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Part 1 of Without Sin.

Too Big for Words.

When I was young I thought everyone’s life was essentially the same. I don’t mean I thought people were all just like me, I mean I thought the core conditions related to being human beings are largely similar.

Our home lives, our school experience, our difficulty making and keeping friends. Our always getting called out for squirming or talking when we were supposed to be working and not crawling under our desks. I think it was sometime in third grade that I realized not everything is our shared experience, and in fact, hardly anything really is.

I learned it was just me when I had a crush on a girl in the class, and I had the feeling she was laughing at me with her friends behind my back about it, even though I hadn’t said it out loud, especially to her. I felt embarrassed because I had the feeling everyone else knew what I felt and what I felt she was doing. I felt that the whole class was against me and I got so angry about it that I was nearly in tears from my internalized dialogue about what I felt was going on. I heard her laugh. It felt like she was laughing at me. I grabbed my faux leather Members Only jacket that I was unseasonably wearing and whipped it toward them. I’m pretty certain I wasn’t close enough to hit them, but they were scared. I was scared.

Feelings aren’t facts, but I remember wishing that the feeling of people laughing at me was what they were doing now, because all they were doing was looking. I felt their eyes. All these years later, I can still feel their eyes on me wondering what in the actual hell was going wrong with me. Honestly, I wanted to know that too. It didn’t feel like I did that, but I had my faux leather Members Only jacket in my hand and acid in my throat.

“Sometimes we all have feelings too big for words,” I tell my six year old. These feelings were too big not to burst out of me because I didn’t know how to separate my feelings from my identity. I didn’t know what it meant to externalize and observe my thoughts. I didn’t have the capacity to leave the gym because I was a student, and I hadn’t learned the discipline to process before acting.

I was in third grade and I can have a little empathy for myself now, but then? All I knew is that this is what the big feelings bring — the sense that people don’t care what’s going on with me; they just want whatever’s wrong with me to stop. God, I wanted that too.

Good Enough

Anger and its friend displaced rage were with me a lot until my twenties, but I’d learned since third grade that I could just hate myself instead of everyone else most of the time. It wasn’t until I took a psychology class and learned the Cognitive Behavioral Model of therapy that I first learned I’m not my feelings and my feelings aren’t me. I learned the discipline to choose to become an observer of my emotions and my thoughts.

At least in college I felt like my own self-medication gave me some sense of control. I was much better suited to the rhythm of college classes than the hellish constructs of high school, but I wouldn’t really understand and unravel my anger and displaced rage until I was nearly thirty, and had the good fortune to land a year-long residency in a Clinical Pastoral Education program. After a year, and a lot of intense work learning to become vulnerable, I was finally able to name what I’d misnamed for all these years.

I wasn’t angry.

I was wounded.

I was bleeding.

I felt like my heart was dying.

I was grieving not being the husband I wanted to be and not being the person I wanted to be. At my core, I think I was also still mourning the good enough child I could never be.

I was grieving my entire life of teachers “letting me” try again after one more time not attaining my potential. I was still unconsciously lamenting all those new chances teachers and adults always talked about in front of me and sometimes at me. So many conversations where they’d tell me this is a fresh start; or, now that we “all” agreed that I’ll finally apply myself, toe the line, carry my weight, and so on. I could now, finally, reach all that potential everyone was always telling me I had as they looked at me disappointedly.

“It’s obvious you don’t care because you don’t even try to complete the homework.”

I did try, but I just couldn’t move the pencil. Besides, they were right of course because they’re the teachers. They know. I obviously just didn’t want it enough, because — if I really did — if I actually wanted it badly enough before the next new chance arrived too quickly on the heels of the last, I could’ve reached it.

“All you have to do is try, Eric. Show me the effort. You just haven’t applied yourself enough to the tasks before you or you’d have completed them. I know you can do it if you just try hard enough.”

I tried. I tried, I tried, I tried.

And then I tried again, made promises to my parents, teachers, and JEE-sus (it was the South) that I’d finally get it right this time.

That old song about the new chances kept coming round again, five hundred eighty-second verse, same as the first. And that familiar refrain came with it. “I’m just not motivated enough / don’t want it badly enough / refuse to really apply myself enough. / Just never been enough.

Why did being me mean I had to feel so defective all the time?

By now, I knew it really was just me.

Bridge

This is the moment, when writing something that touches on some of my most vulnerable places I own, that I feel the pressing need to walk it all back. I feel the unstoppable need to reassure you my life wasn’t bad. My life at home was pretty well fine. People who should love me, did. We were members of a congregation where I felt mostly like I fit in. I feel the need to say that, only partially because it’s all true; but also because I still get hung up on everything that’s wrong with me.

Why can I never be good enough?

Made New

I was twenty-three. I wrote a short ninety-something page book as I was trying to sort out my head to marry the love I still love. I was wrestling with all the trying and all the wanting it. I was facing a second senior year in college, and even though I played it off like I planned it all along, like I frequently still try to do, I was embarrassed and hurting because, five months before the wedding, I felt like I’d let us down already.

I felt like I didn’t know myself enough to be enough for her. I didn’t know my own damn heart or mind, how could I when I felt like I was looking up from an island in the middle of nowhere where even the constellations were different?

After years of longing to be enough and failing every time, I was staring up at a stranger’s sky.

I lost my own a long time ago.

Continue to Part 2: Done Being Good