Back in the last century RENT hit the stage. The songs the sound the content, all very much an ode to individuality, creativity, avarice, and many other adjectives, some warm and fuzzy, some hard and sad and angry. From the opening refrain that asks us how you measure 525,600 minutes to the haunting strains of Without You it’s an amalgamation of joy, and sorrow mixed with a bit of excess and an eye towards activism that is easily missed if you get lost in the drama of it all.
This is not a review of RENT. I don’t begin to command the kind of following that would make that something anyone would really care to read, besides it’s much to late to review a musical and a movie that’s origins began with a workshop production 30 years ago, and yes it was 30 years the first workshop happened all the way back in 1993.
This is a review of 2022, well not so much a review as a kind of workshopping. There are many ways that I could review 2022. A little bit under a year ago life caught up with me. These pages are full of what happened, of guilt, angst, anger and self flagellation. Rehearsing all that happened a year ago is not what this is about. If you want a picture of that just look at the posts littering 2022 and you’ll be able to piece it together. So what do I mean when I say life caught up with me? I mean all the things that I had been pushing off, stuffing down, trying to deny working hard to not show exploded. For the first time in who knows how long I was forced to acknowledge things as they were. To stop sugar coating words and phrases and actions. I was told what contributed to my choices and decisions. I was looked at and pitted by some and relived by some and written off by some. I believe I can safely say that I have never tried to sugar coat what happened, nor have I fallen back on mental health as an all encompassing absolution of my own choices. Sure the lack of attention to my own very real issues stemming from years of hard things contributed, but that’s all, it contributed, I refused to look at any other way except the one that seemed like the only thing I could do, fully knowing there was more and better and safe ways. So one way to workshop 2022 would be to say it was the year that I finally came face to face with myself and all the ugly that that can entail. The fact that I am writing this tells me that it was for all intents and purposes a horribly awful good thing that happened. I finally stopped listening to the whispers in my head, and started to listen to the world around me. My wife, my children and the people who have chosen to wade into life with me. I call things what they are, I let myself get frustrated and I name it. I beat myself up still, a lot but that’s to be expected. I have a lot to beat myself up for, but it’s a productive buffeting as opposed to a debilitating one.
Checking into a mental health facility is a humbling experience. It’s that place that other people go to. It’s a safe place for people that are broken mentally to start the mending process. It’s a place that “crazy” people go, right? I walked into that space and spent two weeks give or take a day or so finding out what was wrong with my brain. I still am amused at the faces of the professionals that were so helpful when they had me rehearse everything that had brought me to the place I was in. Equally interesting is what happened when I recounted all the things that had happened. There was a lot of crying, a lot of being angry, a lot of getting used to medication that would regulate the parts of me that needed a bit of a boost. Through all of it I wrote in the journal you see with a rubber pen. When I look back through the pages of that journal I am grateful that I am here writing this. Things could have gone very differently, It’s a testament to my wife and family, and a couple of close friends that I’m not just alive, but I’m getting back the parts of me that I had lost or buried, or just plain forgotten.
The hard work. There is no other way to explain it but hard work when it comes to moving forward. It takes work and medication to not let myself sink. There are reminders all over the place of the things that contributed to the depression and ptsd. Dreams have started to push in again and sometimes they are good ones, but many times they are just off, leaving me with a weird feeling when I wake up. I’ve been letting myself get “mad” if that makes sense. I used to just stuff it or say never mind and while there are times that I do that I am catching myself and letting my wife catch me at it more which makes things much easier.
Coming face to face with the never agains has been one of the most challenging things that I have had to do. We have lost a lot in the past few years, some of it was because of me some of it was just because things happen. Driving down the road or walking through a store, hearing certain songs, or seeing certain things in the aisle grabs the roots of sadness and anger and tugs them from below the surface of life.
I preached my last sermon February 6, 2022. I’ve read over it, in the year since. I wish I could have preached a better sermon that day, in fact looking back at those last weeks I wish I could have been a better person, a better husband and father and pastor. I wasn’t it’s that simple. Too caught up in my own everything, not seeing what was really happening, not wanting to see what was really happening.
It’s interesting to me, the drive to do and be something. How do you measure a year in the life of a person that was a pastor that destroyed so many things and people without intending too. What do you say. I know what some of the comments on articles posted to Facebook have been. I’ve read them and gotten angry all over again not at the people who wrote them but at myself for hurting those people and others. For damaging the case for following Christ in so many eyes. Sin has a ripple effect in everyones life but in a leaders life, in a pastors life that ripple effect can quickly turn into a wave, crashing down on the unsuspecting, the ones that trusted the ones that loved and even the ones that weren’t sure. Each left to deal with it, many to turn and walk away because of the hypocrite that was caught out.
I fix computers now. I get up every morning gather the parts and head off down the road precision screw drivers, static mat and work phone in hand. It’s a good thing. I really enjoy it. The beginning middle and end of it all. The ability to see a problem and then go in and fix it, ending the call with a working tool that a customer can now use to complete their tasks. In each place I go I wonder. I wonder what’s really going on in minds and hearts. I wonder, when I go to a factory and fix a laptop or a desktop, when I walk into the person who is working remotely from home, or the time I was called to a church to fix a track pad. Each of those places I wonder. I wonder what the person is really dealing with, really hiding, because let’s be clear, most of us are. Most of us don’t show the world around us what’s going on. Some of that stems from self preservation, some from arrogance, some from shame. It’s all in degrees too. I am not for one moment suggesting that everyone has as big a mess as I did. But everyone has a mess. What we do with it is our business, unless it effects others, and lets face it, while those messes of humanity that we all are, may start out small, manageable, and even relegated to only effecting us but that doesn’t last long. There’s a ripple effect that soon begins. Soon there are more and more people impacted, hurting and angry, sad, worried rightfully so, but just because things make sense and have justification does’t make it any easier, if anything those reasons hurt more, or have the potential too.
How I measure the year in my life is with relationship, family, and mental health. Don’t get me wrong, there has been repentance. There are times that I suffer from there’s no way God is cool with me, and I have to remember in those instances that He chooses to love me where I am as I am, he chooses to forgive me and then toss that mess away, even while he knows that it’s harder for me to do so, yeah harder’s not right impossible is more like it.
I am so very lucky though. I have a family that loves me a wife and kids and now grandkid who actually want to be around me, which is an amazing thing. The relationships that I have with them are grounding and for that I’m constantly amazed and surprised and thankful. The other piece of it is the mental health piece. The ability to acknowledge the issue and live in that moment the moment where I know I need help and am willing to go after it.
Johnathan Larson was right when he wrote Seasons of Love the best way to measure the year is in the seasons Love sprinkled throughout it.
Be well intrepid reader.
Until next time.
A
