in my car reading by street lamp. And tea with milk and sugar. And bizarre encounters in restrooms that remind me that God’s right in the middle of all this, working out the kinks we force on ourselves and showing us how to love others while still begging us to love ourselves. No, not! love ourselves selfishly, but for fucksake, love and treat and know ourselves to be Beloved and Beyond All Measurable Worth because He Loves us. And, well, shit, He loves everyone else too, so how is it that we dare to hate them, how is it that I continue to hate myself, the way that we/I do?
Anyway, all that to say: I fucking know how to be alive. Because I know peace and understanding and sorrow and how to love the feel of cat fur or the smell of rain and still (sometimes) forgive myself for not practicing guitar today. Maybe I’m not making any sense, maybe I’m an over-emotional, self-righteous asshole (or something less dramatically self-deprecating and therefore true). But I do know what it’s like to be alive, to LIVE.
And it isn’t in sitting around my room watching tv online because I’m so terrified I’m screw up to let myself think about anyone but fictional characters that I adore. But maybe it comes out of that, through that. Maybe out of and through all the tromping around those dark forests full of cardboard trees I begin to understand that I’m allowed to need to be alone and undisturbed to find my peace of mind. Or that I’m allowed to freak out and be irrational sometimes. That I’m not even SUPPOSE TO BE this person I think they think I should be. Wouldn’t that be nice?
This is not what I had intended to write.