understand

This is my seventh time to come back to this post and feel an inclination that I need to write that I’m not depressed somewhere in this introduction, which started as a handful of sentences and has, quite obviously, grown. But I want to say it, right at the top, right out in the open, that I am not at present struggling deeply, at least, not anymore than I always seem to be. How to explain this? I’m not a whole person. Sure, that’ll do.

This is partly about me, well, it’s entirely about me, but it’s also not about me. In reading this over, I realize that for some it will seem rather dark and perhaps even alarming. It’s not. And I’m telling you now that if you don’t understand this, there’s someone in your life who does. I didn’t write this to try and soften things or play nice with myself. This is the raw, the chafe, the rub that sits inside you and makes your legs tingle. So if you don’t understand this post, my apologies, but it means you need to read it again. Slowly. Because there is someone in your life who understands it and they desperately need you to understand. That’s all, nothing more. They only need you to understand. What comes after that comes because understanding came first.

I wrote this for a handful of people I have been talking to lately and I have sensed that they have wanted to say similar things, so I wrote it for them, for us, for my tribe. I’m so grateful for all of you in this tribe of insecurity and uncertainty. Some days we just help each other float. Comments, tweets, phone calls. Thank you. This is for you.

It’s late. The cookies, the last of them, are just out of the oven. Tomorrow is another day, either in this world or the one to come. I am grateful for tomorrows, what handful or storehouse I may have of them left.

—

What am I trying to say here?

This post feels as if it should be a piece of performance poetry, no meter or line, no structure except in the rhythm of syllables that spill and spill again, tumbling onto the page and pooling in your hands like rorschach blots. A confusion, but a beautiful one, one that terrifies you with how beautiful it is when everything within you tells you that it should not be. No, never. Not this. This thing cannot be beautiful.

What am I trying to say here?

I’m trying to say that I need you, quiet and silent reader, friend, to understand.

And that’s all I need. I need no hand to hold or letter, I need no comfort or grace save this: that you want to understand.

I need you to understand that I’m tired of people who look at the sin in their lives and act like getting by is just enough, as if this should then be a comfort to me, because I too could just get by, get by and act like these things didn’t frustrate and exasperate my being, even into my fingers that can’t help but claw at keys to try and make sense of these things.

I need you to understand that I’m tired of people who look at the sin in their lives and act like putting them into categories fixes things, as if organizing sin into bins from the The Container Store until they are all sorted by kind and deed and color and degree somehow makes them manageable, sortable, and God is now ready to play maid and clear them away.

I need you to understand that my being is a vast globe and I think yours is too, a highly developed and abundant planet, full of some beautiful sights and some horrible places. Forests stretch for miles without interruption, seas are endless and explode against the shore in praise. But there are places of darkness, not to be ignored, not to be placed into categories, but ecosystems, fully evolved, rooted deep and for so long, grown into a kind of truncated maturity and the axe doesn’t even know where to begin to be leveled to clear them away.

This is the expanse of me. This is my self laid raw before you. I am not satisfied with the lands that have been overgrown by a foreign vegetation and plagued by a strange disease.

I need you to understand that the deep seed of fear is the question of atrophy.

Have these limbs of this world in this quiet place in the midst of the universe gone too long under the power of these foreign invaders? Can these dead bones of earth and water rouse to life again and return to their rightful home and no longer be refugees?

Which bones, oh which, are even dead?

I need you to understand that there is nothing pretty about being someone who thinks all the time and doesn’t know how to stop. I need you to understand that my truest self, my deepest self, is not even sure who it is sometimes. I need you to understand that my faith in God does not shake when these questions come, but my faith in myself and my usefulness to Him becomes like water falling through a colander that I in vain try to keep stopped with my hands.

I need you to understand that this is not depression, that this is not the worst it could be, that I know that, that I am aware of that, but that it does not negate the depth to which I feel these things. I need you to understand that this is not self pity or my desire to be difficult or different. I need you to understand that I am jealous of you if you have never felt this way and I am sorry for you at the same time.

(Because that’s the secret. To feel this deeply in the bad makes how you feel in the good unspeakably beautiful. It’s the trade off, a cosmic fail-safe that keeps me going each and every day.)

I need you to understand that this is now.

This is where we stand. This is the present moment. There will be moments to come where this is not the thought, these lands not the place for battle.

But for now. This is where we are.

I am complex. I am bursting. I am unconfined all the time.

I need you to understand.

I need you to understand that desiring to understand is the most gracious and beautiful and sacred gift you could ever give to another person. So I’m asking for it now.

We’re all recovering from something.

This is my now: ecosystems; highly evolved.

Prune, prune, prune again. Hack, hack, away, away. Come, Lord Jesus, come.

Please understand.

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.