Teen Angst

by M83 is currently stuck in my head. And the title might be fitting for this post in a way.

(...wait, I'm not a teenager anymore?? I don't think it's ever hit me that I'm past those years. I don't feel like I'm that much different personality-wise than I was back in high school. ...it also hasn't hit me that I'm going to be in my last year in college. AAGH.)

So last night I had two dreams. In the first dream I was directly experiencing a video game that played like a more action-heavy version of that PS3 game Heavy Rain. If you don't know what Heavy Rain is, it's an "interactive drama" in the sense that you're basically watching a really long drama, but you have control over how the events play out by making decisions for the main characters and performing quick time events, which affect whether or not characters survive life threatening encounters and stuff.

So I was directly experiencing a more fast paced version of that which involved me flying through the air, attempting to infiltrate a hotel building to stop a gang of crooks that was trying to release some kind of toxic gas into the air. The first time around, I failed to make it in time to catch the crooks but I managed to absorb most of the gas into this magical... orange I was carrying while I was flying. The second time around, I almost made it in time but got attacked in a glass hallway by some crazy catlady-like person who I hadn't been able to prevent from going insane earlier in the game. The third time around, when I was flying I crashed into the glass hallway and landed on top of her, knocking her unconscious, but then something else happened that I can't remember as I was running up the hotel's stairs. But yeah, I don't think I ever caught the crooks in that dream.

But that dream has nothing to do with what I was going to talk about - the second dream. In this dream, I was at home (but for some reason it felt like it was my apartment) and I was in the middle of talking to two people when two more people showed up at the front door. And then they proceeded to start preparing a cake for someone I knew without actually telling me what they were doing, because I hadn't been part of the planning/participating party for this person's birthday. It didn't really help so much that I could clearly see what they were doing, although in retrospect it was kinda strange that they were expecting a cake to materialize from stirring something in a boiling soup pot. And then I woke up.

Lately I've been noticing that my dreams have been getting less frequently random and more frequently reflecting something that's been going in my head for a while. I'm going to leave the people that were in the second dream anonymous, but they were directly related to the experiences I've had with celebrating birthdays of people I felt closer to in the past. Or not celebrating birthdays with.

I've mentioned this before on an earlier post in this blog, but I have this paranoia of not being involved in celebrating the birthday or surprising people I know. Or more specifically, of not being invited or notified when people are planning out birthdays or getting gifts. I also have this irrational desire of getting to know everyone I know well enough so that I can feel "eligible" to celebrate their birthday with them. It's kinda stupid and petty, but it's there. Part of it does stem from a genuine wanting to know people better, but there's also a selfish motivation in wanting to be involved with people's lives. I start feeling left out and jealous when I'm not involved, especially with people who I feel like I knew "well enough."

In many ways I've wound up using circumstances like these to gauge of how good of a friend I've been. I start valuing myself based on whether or not/how people react to seeing me and how close I am to the people I know, and I start being more reclusive whenever I get any sense or hint of a negative or nonexistent reaction from people.

This week at Chapter Camp was in a ways a major reflection of that. I do not function well when I'm surrounded by a lot of people that I don't really know that well, and consequently, Chapter Camp being just that, I wound up isolating myself a lot. I didn't really realize it so much at first, as a lot of the time I was either napping out of sleep deprivation or reading/reflecting/praying, which was convenient to do at an outdoors camp with little phone reception and convenience of internet. But towards the end of camp, when it got to the point that I missed the big camp picture because I stayed around at a prayer ministry session a little longer to ask questions... I dunno. I mean, of course I couldn't help that it happened, but I still felt a bit upset about it. I still made it in time for all the random group pictures that got taken afterwards, but none of them were groups that I had been a part of, and I just felt... alone. Again.

That night, when prayer ministry was being offered, I wrote out a prayer in my journal along the lines of searching for humility. The talk that the pastor gave that night looked at a section of Philippians and went back to the basic roots of Christianity, Jesus himself. The amount of suffering and torture that he went through, for the sake of loving people who couldn't care less about him, even though he deserved so much more. "Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing..."

and I thought about myself. I didn't really deserve the kind of attention I wanted because I hadn't really tried that hard to really know people; I just gave up the moment I felt that other people had stopped trying. And here I was, whining about how lonely I was feeling. Totally the opposite of Jesus. At least I wasn't being tortured for anything. At least I wasn't dying for anyone's sake.

So I asked God for humility. To learn how to love people even when I didn't really know them, regardless of whether or I actually felt like they merited that kind of love from me. To learn how to love people even after I had become sick of being around them. To learn how to exalt my peers, to serve them in humility, to at least barely grasp some semblance of the qualities that Jesus exemplified. I was sick of feeling jaded of people, of the selfishness of my own heart. It's a very idealistic desire, I know. But given the context of what we'd been learning this past week... I wanted it.

And then after prayer was over, I was planning to go to bed early cause I'd had a headache for most of the night for some reason, when I was approached by a friend who came up to me and apologized for not being transparent with me when I'd been transparent and opened up with that person, because that person was personally having problems being transparent. I didn't think much of it at the time. I hadn't even realized that this person hadn't been transparent with me in the past. I was still in the state of feeling like I had done nothing to merit anything from most people, of totally blaming myself and my selfish social desires for anything lack of closeness I had in all of my relationships.

And so I walked back to the cabin afterwards, singing to myself. And halfway to the cabin, I broke down and cried. I can't entirely explain why I did even now, except perhaps for the sense of realizing that it wasn't only me who responsible for the problems stated earlier. But then that led to a feeling of, "wait, if people aren't talking to me even when I'm trying,  then WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WRONG???"

I know that that feeling isn't true. It's not all about what I'm doing wrong. But as I was walking, that was all that I could think about. And it made me feel so pathetic inside that I continued sobbing while walking... except for a moment when I passed by two of the seniors. And then when I was in the cabin and ran into one of the other junior guys. By then it'd mostly subsided. I got into bed and tried to sleep, but I couldn't because I'd taken a nap earlier after the silent retreat, so I felt wide awake in bed and with a headache. So I took my journal out and reread the prayer I'd written. And I sobbed again. I could hear my yells echoing throughout the empty cabin.

An hour and a half later, the rest of the junior guys came back and wound up talking/stuff for another hour or so. And while part of me really wanted to join them, I held back because I didn't feel comfortable seeing them in the state I was in. And I didn't have the heart to tell anyone to shut up so I could sleep. I didn't want to be person who stopped everyone from having fun. And it was a miserable hour lying there, and I felt like there was a mental war going on in my head - fighting between feelings of wanting to yell at everyone, feelings of just wanting to end my misery and sleep, feelings of feeling left out and wanting to join everyone. I banged my head against the pillow, against the wall, sneaked a glance at the journal hoping to trigger another crying spell - at this point I was hitting my personal all-time low. I tried praying silently, but in the midst of the moment, I felt too overwhelmed emotionally to say anything.

I eventually was able to fall asleep after coming to two thoughts. The first being the realization that this was God's answer to my prayer. If I really wanted to become "like him" in the sense of learning to love people unconditionally, and to become humble, I would have to face situations like this in which I would feel totally hopeless and abandoned. In which all of the voices in my mind, whether self-generated or from something else, would be screaming against the people I'd said I wanted to love, would be clamoring for the gratification of my own pathetic self-pity. This would only be the beginning of a challenge that I'd have to face for the rest of my life.

The other was that a subtle, reassuring thought in the back of my head. Of someone telling me, "Ryan, isn't my love enough for you?"

The following night the junior guys had a prayer meeting where we each opened up about what was going on in our lives and prayed in one voice for each other. And I pretty much let this story out, after nearly doing so twice earlier in the day when they were asking for testimonies. And it was really good. I don't really have much else to say there, except that I love the junior guys. A lot. Even if I don't know all of them that well yet.

This past week has been just one whirlwind after another of flurrying emotions, thoughts, reflections, events, and so on. I think it's apparent from the dream I had last night that I haven't quite gotten out of the pitiful angsty mentality I've entrenched myself in in the past, but I've managed to make some progress in learning to cope with it and move on with my life. If anything, I've been feeling a lot more motivated and excited to learn more about what God has in store for me in the future, whether it be through studying Scripture, the reading I have planned for this summer, new summer/next year experiences... I feel pretty optimistic.

Here's to looking at next year.