I used to be a religious Xanga-er. I wrote pretty consistently from about July of 2003 to May of 2007. It’s all actually still there on the web, at dayoking.xanga.com (A quick check reveals that my first post was made on July 31 and my last on July 6 of the years noted above.)
It’s still interesting to me mostly because it’s a chronicle of my thoughts and feelings over that span: the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school to the summer after my freshman year of college. My Xanga was much more a “personal journal” than “blog,” if that kind of distinction means anything to anyone but myself. It was basically a diary with an audience.
(The audience part was probably the key to its longevity, since I’ve failed miserably at every attempt to keep a diary or a journal before or since the Xanga. For some reason I feel foolish writing to “myself” in the context of a personal journal, even if I try to pretend I’m writing to someone else).
The most interesting part is the way I wrote when I was feeling depressed. It was a specific Xanga post recording the events of one day in the fall of 2003 that has helped me remember what may have been my first depressive episode. Thanks to Xanga, I know the specific date: October 20, Monday. Here’s the lowlights:
I’ve been so tired the last few days…blah. I just feel so weird. Like…that paranoid stuff I was talking about. Like I do things…just weird things…I think way too much about nearly everything (except, of course, the things I should think too much about) and its really annoying…and I can’t help it…it’s nice to know that God made me the way I am sometimes, because I don’t know what I’d do without knowing that. I’d just be crazy. Like really crazy, not the type of crazy I really am…
I don’t think I can do anything right…because I talk to God and say “help me do better” and I physically or psychologically just can’t do it. Like something happened earlier today (I’m not going to try and explain it, because you’d proabably think I have some sort of pyschological problem…maybe I do…:S) and I said “God, that’s so stupid. Why do I do that? I need help, please.” and then, IMMEADIATLY , like, right after, that it happens again and I do the exact same thing!?
[The irony seems tragic now, reading the parathentical in the second paragrpah]
I wrote a lot about the way I was feeling in my Xanga. From around this time until I quit writing, “downer” posts were quite common, since my Xanga provided a relatively safe outlet for my feelings, and the only inhibitions on what I could express were self-imposed (though there were many of those). During high school they seem to be mostly muted, but they certainly come out again during my silently miserable freshman year at Bryan.
What is so interesting to me now is not just that I can get a better sense of how I felt then, but the simple fact that I did express, in any form, how I was feeling, even if that expression was just copying lyrics to depressing songs and adjusting the fonts for particular emphasis.
Pretty soon after I quit Xanga, the way I was feeling changed. After I left Bryan, I went to Boyce, which became the first place I would start a semester and leave school before midterms. I used to feel private, quiet anguish that was painful but still allowed me to excel at school and cultivate healthy relationships. Yet from Boyce onward, to a semester living with my family in Athens to the second aborted attempt at going off to school to Calvin and my flight here, to Germany, something changed. I ceased to be able to get to class, to do work, to function on any significant level. My life, from the time I left Boyce and in a more intense way since I came to Germany, has been on hold, paused. On hiatus. What I’ve been doing these last few months hasn’t been living. I’ve breathed, ate, spoke, thought, sometimes laughed and smiled. But every moment of it has been empty.
I spent most of high school, and my entire freshman year at Bryan, writing about how miserable I was feeling, but since the fall of 2007, I have found myself unable to do any extended writing at all about my feelings. This is not helpful in two ways: I have no sort of emotional or cathartic release for the way I am feeling, and I have no good way to tracks the changes in my emotional mindset.
I write. It’s what I do. But, on the whole, I’ve done less and less of it since the fall of 2007. Since I left the states last November and came to Germany I’ve done little writing at all. Aside from an angry recitation of Psalm 22 and a sparse confession [both are Facebook notes], I’ve been completely unable to say anything significant about my condition.
It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve sat down a hundred times to write something that would express the way I feel, and plenty of times I got a significant amount of words down. Good words, even. But they were all deleted or the document wasn’t saved or it was saved but was forgotten. I’ve started hundreds of posts or essays, and finished none.
I don’t have much significant or insightful to say about my “condition,” whether it be unipolar depression or Bipolar Type II. I don’t know that I ever will. But in my mind, the most powerful commentary on the depth of suffering I’ve endured for the past year and half is the silence.
For me, depression hasn’t simply caused pain. It’s robbed me of the will to express myself and share my feelings. Like a black hole it eats up everything, and even the desire for emotional release gets stillborn by its silent, throbbing vacuum. I cannot write about the experience of depression, because depression is not an experience but an anti-experience, an unexperience. When I am depressed, I am not experiencing the grace and the love of God; I am not experiencing hope for the future; I am not experiencing fellowship and love with my friends and family; I am not experiencing any sort of meaning or purpose or resonance. Depression for me is defined not just by what I have felt but what I have not felt, what I have been unable to feel. Depression, for me, is not simply the presence of unhealthy thought patterns and painful emotions; it is an absence, an inability to experience the world in the way it was meant to be experienced.
So depression robs me even of the will to write about how sucky things are and how horrible the world is and how everyone should pity me, which usually wouldn’t take that much effort to do. When I am depressed I have nothing to offer, nothing unique or worthwhile to say, and no energy to express anything that might be worth saying. As someone who deeply desires visible human connection and thrives on reciprocal communication, my depression is marked quite starkly by my silence. Not a “pregnant” silence, but a barren one. A silence that expresses no meaning, and has no meaning in itself.
So here I am, writing a blog post, breaking the silence. Good sign, right? I certainly hope so. But the way I feel day to day varies so much, and I know I still have far to go. But now, at least, the silence does not have the last word. It has a context. I don’t know if I can give meaning to the silence, to the unexperience of depression/Bipolar. It is intrinsically not just meaning-less but un-meaning-full: something that devours meaning and dissipates it completely.
But this is a start, a beginning. The silence, the emptiness, the void, is not invincible. It is not insurmountable. A bit of writing is not much. But it is more than I had before, more than I had yesterday or three months ago. It is a witness to something beyond unlife, unexperience, unmeaning. It might even be hope, and hope does not disappoint us.
I like books. I like reading them, of course, but I also have an unhealthy fascination with touching them, looking at them, purchasing them and collecting them. All of these activities are only tangentally related to the fundamental act of reading, but I justify my continued enjoyment of them by insisting (to myself; no one else has cared to notice) that they are all connected, in a sense, to reading.
This might carry weight (with me, or in a court of law) if I read a significant percentage of the books I acquire. Right now it is quite pathetic. I am sure the proverbial children in India would do a much better job of availing themselves of their avaliable resources were they to obtain the few hundred books I have in my possession. I do honestly love to read, but somehow I find myself engaging more often in other activities, like compulsively refreshing Facebook or checking and re-chechking the college football-related sites linked to in my sidebar.
What inspired this confession is the fact that there are 454 books on my Amazon wish list. And the propect of whittling them down to 8 – 1o for a birthday wish list just depressed me. There are two I know I want, but beyond that . . . 452? Paralysis by choice. Egads.
I think I will now go read my Sociology textbook and listen to . . . “The Everglow” by Mae. It fits today. It pretty much fits life.
Today is . . . Saturday? No, Sunday. Sonntag. Sonntag, 14 Juni. Einundvierzehn.
I can’t remember what happened yesterday because nothing did. Which was sad, becuase Thursday and Friday represented the first two days consecutive days that I spent with people in my own peer group since I arrived here in Germany. On Thursday we bowled, sadly. I consider bowling the least enjoyable and least constructive social activity people can take part in, becaus a) bowling sucks and b) when you’re not bowling there isn’t any real chance for conversation.
Friday was better, because we went down to the Schlossgarten in downtown Stuttgart and ate at a biergarten. A biergarten is like the kind of outdoor cafe you might find in Italy, France, or Spain, except it’s bigger, with a long wooden table and benches, and the emphasis is on the Bier rather than the Kaffee. I did not get any bier, for personal reasons, but I suppose one of these days before I leave Germany (who knows when that will be) I will have the take the plunge and get a giant frothing mug of dunkelweissen or pilz or what have you.
On this same occasion we went down and played with the big chess sets in the park. I owned my American opponent, and would have mated him more quickly if he didn’t have four old German guys trying to point out the right move. Then I played a German guy my age who obviously did this habitually (I offered to play black and he said, “No, no, I’m practicing black.” Bad news.)
Anyway, it was a day spent out of my American terrarium, and I was able to use my limited Deutsch (Wie heissen Sie? Woher kommen Sie?) on one of the on-lookers to our high-stakes, super-exciting chess match.
Hopefully this (the spending time with peers and / or the conversing with Real, Living Germans) will become a trend in the near future. As opposesd to a single, solitary point pinned to an otherwise empty co-ordinate plane, which is what it is now. That lonely, lonely, little point.
Things are shaping up to be pretty odd.
In which I display my astonishing lexical ignorance and chronicle my pursuit of an expanded functional vocabulary.
Prorogue, verb. Transitive: defer, postpone. Intransitive: to suspend or end a legislative session.
Context: Through edicts and bulls, inquisitions and excommunications, the church has attempted to prorogue truth and place an impenetrable stone wall in the path of the truth-seeker (Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981. p. 15).
In a sentence:
The cow attempted to prorogue its imminent execution by expelling a powerful release of flatus into the face of the closest farmer.
Here’s your occasional update of all the things on the Internet you should be reading rather than this blog (and judging by my daily stats, you already are).
- OMFGWATCHMEN. Saw it. Hopefully more fleshed out thoughts to follow, but right now I’m a bit ambivalent. I mean, I enjoyed it. But I wasn’t totally blown away by the visuals and I already knew the whole story, so . . . . Honestly, I wasn’t quite sure about my opinion of the movie until the Hendrix version of “All Along the Watchtower” started playing. That song multiplies the awesomeness factor of anything it touches by three powers of rock.
- The Catholic Curmudgeon, AKA J0hn C. Wright, offers his perspective on Watchmen. Here’s a direct quote and useful summary:
And then there is Dr. Manhattan’s big blue penis. This is a penis movie, and there is a lot of penis. Lots of buttocks. Blue buttocks. Giant blue buttocks.The man is a poet, I say.
- However, Wright is a bit down on the movie (and apparently the graphic novel), so I think the beginning portion of Patton Oswalt’s blog post here summarizes my feelings better. Was it perfect? No. But it was as good an adaptation as we were going to get. (HT: Pajiba)
- One last Watchmen link. This review is positive on the whole the same way Wright’s was negative on the whole, but I especially appreciated this comment:
. . . Snyder’s Watchmen is unnecessarily violent at the wrong times . . . and then inexplicably goes soft at the moments when gore is virtually required. I’m referring here to the consequences of the Big Plan, which feel strangely weightless in the movie, partly because (in this cut) no characters we’ve been following are anywhere close to Ground Zero and partly because, unlike every other action sequence in the movie, it’s all very PG-13 all of a sudden. (Contrast this with the opening of Chapter 12 in the comic, which is basically several pages of horrific imagery, unlike anything we’ve yet seen in the story.)
It reminded me of the blood-less, gore-less, barely-mildly-horrific judgment scenes in the Left Behind series (through book four, at least, which is as far as I cared to go).
- If you’re looking for “naked chinese girls,“ this is probably not the place for you. However, if you are looking for some intelligent thoughts on cultural interaction from a close and personal friend of The Blog, you might want to check it out. (For those who are wondering, those three words do appear in the post, just not in that order or context.)
- I love to get my CCM hate on as much as any other culturally-liberal-ish evangelical, but good points in defense of genre are made here.
- This is a little much, especially on an Anabaptist blog. But I have to wonder if some people would think this is worse than if he had admitted to being gay.
- Speaking of being gay, this is a serious article by a man who is Christian, gay and celibate. It’s not an easy thing to be, and he calls on the Church for help and support for himself and other men and women with the same sort of struggles.
- This is a great reflection on an Urbana-sponsored blog (I want to go!) dealing with the “revolutionary” perception of Jesus – no, he wasn’t Mr. Rogers, but he wasn’t Che Guevera, either.
- Debates like these are ultimately focused around our perception and understanding (or lack there-of) of Matt Stafford’s place in the Georgia offense these last two seasons. I (and, I think, much of Bulldog Nation) am happy with our former QB’s offensive production, but can’t shake the feeling that there was something we were missing — some potential that our star QB had yet to tap in to. In any case, I think it’s an question to which we may never get a satisfactory answer, which makes these kinds of discussions ultimately pointless.
- Reasoned thoughts on hell, from a blogger who is, in my estimation, already there — he’s writing a thorough commentary on Tribulation Force, second book in the “Left Behind” series. May God have mercy on his soul.
- “And you experts in the law, woe to you, because you load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.” Do Jesus’ words for the Pharisees and teachers of the Torah in Luke 11:46 also apply to modern-day “eco-Pharisees”? This writer at Jesus Manifesto thinks they might. My own, related thoughts here.
- Street-wise black guy and grizzled veteran white guy team up to face national and international threats, with plenty of action and hijinks along the way. I’m amazed it took someone so long to realize that our Executive Branch is a Hollywood buddy-cop movie in the making. However, I’m more partial to a commenter’s suggestion: Joint Chiefs, a buddy stoner movie. Dude, Where’s My Senate Majority?
- It’s only a short jump from some of the strategies outlined here to this. I’m gonna go ahead and start digging a bomb shelter under our building and stuffing it with some heavy-duty weapons in a futile attempt to survive the coming robo-mutant-mosquito apocalypse.
- A black couple in Illinois has decided to jump on the “Year of Living [Adverb]ially” bandwagon in a controversial way: they’re going to exclusively “buy black” – that is, from black business owners and black service providers. As expected, charges of racism from white America have come flooding in.
My smarmy and unnecessarily sarcastic response: Isn’t it great that we whites are so racially progressive and so completely totally beyond any semblance of racism and prejudice that we can see how obvious it is that the only solution to our racial problems in America is simply to pretend that racial divisions and differences don’t exist? I mean, it’s the blacks who keep raising the race issue; we whites are way beyond it. Now excuse me, I have to go watch a TV show staring white people on my couch and TV I bought from stories owned by white people and then have a late-night snack with food I bought from my local white grocery store, and tomorrow I’m going to drive the car I bought from my white dealership to drop my kids off at their white school and then go to my white church group to hang out with my white friends. Racists!
- Speaking of race and stereotypes, it seems there’s finally a solution for Rhythmic Locomotion Impairment Syndrome, which is common for melanin-deficient human beings like myself.
- Why should this cheesy 80’s ballad hold more significance for me than any other? Because according to this nifty site, it was the #1 song on Billboard on the day I was born. I was hoping for something a little less, um, [the sentiment I would express using the inappropriate sense of the adjective "gay," but for which I can think of no other suitable synonym]. Fortunately, subsequent birthdays coincided with the chart ascendancies of “Baby Got Back,” “Wild Wild West” by Will Smith, and “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry. I have, in my lifetime, owned albums containing two of those three songs. That’s about as much as I’m willing to incriminate myself in that matter. (HT: Tim Keel)
Well, now you know what has been occupying my time over the past week or so when I should have been doing things that were constructive and/or didn’t threaten to afflict me with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Good thing you were so interested.
More Book Blitz, another Link Barrage, and hopefully-coherent thoughts on (OMFG) Watchmen hopefully to follow tomorrow / this week. For now, though:
The good (I’m assuming) people at FlowingData.com (they do charts) have provided some assistance for us right-brainers struggling to make sense of this all this financial gobbledygook. To help us understand the nature and origins of the present fiscal crisis, they have provided over twenty-five handy-dandy hi-res illustrations, with some attendent words (or, in their parlance, “Visualizations and Infographics”). [HT: The Urbanophile]
That’s all well and good. But as far as our stimulus package is concerned, I’ve seen no better visual metaphor than this one:
[There was a video here, but the embed sucked. Balls.]
Quick, now, like a fox — the kind of quick, red fox which is partial to jumping over lazy dogs:
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Review in 11 words or less: Third time is the charm for me. Slow, but above average.*
It Came From Within by Andy Stanley
Review in 10 words or less: Like Donald Miller: so easy to read, it was hard.
Is God to Blame? by Gregory A. Boyd
Review in 9 words or less: Boyd — maybe Open Thiest. Do not care. Big fan.
What Should I Do If Reverend Billy Is In My Store? by Bill Talen
Review in 8 words or less: Felt odd. Disjointed. Thus the Odd God commands . . . ?
A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin
Review in 7 words or less: No Tyrion, Daenerys? Half a book!? Frak!
Yes. So.
The last ten books I’ve read are:
1. A Feast for Crows
2. What Should I Do if Reverend Billy Is in My Store?
3. Is God to Blame?
4. It Came From Within
5. Pattern Recognition
6. Reconcilation Blues by Edward Gilbreath
7. A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin
8. Cross-Cultural Servanthood by Duane Elmer
9. What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey
10. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Currently Reading:
Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God by Gordon Fee
You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It by Michel Gondry
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King, Jr.
*Also: He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots.
So, I booted up my old, unused Twitter account yesterday, hoping to find a way to integrate it into the site, but I’m not sure it’s possible without an upgrade. I’m not a big fan of the idea of Twitter in general, but I figured it would be a quick and easy way to post interesting links. You see, I post a couple links on my Facebook feed every week at least, which isn’t phenomenal but better than I’m doing here. On Facebook, though, the point is just to post the link with minimal or no comment, whereas on a blog, the idea is to “discuss” and “commentate.” These are activities which are surprisingly taxing in my current mental state, but I feel guilty posting just a link on a blog.
Eh, it’s better than nothing. Here’s a balanced and trenchant article about the complexity of building a truly “sustainable” food industry.
Also wins a Silver Duh! for this statement:
The reality of 21st-century America is that food demand is centered in cities, while most arable land is in rural areas.
Jesus Sermon on
the Mount. Funny things written
on shirts. Plantinga.
. . . It feels like somebody took my heart, and dropped it into a bucket of boiling tears. And, at the same time, somebody else is hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer. And then a third guy walks in and starts punching me in the grief bone, and I am crying, and nobody can hear me. Because I am terribly, terribly, terribly alone.
– Michael Scott, Dunder-Mifflin Scranton
I’m not sure that anyone is all that concerned, but the reason that a) I failed to post for a long time (not including the recent week-long-ish spurt) and b) that week-long-ish spurt consisted of absolutely nothing of consequence (and / or interest) is that I am lazy and would rather reload Facebook at five-second intervals and use the intervening time to giggle guiltily at Schadentwitter (i.e., www.fmylife.com) than attempt a meaningful blog post.
Wait. Did I say that? Not what I meant to say. A true explanation, but not the one I was trying to communicate. What I’m trying to say here is that, like Michael Scott, I feel like someone is hitting my soul in the crotch with a frozen sledgehammer. This somewhat dissipates by interest in blogging, and pretty much everything else, actually, except eating, sleeping and re-watching every single episode of Arrested Development.
I’ve never been or wanted to be the whiner, but I find myself at a point in my life where I legitimately have very little positive to say. I’m sure that, like the crew of the intrepid Battlestar Galactica, whose planets were nuked and whose fleet was invaded by robots that looked like humans who attempted to sabotage their fleet and who spent three and a half seasons looking for a mysterious planet called Earth where they could make their home in peace only to find out it was a barren wasteland from whence those cyborgs had come from in the first place, I am indeed making my way toward some kind of happy or at least intellectually satisfying conclusion. (I’m playing “All Along the Watchtower” a lot to make sure this happens.)
Until then, though.
