I'M THINKING OF SH*TTING MYSELF

(one man's tale of depression and hope)

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Before  anything else, though, we gotta talk about that asterisk. 

Because what sort of person throws an asterisk into a fun, earthy word like "shitting"? As though I oughtta be ashamed for using a word that describes something as natural, organic, and universal as a bowel movement. As though the very word was somehow dirty. 

I suppose I could've sidestepped the issue by going with "pooping," but "pooping" strikes me as too silly for a discussion of depression, filling your pants, and spiritual abuse.

So... why the asterisk?

One way to answer that would be to take you back to a crisp summer night I spent in Northern Canada about twenty-four-ish years ago with a nationally ranked volleyball player named Reuben, in a wooden box on the back of a Ford F350 work truck. The circumstances of our (just fyi, completely non-sexual) box-bedding are less relevant to this post than the fact that at the time, Reuben and I were both students at a private Christian university that held such ardent conservative values that, I kid you not, it was considered improper and even immoral to use a word like "shit" without an asterisk, quotation marks, or (if you happened to hit your thumb with a hammer and couldn't help yourself) an apology. 

But Reuben came from a farming family, where the word "shit" and the shit it referred to was as ubiquitous as, well, shit. 

So Reuben had a bone to pick with our school community's weird hesitancy around the word, and our conversation in the dark of that truck bed devolved into hilarity as we imagined the President of the University delivering a lengthy speech to the assembled student body to outline the school board's decision (after prayerful consideration) to at long last redeem the word "shit." 

We imagined a speech that involved not just the invocation of a lot of Bible verses, but also the repeated use of that same word by our dignified (pretentious?) administrator. So this Christian Farm Boy Student athlete and I laughed till we giggled as we took turns role-playing the imagined speech with the sort of affected seriousness we'd come to expect from the good doctor/administrator, until sound of our hilarity echoed loudly in the confines of that dank wooden box. 

There was a real catharsis in having a laugh at the at times silly moral strictures of a community that, believe it or not, was actually much more lenient and liberal than the community of my childhood - an evangelical Christian mission center where I lived from diapers to high school diploma in the Amazon Basin of Peru, South America.

In Peru, I'm fairly certain, I never ever even once heard a single adult use the word "shit" (or any other ostensibly "profane" word).

Like, ever. 

Catharsis is important for people who've grown up in those sorts of communities, where the impossible demand for an often arbitrarily constructed standard of moral purity* often drives initially mild misbehavior into hiding - a place where it tends to grow into something that really IS ugly and cruel... like for example the Black Dog of depression that I wrestled with from an early age, or also the I suspect above-average number of sexual predators in our community - a collection of shit-heels who, I was later to learn, had violated and damaged a number of my friends... and by extension and influence, I suppose,  me. 

I cringe a little in writing that, knowing how offended many of the people I grew up with would be at seeing this implied indictment of their if not willful, then at least careless blindness to the child abuse in their midst.

See, I love those people.

And I can imagine that reading those words might trigger some of the guilt they simply cannot let themselves feel for their negligence, or for the thousand other "smaller" emotional and spiritual abuses they inflicted in the name of preserving the damnéd lie that with God On Our Side, we could achieve Personal Moral Perfection. That if we just "Handed It All Over to the Lord" enough, then all our iniquities - even down to the unspeakable word "shit" - would disappear. 

Poof! 

You're clean!

And make no mistake, it was a lie. 

The most insidious kind of lie, that for some reason creates in its adoptees a need to desperately search for scapegoats that'll allow them to avoid looking inward, or in the mirror. Rather than admit to any serious personal failing, they attack. It's the sort of mindset that's created an entire class of people in this country where I now live ('Murica!) who have chosen to hypocritically champion a political ideology largely defined by false moral scapegoating, led by a man who is an absolute antithesis of every value I grew up being taught to aspire to. 

This disconnect is not a bug, it's a feature; because to fully admit, accept, and reckon with the truth of the actual pedophilic situation, they'd likely have to also admit that maybe, just maybe, their entire Perfection Project (which, to be clear, is not something they ever got from their gloriously shit-disturbing namesake, Jesus Christ) was fatally flawed. 

And of course, it's not entirely their fault. This way of thinking is a legacy handed to them by their emotionally unavailable and desperate-to-make-the-world-make-sense parents.

World Wars'll do that to ya, I imagine.

Sigh.

That's humans for ya. Forever rolling on down the behavioral ruts of their forefathers. Reincarnating past mistakes. 

The damage is real, though, and so brutal and unarguable with regard to the sexual abuse of children that a part of me desperately wants to break the code of silence and name names: the elementary school teacher, the high school teacher, the pilot... the others. 

I can't, though. 

Not just for legal reasons or because those particular stories aren't precisely mine to tell; but because I am, despite what I'd prefer for myself, a child of the asterisk.

But it's the middle of the night and I've just woken from a dream in which another college friend - this one an actual real-life former rock star - has chosen to indirectly inform me that I'm no longer welcome to crash at his pad, by inviting someone else to sleep in my spot. The dream ended with me trying to convince the spot-interloper to allow me to stay on with him; and gradually realizing that it wasn't his fault or his choice - that he was just the messenger for a person unwilling or unable to say what he really meant: that I was unwanted, unwelcome, and unloved. 

A discardable piece of shit, unworthy of direct communication. 

I woke from this obviously psychologically significant dream with a rumbling tummy and the realization that I had to shit** - followed by the realization that the electrical power that a Florida hurricane had knocked out was back on... which meant our toilet would once again work. 

I didn't have to go out into the woods and dig a hole in the dark in the rain. I could just get up, go to the bathroom... and let it go. 

The emotional residue of that dream lingered, though. 

It felt like a confirmation of a belief I've always secretly and occasionally not-so-secretly held about that obviously-cooler-than-I, literal Rockstar friend: that he didn't really love me, and would eventually tire of pretending to want me around. 

It's a core emotional belief that has actually infected and sabotaged every relationship I've ever had with anyone I've ever thought highly of... but knowing that this is true is not the same as moving past it. Fact is, I don't actually know why I am this way - whether it's the pedophiles in my childhood community, or the impossible purity culture, or what. But I do know that my shame spiral is somehow entwined with my depression cycle, to the degree that I woke from a shitty dream having to take a shit, and for those first moments of semi-consciousness, I felt so shitty about myself that I considered just, well, shitting myself... and then going back to sleep.

I didn't, though. 

I wrote this, instead. 

My first full-on blog post in like a year. 

I told the truth, asterisk free. 

I admitted my deepest fear and shame and this - dear brothers and sisters in love and freedom - is at long last the hope I was referring to in my subtitle. 

It is the belief that we can delete the asterisk from the sometimes-let's-face-it shittiness of our lives, and instead put the "i" of our honest selves back where it belongs.

That shit from my childhood was real, and pretending it wasn't did damage.

But I'm tired of letting it define me, and I know (or at least hope) that the first step on the path out of the shitpile is to admit that the shit does, in fact, exist.

My whole childhood I was told that the devil was the father of all lies and that if I resisted his lies, he would flee from me. I'm no longer quite sure what any of that means, but here's my resistance, tapped into my phone, in bed, at an ungodly hour after a shitty Dream of Worthlessness.

Here's me finding hope in the belief that the truth, at least, should never be held in.

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* For example: "poop" is funny, "crap" is a minor scandal, and "shit" means you're flirting with eternal torment.

**I'm trying very hard to redeem this word, here. Can you tell?