May 21, 2014

Paper Always Listens


During a recent visit to my parents, I took the opportunity to explore my old desk. This desk has a certain secret compartment, almost impossible to see...but if you know where it is, you can open it by feel. After opening it and smelling that wonderful aged wood scent - a jumble of folded papers fell out. They were old journal entries I wrote back when...well, you'll see. But upon reading, a simultaneous lightness and heaviness settled on me. The problems in my past were so short-sighted and almost funny...yet upon sobering reflection, not so different than those of today. It seemed like my past self was there, pouring his heart out, and that we connected through time. Maybe that's weird, but I thought I'd share, in hope that you might also empathize and find value in these questions and doubts.

"It all doesn't make sense any more. I'm a fake, in everything I do. A poser. Nothing satisfies, and I run from what's right. I'm caught in a perpetual twilight - I recognize the problem, but not enough to turn my path. I stay in a lukewarm state where the only possibility is atrophy. And it's happening - I'm getting fatter again and have lost my tone. I'm remembering less and less. God is so out of the picture it's not even funny. That fact is scary - I recognize that it is sacrilegious for me to tell others of God, or to pray/sing earnestly, and thus I don't do it. So, I recognize the wrongness of my side and the righteousness of the other, but that only makes me want to burrow further into my farce. Business is no longer certain, and entrepreneurship doesn't really appeal to me. Without God, I know I won't meet my wife at college, and then succeed in business and be rich. I am now a shell, all of my futures and plans sucked away, only maintaining their momentum, an outer image to keep things going. Whenever something inside must be called open, the call is unanswered, creating a gnawing, unhappy, unfulfilled feeling. I see the problems, and recognize them fully, yet have no motivation to fix them. I sit in the chair before the guillotine, dully recognize its presence and purpose, yet lay unmoving before its blade. Thus I live out the first semester of high school senior year.

I'm confused deeper than I ever have been.


Paper always listens."