On the Oddity of Sanity

Reading through my blog on Myspace...I just sort of have come to the realization that circumstances have been changing inside and around me...but I, myself, am not changing.

The same pain I felt a year ago, two years ago...it is all the same.

How much am I to blame for this? Is this my fault for not healing? Have I refused to allow any light inside of me, is it just because I love the darkness too much?

It's not like I sent out a sincerely humble request that I be born in the summer of 1986. Personally, I like to think that if I would have been told in advance I was coming to earth (assuming we exist in any form pre-earth form, but that is another migraine for another time that should only be taken in this current context for it's somewhat forthcoming comedic value)I would have gone kicking, screaming and grabbing onto anything bolted down, rather then take a one way ticket down here.

I am Matthew Adam Pike. The son of David and Pam, the grandson of a group of mostly dead people who of only one I was close to (Clovis, my mom's mom) and only one other I know of is alive (John, my dad's dad). I have a lot of aunts, uncles and a lot of cousins.

I was born in the great year of 1986 in a hospital in Birmingham and a couple of days later was brought to live in this small village called Jemison.

Honestly, I really doubt many people choose to live here willingly. They were either born here, ran out of gas/money while traveling, have no concept of a bigger world or are simply masochistic at heart. There could be the rare person that enjoys it here but I will simply chalk that up to mad rumors or cases of temporal insanity.

I went to the aptly named Jemison Elementary and High schools. Grew up around the same group of people most of my life as well, be it at school or church. I vaguely remember a few names here and there but that isn't the important part, what matters is that it was the typical small town in the south eastern section of the United States in the 1990's up until 2004.

The people lived out their confusing teenage thoughts full of grand schemes and impossible quantities of dramatic angst (of which I am only slightly guilty of both).

I'm not sure which is more amazing, the fact I managed to survive all these years of schooling while being such a nut case or the face I managed to do so in such a way that it actually looked like I knew what I was doing.

I myself endured horrors such as a five year long crush on a girl, awkward ideas as to what fashion was, somehow being the leader of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (when I have no athletic bone in my body and none of the main members were athletes. Seriously people, how did we do that for four years with no name change? Has anyone taken a marketing class since then?), a ridiculous amount of time in band only pretending to play saxophone (you try doing marching formations with a twenty lbs sax swinging from your neck and see if you can play a note), so many throughly bizarre experiences with religion, spirituality, church and the like...I mean I could go on but we all have lives like this.

We all have good and bad memories.

Some are amazing and cause our hearts to pound almost out of our chest...other memories make our faces burn and tears start to run out...bitter sweet moments of love and stabbing betrayals of the heart.

Things that make absolutely no sense and still we have to accept and move on.

Utterly bizarre contradictions of our own personal character and being and yet, yet we still live and we still have to push on.

Music, words and friendships are the three things that have kept me sane over the years.


Music.
I honestly have no clue what it is that makes me love music as desperately as I do. Really, I do not understand music theory all that well and have incredibly sub par skills, yet I was able to bluff my way in marching band for six years and supposedly I have been in a real band for the past nine years...not sure what those count for but it does count for something in my mind.

I have to listen to music and when I do it sweeps me away. I attach memories, thoughts, hopes, daydreams, my writings and everything in life to songs. There are certain songs I listen to when I am sad, when I am happy, when I cry, when I hurt, when I feel like being silly, when I need encouragement and when I just have to break down and realize how little of life really matters.

Nothing I have ever experience can come close to the extreme rush of playing on stage. The drymouth and pre-show shakes you get before every show, no matter how small or big the audience. The incredible beating of your heart as you take the stage and you hear the drums erupt like a canon, the aggressive riffs fly from the guitar and then you know, you just KNOW you are going to screw up your cue...but by some miracle of God you manage to slide your fingers up the neck of the bass and start to crank out some sort of deep rumbling throb that is nothing short of a purpose giving beat.

Why do I love playing so much, being in a band?

It is a way of having identity and fellowship. I am a bass player at heart. I see no reason to play music unless you are working with others, I have ALWAYS have trouble practicing without having others around, partly because I am lazy and partly because of the need for the collaboration. The need to feel wanted and needed. It is nice, it is easy and the attention itself is so addicting.

Having a personality that is easily addicted and that thrives off of highs and lows...it is easy to loose yourself and forget who you are...happens every day of my life.

Every now and then I just have this overwhelming urge to play music again, to find a way back on a stage...but honestly I have no clue how healthy that is anyway.



Friendships and Relationships.
Two loaded words in my vocabulary.

I have always claimed that to me, my friends are what I consider to be my true family. Which is something I have always done out of a deep seated fear of family. I didn't have a perfect life growing up but, who actually did? If I had to endure the personal Hell's that some of my friends have been through I would have died, no question.

Why do some people seem to suffer more then others? Is it simply reaping what we sow? Maybe just the fact we are all screw ups anyway and how the dice fall is how they fall?

I like to think I am a fairly tolerant person but when I hear fellow Christians go on excessively about how we all deserve pain, we all deserve punishment for our sins...part of me agrees but at the same time, no one deserves the pain in their life. No matter how horrible, how evil or how screwed up they are...we all deserve love, we are supposed to be made in the imago dei, image of God, and that alone makes someone worthy of love.

Call me crazy but all of the Adolf Hitlers and leaders of genocide in the history of the world might have be a bit less crazy if they were hugged as a kid. Maybe if instead of being told how much garbage they were, it might have helped them to know that they could be accepted and loved for who they are and not who they should be. We can get into playing the what if game all day but it is still just a thought. People have to be taught to hate just as much as they have to be taught selfless and sacrificing love.

I go into that tangent for a slight purpose, I am starting to think to believe that so much of human behavior is a mixture of the chemicals exploding in our brains mixed with however we grew up.

Even if I wouldn't have grown up in a rather bad home life, I would have been a very odd and very neurotic human being. Factor in the fact I grew up in a situation where I have never seen a sane marriage or what it means to be an adult male...we sort of start to have a pattern that I believe has drastically shaped my life without knowing it.

Something that has always baffled me is how people tend to apologize to me when I say my parents got divorced when I was three and then my dad died when I was eight (or something along those lines). Don't get me wrong, it sucks but if I were to film out every last memory I have of my dad, what an odd sounding video, it would take up maybe fifteen minutes tops.

Why would people apologize? I mean, sure it is nicer then someone just laughing at me, but at the same time it is almost like they are not just apologizing for the bad circumstances but apologizing for me missing something deep and unexplainable.

I mean, it is almost like there is a REASON why we have two parents, a mother and a dad. Some sort of mystical thing that happens when you have two parents raising a kid, novel idea in todays world.

I'm starting to think that part of the reason why I tend to be so...odd, terrified of love, scared of even reasonable commitment...is because of not having a dad, not really seeing how the right kind of relationship should work.

I seem to recall reading in Anne Lamott's book "Traveling Mercies" where she mentions experiments with lab rats. That the way to ensure a rat becomes insane is to frequently and randomly change the variables in any experiments involving it. It eventually will get to a point where the rat is terrified and neurotic, it doesn't know if stepping on the switch will give it food or electrocute it and...as odd as this is I relate well to that story.

Every relationship in my life is like a switch in a rat cage. I step on it and (bearing in mind this is how my mind views things)either I get a rewarding and tasty piece of cheese (which would be an indulgent and easy stroke of my ego, some sort of affirmation of acceptance, a hug, affection or whatever) or I get a shock of the lifetime and it might be these horrible situations but...more often then naught, it is merely just dealing with hearing a valid criticism, someone loosing their temper, hearing about how disappointed with me someone is, etc.

The huge headache for me is that I am not sure how to separate the good from the bad. What I mean is that there gets to be a point where relationships become more then superficial and it terrifies me deeply. We're talking absolute fear among other things...and then it just gets to the point where I cannot tell the good from the bad. Things become really jumbled in my head and I start uncontrollably flinching when I'm touched or I jump at loud noises...weird things but it is a deep seated part of me.

So deep that I am not sure where any of it ends or begins. Could this be part of me that was made when I was born into a family with only superficial bonds?

What do you do with this? I have always felt excessively guilty about not loving my family more but to me the easiest thing is to just not care. It is easier to lock myself in my mind and segregate myself from my surroundings then it is to actually live with others. There are a lot of parts of me that no one has seen and that never want to be seen by another human.

The biggest crime anyone dating me has done is simply wanting to get to know me and unknowingly a point is reached where they hit these incredibly sensitive nerves and I responded by leaping about twelve feet in the air screaming about lemons and upon landing I would dive out the nearest window ranting about how the British were coming and Paul Revere needed to be warned.

I promise I'm not crazy.

I'm just special, in ways that only a mother and Jesus could truly appreciate.



Writing.
Why do i write?
The basic math I can figure is such:

A quarter therapeutic, a quarter for reasons of keeping my sanity, a quarter for self gratification, a quarter for having fun, a quarter because I do not know what else to do and a quarter way to express what I deem to be humor. I have always been bad at math.

There is escapism for sure but at the same time part of me just demands I write. Similar to the parts of me that demand I play music, demand I tell at least one person a year that Jesus loves them and that reminder that my one meal a day is just not healthy.

I want to write and so I do.

I want to write amazing prose, thrilling stories and use vocabulary words that even I am not sure of their meaning. So far the only of those I feel I somewhat accomplished with any real measure of absolute competency is the last one.

I would love to write songs, poems, thrilling stories but it seems like the only thing I can do that I won't delete or hide under my bed are these annoying essays about myself. Seriously, I feel like I am the worlds biggest narcissist (triple word score!) but I have no intention of stopping.

Writing this all out is therapeutic for sure, makes me feel special that I can string basic concepts of grammar together and well, also, even few months someone sends me an email about how me talking about 'such and such' was really neat and it inspired them or made them realize they were not alone.

That I admit is something that is cool and makes me want to keep writing. Sorta like how when I first read Donald Miller or Anne Lamott...you get introduced to these very likable, very witty and very human people that also happen to believe the crazy story about a first century carpenter Rabbi claiming to be God...and it makes sense/confuses them just as much as it makes sense/confuses me and even though they don't know me I feel a strong connection to their writings and their lives.




When you break things down to the bare essentials, few things in life are worth anything.

Very, very few.

One of these is supposed to be relationships but I'm not very comfortable with any of them. I really want to have them, I want to be closer to people, I want to love them and receive love...but...having the desire for normality just doesn't make it happen.

Having a relationship with God is like having this consummate relationship that sums up every other possible relationship a person could ever have with another human. Family, friendly, romantic and whatever else, it is this odd hodge podge of love that only makes sense when you stop to think that Yahweh is beyond our comprehension. Theology does a rather poor job at painting the picture of an infinite being when every thing said is impossibly insufficient and unable to really convey.

God is love.

A true and profound statement that is matched only in its utterly insufficient and near blasphemous summary.

God is.

Maybe a bit better but it doesn't reveal much.

The only reason we know about God is because he chooses to reveal himself through love, through life, through scripture and through his spirit. It doesn't make much sense but I doubt my cat ponders Quantum Physics all day either.

The point is...I write because I can't help it, I love God because I can't help it and that is okay. I don't understand all of it and if I said I did I would be a liar. Only a crazy person would claim to understand someone like Jesus. As C.S. Lewis rather wittily remarked in the Chronicles of Narnia "He isn't a tame lion".

I suppose that is a lesson I need to learn, acceptance.
Accepting I'm human and it is okay to actually be human.
Learning to accept love.
Learning I am lovable.

It is just a pity they didn't offer that as a major at the University of Mobile.