In the constantly penetrating clarity that comes after relinquishing an addiction, I found myself bombarded with things I do not like about myself. It sucked. Still does. Every day shows me some new thing I thought about my world or myself because it was convenient or fed my ego, which led to a habit or a perspective that I hold now and have to deal with.
The hardest and most discombobulating thought I had and didn’t realize for the subtly woven lie it was struck me as I was doing dishes. This annoying still small voice pointed out that I kept thinking: Jesus loves me, so He understands. If _______ knew me like He does, ________ would understand and love me, too. Yeah, Jesus loves me (He’d have to to have not un-made me by now), but His death was justification for my sin, not for my arrogance. By that I mean, Christ died so that He could hang out with me, not so He would have to go around constantly explaining my behavior to other people.
I always thought it was so cool to be dark and Gothic, but allowing myself to wallow in the idea of apathy and overly dark views of life only left me with a bloated vision of the world, completely blinded to the way my behavior or ideas affected others. I was the spiritual/emotional equivalent to that one constantly drunk friend everyone else had to explain and apologize for, but it was OK in my head – because Jesus loved me, and that made it all OK. I told myself that so often it became a mantra, especially when that still small voice would whisper to me that I was being a complete, bumbling idiot.
A smart-mouthed friend of mine repeats this snarky comment he heard somewhere: “Jesus loves you... but the rest of us think you’re a serious pain,” and there’s a lot of truth to that. I was a Christian; I knew Jesus loved me. He was legally and intrinsically obligated to, and it never crossed my mind that He might want me to behave so that He could like me, too. He’s God, after all; why should He care? Short answer: Because the crazy drunk friend is the only one having fun at the party. Ever. And that sucks. For everyone.
I really didn’t mean to be the fun-sucker, but then, no one ever says, yeah, I want to be an addict when I grow up. There were rules to follow, I knew them. Seeing what problems other people had, I realized (with my uniquely twisted logic) that crazy isn’t crazy as long as it’s functional. In the South, that’s just quirky. As long as I kept getting up in the morning, going to work, going to church, no one found drugs or porn on my computer during company time, I could slide inspection. I was fine. If there were raised eyebrows or worried looks, well, screw 'em. Jesus loved me. If they knew me like He did, they’d love me, too.
So… what changed? A lot of little things, then some really big ones.
Church hadn’t been on my list of important things to do for quite some time, partly due to some of the things that happened to me as a kid, and partly because I don’t buy that God lives in a single building on a single day anymore than I buy He digs one denomination over another. Keeping Christian friends mattered more, because there were verses about not forsaking or abandoning the gathering together, but that could happen at Starbuck’s or a book club meeting. I kept them around like I kept certain books on my shelf: if anyone asked, they were there and I could reference them as evidence of my acceptability. I was covered. I was good.
Weirdly enough, a book club friend of mine morphed into one of the little things that changed. She, being the darn Christian hippie she was, kept talking about claiming and naming the things we are, and loosing and shedding the things that we are not. She knew I wrote poetry, loved books and had a mad, passionate love affair with words, so, in the middle of one meeting, she just out and blurted that I was a writer. It... was like being called a slur! I was shocked. I was no writer! Writers, well, write. They’re published and talk about books all the time, attend readings or workshops, and change the world. Everyone wants to see the world the way they do, and they’re the cool, intellectually mysterious people that get invited to everything because they’ll always have something profound or pithy to say. I was no writer… I said to a table of blank stares and bemused glances.
So, said my friend, if you went to a workshop or convention, you’d be a writer? Still thinking they were sweet little Christian friends of mine who really didn’t have contact with the real world, I thought about it for a split second and said, basically, yeah. She nodded, and e-mailed me information about a convention the next week.
I thought, well, OK, whatev. Jesus still knows me, still loves me. I’m still weird and cool and… that’s what matters. I’m still OK. I’m not terrified of not having anything to say, or having to deal with all the… well, stuff I’m not dealing with right now because it doesn’t exist. I’m still good.
Reading about the convention, my cynicism positively abounded like a sugar-fed puppy in an open park with no leash. It was a Christian convention. There was no way anyone would be interested in what I had to say, or what I had written. They’re all into light, fluffy stuff, full of hope and romance and cute, pink flowers attached for no apparent reason. I would not belong (yet again), and I could go back to my collection of Christian token friends and a God I mostly talked to during bi-annual ladies’ retreats or yelled at in my car.
Except that little writer label comment from my friend, and the little e-mail she’d sent me, and the little, constant feeling I was supposed to be doing something other than what I was gelled into this really big thing in my head. The convention was a few months away, which gave me time to think about it, and that thought kept getting stealthily bigger.
I knew I was absolutely and positively screwed when I walked into a generic big box bookstore and found a Christian magazine talking about social justice, irony in modern society, and what a dark, complex piece the latest Mickey Rouke movie was. My brain stuttered, double-clutched, then froze.
Wait, this isn’t right. Christians are supposed to be all pious and three-piece suits on Sundays. They’re not supposed to talk to their priest over red wine, admitting when they screw up and aren’t decent human beings. Why do they have to be decent human beings, anyway? Jesus loves Christians, and if everyone else saw them like Jesus did… oh, wait… Christians aren’t supposed to expect everyone else to understand them, and then love them. They’re supposed to do good things that help other people, so that there’s a reason for others to want to understand them. Um. Merde. I hate when everything I thought I knew isn’t true at all anymore; I’m left wondering when the Earth went from being flat to spherical, and how everyone else but me seemed to know it all along.
It’s been 3 months and 18 days since I had my last serious hit, though it feels like years longer. I’m having dinner, ironically enough, tonight with a Christian friend of mine who also wants to make a difference in the world. Neither one of us have figured out quite how to do it yet, but she is a story-conveyor the way I am a writer, so it’s just a matter of time. In the constantly blinding luminosity that defines relinquishing an addiction, I find my world and myself colored and affected by my previous actions and choices. It sucks in some ways, but cleaning up one’s messes the morning after isn’t really the definition of the party. It’s just what decent human beings do. They admit mistakes were made, and by God’s grace, try to make better mistakes in the future.
