The joy of reading

My love of reading began with a video game. In 1998, I was laying on my floor playing Final Fantasy 6, having just entered a town, and I was hungry for the next story beat. I couldn’t wait to find out what happened to a character who flew off unexpectedly and ended up half the world away. Instead, I was immediately greeted with fights. I actually found myself frustrated that the game was asking me to play it instead of just read. After an hour or so, I got what I wanted. I got to lay in front of my TV and read through text box after text box explaining what was happening to these silent, almost completely still, pixelated characters I had grown attached to. I didn’t need flashy graphics or beautiful music to get me invested. The words alone were enough.

As I left the town, now knowing exactly what happened and why, it hit me. This was my experience now. No one read this to me. No one forced me to read it or be invested. No one else was even in the room. The words I read were mine now. The feelings I felt after reading them were mine too. No one could take that from me. No one would have the exact same experience I did, even if they read those same words. That was the first time something ever felt completely mine. Let me tell you why.

Growing up, my family did their best to involve me in everything they were doing as much as they could. If we were having a water balloon fight, I got a hose. If I wanted to play baseball with my friends, they helped me become the manager of the team.  They always made space for me in whatever they did however they could. But I could never escape the feeling that my experience was usually a lesser version of what I wanted.

I was calling out teammates’ names in the dugout when I really wanted to be running around the field and swinging bats with them. I was spraying my family with a hose because I couldn’t chase them around and throw balloons myself. My mom would pick me up and dance with me to whatever song happened to be playing, and I loved it, but I often wondered what it would feel like to be dancing with my own feet. I don’t mention any of this out of a need for sympathy. My family was and is wonderful and those things are simply the nature of the beast, but the one common thread in all of these things is that my experiences of the physical world were mediated. It was like eating butter flavored things but never being allowed to eat butter.

Reading was different. I was good at reading. I taught myself to read at 5 and was reading far above my grade level all throughout elementary and middle school. I wasn’t just good at it for someone in a wheelchair or someone with cerebral palsy. I was genuinely good at something. So when I had that moment alone in my room, it was like a thousand lights came on. I wasn’t experiencing a watered-down version of what was intended. I was getting exactly what the writers hoped I would. More than that, I made something. The thoughts and feelings I had about it were my creation, that I made, just for me. Nothing was the same after that. I found a part of myself and I never let go.

But maybe your thing isn’t reading. Maybe your thing is art or music. Maybe your thing is gardening or exercise or dancing. Maybe your thing is helping other people find theirs. Find whatever makes you feel alive. Find whatever gives you something that’s just for you. Find whatever makes you love yourself just a little bit more, and hold onto it. Just don’t forget to share.

The Joy of Accepting Myself

The beginning of the year is a strange contradiction. It’s a time we tell ourselves is different even as it feels exactly the same as days before. It’s a time where we look back on our accomplishments and resolutions, often finding that we accomplished little of what we resolved to and much of what we didn’t. For many of us, it’s a time when our own journey always seems to pale in comparison to everyone else’s. You may say that all depends on how one defines success. I’ve found that many people, myself included, define success in terms of happiness. I don’t mean immediate happiness. Most adults have made peace with the fact that one must sacrifice the immediate happiness of doing whatever you’d like for the sake of securing long term contentment somewhere down the line. The obvious question that follows is: does that contentment ever come?

I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is: Do we let ourselves see it and feel it when it shows up? Let me explain. I realized recently that I used to imagine happiness and sadness as meteors that crashed into the ocean, leaving giant craters and overwhelming me with tidal waves of one emotion or another. I always hoped that I’d be able to predict the next one, that I’d build stronger walls and be more observant and avoid getting swept up next time. If I’m particularly happy, I never let myself fully enjoy it because I know the wave will pass eventually. When I’m sad, I often ridicule myself for not building stronger walls, for not moving out of the way in time since I should have seen it coming. What I’ve begun to realize though, is that my emotions are tides rather than meteors. The high tide of happiness was never going to drown me, and no sandcastle wall could stand against the tide of sadness forever.

This isn’t what American culture tells us. The pursuit of happiness is engraved in our minds seemingly from birth. Never mind that we often sacrifice life and liberty for it. If we just keep running toward the horizon, we’ll catch up to our happier self in the distance. If we just keep running fast enough, our sadness can’t keep up. It’ll get tired and collapse even though that’s often exactly what’s waiting for us when we end up collapsing ourselves. We put our emotions in boxes to do our jobs, to be the people others need us to be, all to avoid letting our humanity catch up with us.

For most of my life, I thought of my low emotional moments, my low tides, as a crisis. American Christianity reinforced this idea by telling me over and over again that people are responsible for their emotions. If they’re happy, it’s because they chose to focus on the right things and have a positive attitude. If they’re unhappy, it’s because they deliberately choose to ignore positive things and focus on the negative. This is what I was explicitly told by countless adults growing up.

What this led to during my low tide moments was a scramble to find anything that usually made me happy in an effort to pretend everything was normal until happiness showed up again. I was a kid on the beach carrying water from kiddie pools and dumping it on my feet while telling myself and anyone around me that I loved swimming in the ocean even as the water disappeared underneath my feet. Fake it til you make it was the my creed and anything else was giving up. I was so busy making sure no one was uncomfortable around me that I never gave myself permission to be uncomfortable. Discomfort was a defect that needed to be changed rather than listened to.

My high moments were never any better. I was afraid to fully enjoy any positive moments for two reasons. One, I was constantly aware of the fact that whatever happiness I experienced was temporary, and I was afraid that the more I enjoyed it, the more I’d feel its absence when it inevitably left. Two, I was raised in a tradition that attributed everything positive to God and everything negative to humanity. Enjoying something too much ran the risk of either arrogance or a lack of gratitude, and both were seen as deadly in the long run. This is the kind of mindset I grew up with, subtly reinforced by well-meaning people who were just doing the best they could to make sense of themselves and the world around them.

I grew into adulthood, and in my 20s I finally hit rock bottom. I finally decided to try getting counseling at my school as a last resort before I did something drastic. Coming in and admitting that I needed help, admitting that I couldn’t hold my emotions alone anymore, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. The process of untangling my feelings and making space for them instead of shutting them out never stopped being uncomfortable. But slowly and surely, through a combination of medicine and therapy, I started to recognize myself again.

I started to sit with that version of myself on that beach. I didn’t try to fix myself. I didn’t go scrambling for water anymore. I sat with my fear and loneliness, the bruised and battered parts of me that I always ignored in favor of focusing on other people, and I let myself feel. I let myself feel anger over things that happened to me instead of constantly telling everyone I was fine. I let myself feel the grief of losing so much of myself in favor of being who others wanted me to be. I let myself mourn the relationships that would inevitably fall apart when I finally showed others that I was not the straight, happy, pleasant Christian they expected me to be. I was, and continue to be, a queer disabled man frustrated by and dissatisfied with a form of Christianity and a society that seek to minimize and contain emotion and hardship rather than confront it head on and be forced to change as a result.

That too, was an incredibly painful realization. A lot of my friendships and important relationships didn’t survive. The ones that did though, were changed radically. They were no longer flimsy things dependent upon our adherence to the status quo. They were two way lifelines, and we laid everything out for each other. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of my fire and intensity burning up everyone around me anymore. I had always done my best to encourage others’ passions and ideas, but now I was beginning to see my own ideas and voice as valuable too.

 Things are still far from perfect. There are still occasional meteors, and I find myself dazed and confused more often than I ever expected. The world is scary and it’s impossible to not be overwhelmed by that sometimes. Now though, even on the bad days, I can sit with myself, knowing that the tide will come back. It always does. I know now that my low points do not make me less valuable than my high points. Both make me who I am, and I wouldn’t trade who I am for anything, and neither should you.

The joy of stating the obvious

I can’t stop thinking about one particular song lately. The song is called “Obvious” and it’s a cut song from the musical Dear Evan Hansen. The song starts with a simple statement from the main character: “When we know something is true beyond question or doubt/ there’s no particular point in pointing it out…it’s something you don’t need to hear. It’s just clear.” This is a trap that I fall into all the time. Someone’s good qualities seem so obvious to me that I don’t say anything to the person because I don’t want to embarrass them or waste their time.

And so, I never tell them my friend how I love watching their eyes light up when they tell me about what they’re interested in. I never tell my professor that the way he cracks up at his own jokes makes my day. I never tell my other professor that the way he winks at me after saying something clever reminds me of my late Grandpa, that it feels like he’s right beside me again, if only for that moment. I never tell my friend that the few extra seconds she puts into a hug make all the difference. 

I neglect to tell the people in my life how much I cherish all the little things we do for each other, every day, sometimes without even realizing we’re doing it. The song echoes this when, after listing his crush’s endearing habits, Evan says: “sometimes the words we tend to withhold, well, they’re exactly the words someone needs to be told/ but oh, thinking they know, we never say I love you.”

Our culture tells us to reserve this kind of thing for romantic partners, but we miss out on so much if we limit ourselves like that. We miss out on the chance to tell people about what makes them who they are. The half smiles, the small eyebrow raises, the silly walks, all these small things that as much a part of them as their face or voice. These are the small things that remind us why we love them.

So today, I’m going to be a little more brave. I’m going to say the obvious thing because that might just be what someone needs to hear today. It might not be much, but that’s okay. Moments like that are tiny lanterns, not noticeable most of the time, but just bright enough when the lights go out. Maybe, just maybe, the light will be enough to help them see themselves when they need it most.

P.S. Here's a link to the song in case anyone is curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01--GmFBnls

The quiet joys of sharing our pain

The heart that hurts is unsightly. The heart in pain should be shielded, cordoned off until it’s fixed. People need us to be happy. Sharing our pain brings others down. If you must take time to heal, take it alone. These are the things our culture teaches us. We should get over our pain as quickly as possible so that people feel comfortable spending time with us again.

Everyone agrees that humans need time to grieve, but so few of us are taught how. We recognize that emotions affect us, and that we need space for ourselves, but what are we supposed to do in that space? Many of us aren’t fortunate enough to have someone sit with us in silence, to sit with us and silently hold our hand, as we try to figure out who this new person is that lives inside our bodies now. Bring someone in, and you run the risk of dragging them down. That is the lie we tell ourselves. That American exceptionalism means that we should be able to handle every internal struggle alone, that no one else is strong enough to carry our burdens with us.

Friendships in media are often portrayed as an accumulation of happy memories, a bridge suspended on clouds of laughter. While that is part of friendship, that’s not all it is. Sometimes friendship is the hammock that cradles you as you feel yourself sag into it with your full weight. Sometimes it’s realizing how much stronger you are when you’re asked to lift something that isn’t yours. Sometimes it’s keeping a flame burning long enough for someone to find it in the dark. Sometimes pain is that flame.

It’s not about having all the answers, or knowing where to go. Sometimes it’s enough to know that someone is with you in the dark, to see their unsure expression and heartfelt smile as you wander off to wherever you go from here. A heart that hurts is one that feels. A heart that hurts is one that can heal.

Pain should be held, not hidden. It should be embraced and cradled. It should be shown to others so they can help. When we show each other our pain, it becomes just a little bit smaller. We see that the person next to us is still there, that our matching scars are not only proof of pain, but survival. I want to learn how to sit with people, how to hold them, how to be the face beside them in the dark. I want to heal with my hurt.

Our culture tells us that every question has an answer, that the answers will make us feel better. Sometimes, it isn’t about an answer. It’s enough to ask the question. It’s enough to pull something out of ourselves and set it down, to make no attempt to build a box around it or label it, to simply acknowledge it as a part of us. Maybe the light that it gives off will warm someone else. Maybe it will resonate with someone else. Maybe it will be the missing piece of the puzzle.

Sharing is hard. It means opening ourselves up to rejection. It means not knowing if our next step will be forward or backward. It means accepting that the person who came with us so far may not be the person to go with us the rest of the way. It means acknowledging that our time together was valuable, even if it wasn’t forever. Sharing means leaving a piece of ourselves with other people, because we know that another piece will grow to replace it. It means accepting other people’s pieces, making them into a mirror we can use to see ourselves when the voices in our head get too loud.

Teach me to be that person. Teach me to remind people of who they are at their best when they feel the worst. Teach me to remind them that they are more than their worst day. Teach me to help them take the next step, even if they don’t know how they’re going to take the twenty after that. Teach me to help them to appreciate their progress, even as the mountain in front of them grows larger with every step. Teach me to help them love themselves for who they are instead of waiting for who they might be.

Teach me to give them the love they deserve instead of the love they were given. Teach me to help them look up at the faces who love them, even if their vision is blurred by tears. Teach me to not let the ending stop the beginning from being born. Teach me to shine the light that I have, to see it as a light that someone needs, even if it’s not that bright. Teach me to be a lighthouse in the dark. Teach me to comfort the hurting heart.