The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living (5 page)

For so long I lived in the deceptive perversity of the dark. But when I was in the dark, I could
feel.
The feelings that come from darkness can be intense, like a roller coaster or a horror movie. We can easily become addicted to those poisonous feelings. But eventually they make us numb.

Humans are resilient, and we learn to cope with unhealthy pain by eventually becoming numb to it. Once we are numb to our addiction, it’s hard for us to even feel alive without its “comfort.” This deception is like a parachute with a star-shaped hole in it. The manufacturer has told us that his parachute is like none other because the hole in the top is extra large so we can see the stars on the way down. We buy into the pitch and end up being made to feel most alive by the things that will kill us.

The deception is evil in the sense that if we don’t stop it, it will kill us. Sadly, we can even be aware that something is
killing us, and yet ignore our self-preservation reflexes until all we have left inside us is a death wish. Our addiction is so exhilarating that we think we don’t care if it kills us. We can’t even imagine life without it. And when we do, we think it will be a worthless, boring life that isn’t worth living. We get this warped idea because once the high wears off, we feel ragged, miserable, ugly, worn out, and tired.

So, even in those low moments, we still don’t care if we die. We go searching for those familiar feelings again, this time fully acknowledging our own death wish. Strangely, we don’t really know what death means. Our souls writhe, exhausted from our unhealthy addictions.

We may desire to sleep forever,
to rest
. But we have no proof that the rest we are longing for is what we will get when we die. I know a girl named Marlene who shot herself in the face. As she began to die, she sunk into what she calls a deeper despair than the one she was trying to get away from. When she was brought back to life, she knew that she could not get the rest she longed for through suicide.

So we stagger toward death with reckless laughter or deep, sad aching, and as we free fall we tell ourselves this falling sensation means we are alive. But the leap we took to get that feeling is a leap to our own destruction.

The question then becomes,
What can save us
and give us what we are restless for?
Not the world we live in and are rebelling against. That world can’t fool us. And not the death we’re plunging toward, the one we know nothing about. We just need the God who started life itself to tell us. If only he would rend the heavens and come down.

I
was rich. The room was my own. Sure, the random alley cats my mom was always rescuing had claimed the space under my bed as their favorite pee spot, but everything else in the room was mine. And yeah, so what if I lived with daily sinus pressure headaches and could barely breathe in there because of my cat allergy? I had a room. I could close the door, turn on the boombox I got for Christmas, and pretend I was one of Janet Jackson’s backup dancers while she sang about racial reconciliation and ignoring nasty boys. This smelly room was an eleven-year-old girl’s refuge.

Our name had finally come up on the government-housing list. After looking at the available homes, we found our castle on Ida. Ida was a small street in the ghetto of Arlington, Texas. Our house was just four doors down from a local band
called the Giant Dogs. The Giant Dogs made us all proud by naming their first album
Starving on Ida
. But I didn’t become a true fan of their honest rock music until later that year. Up until then I had this understanding that music was for entertainment, and musicians were entertainers. So I only used music as a way to entertain myself. I would make up dance moves to pop songs with cool beats. The lyrics were more about rhyme and rhythm than anything else. I certainly didn’t know what I was saying when I performed every word to Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s “Shoop” for my shocked daycare worker. And I thought when the panel of teachers for the fifth-grade talent show had their jaws hanging open while a friend of mine and I sang the graphic lyrics to Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes,” it was because they thought we were just awesome singers. I don’t think the sexually explicit content was simply over our heads. I think we caught on to the fact that this music was meant for entertainment, so we took it that way. It was only a catchy beat.

But that year, in one night, all of my shallow feelings about music changed. My mom bought tickets for a concert in Deep Ellum and she took my brother Eric. When he came back that night he was mad because Mom had made him leave before the band trashed the stage. But he was surprised that she let him buy a tape. He said Mom liked the band because the singer stopped the show to yell at the audience.

“If I see one more guy grab and grope another girl, you’re all gonna listen to feedback for the next two hours!”

He had my mother’s respect after that.

She also liked the naked baby on the front cover of the tape she bought him. She thought that was sweet. My mother loves babies. Eric showed it to me. It was Nirvana’s
Nevermind.

I was disappointed that there weren’t any lyrics to read in the booklet. Maybe he was singing about how crappy men can
be to women. I was a little interested in who the singer was after Eric’s little story. Why did he care about guys groping girls? Why was he willing to stop his show to protest them doing it? Maybe the point of him making music was more than entertainment? Why? The more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued.

I looked at the picture of the band inside and was shocked to see they were dressed like us, with stringy, dirty hair. Eric had to use my room to play the tape since I had the only boombox with a tape deck in the house. I listened to it and was amazed. There was a hurt in the singer’s voice, an aching that I felt in my heart and had never heard expressed in music. The music sounded like the way I felt when I cried myself to sleep at night.

At the same time there was this lightheartedness about the inner pain. It was kind of laughing at reality, but at the same time acknowledging the aching that comes with it. I could not stop listening to the tape.

Eric’s birthday came up not long after that and someone got him Nirvana’s
In Utero
on CD. I immediately devoured it. We had to play it in the big front room that my three little siblings shared because that’s where the only CD player was.

Me, in Utero

I remember listening to the CD straight through four times, right away, going over the lyrics booklet as I listened, looking at all the details of the artwork, trying to see what it all meant and what it was saying about the band. They seemed like such a mystery, with their unintelligible, cryptic lyrics.

The lyrics seemed to say nothing solid and yet the screaming was so passionate. It
had
to mean something. So I just kept searching each time I listened to it. My favorite song
off the album was “Dumb.” It talked about being different from the people around you, getting high, and sniffing glue.

While I was listening through the CD the fourth time, night was creeping into the living room. I was sitting in front of the stereo, ten feet from the wall. On the other side of that wall was my mother’s broken-down car. It sat on jack stands at the top of the driveway. “Heart Shaped Box” had just ended when the front of the car came crashing through the wall. CRASH!

It stopped just short of me.

I just stared at the rubble, so stunned that I couldn’t move from the shock of what just happened. There was a car
in
the house!

Maureen, a close friend of the family, accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake when she was trying to park her car in the driveway and knocked my mom’s car off the jacks, sending it into the house. That little incident etched
In Utero
into my brain—chaos, mystery, nonchalance, and randomness all happening in the music, in the room with the car crashing through the wall, in my life. Indelible.

The Uncool Becomes Cool

The year after I found Nirvana, Kurt Cobain committed suicide. When I heard it on the news, my eyes filled with tears.
Now
I
’
ll
never
get
to
marry
him
, cried my unreasonable twelve-year-old heart. But his death also somehow made me more committed to Nirvana. Suddenly Nirvana was a legacy to be honored, and Kurt’s suicide seemed heroic to me in some way.

Kurt seemed to think being famous and thinking you’re better than everyone was so very wrong. Even at twelve, I understood the disdain for fame and the hatred of pride. I thought his suicide was courageous.

The saddest thing about my hero’s death was I didn’t realize it was wrong. I didn’t realize that life—all life—possessed a magical kind of value.

Looking back, I can still find so much truth in Nirvana and what they stood for. Kurt’s suicide, however, makes me sad.

When you’re twelve and you already have it in for society and fame and all of what makes pop culture churn and the money pour in, you look to those who dare to be individuals as the epitome of life, even in death. Somehow Kurt’s death felt like life to me, as twisted as that sounds.

Why did it feel like life to me? All the stress and weirdness I experienced in my life had a lot of darkness that came with it. And then something happened: I found a way to turn all the bad and dark into my identity. It felt honest and real. I felt comforted in finding someone who was suspicious of all things fake and of ignorant bliss. I was empowered in my suspicions by a public voice like Nirvana’s that called out what everyone was being fed as the trash that it was. But I didn’t know that you don’t have to be suicidal to be brave enough to call society’s bluff, and you don’t have to be eternally sad to rebel against it.

It was like I was standing at a crossroads where I could see only two choices: either I could embrace all my pain and
become
it, or I could try to be one of those shiny happy people I didn’t trust. Wasn’t their situation a choice for them? Maybe their seemingly fake happiness
was exactly what my sadness was—a way to cope with all the garbage of life.

My friend told me once that sometimes the sad place where we keep ourselves feels like free falling. It’s exhilarating even if it’s a fall into a dark place. I used to look at darkness and find it so deep and intriguing. I loved this about Kurt Cobain. He was honest. And being honest felt so much closer to being right. But eventually the shadows of darkness overwhelm and actually become part of you—that’s what happened to me. It begins with rebelling against all the shiny happy people. Then it turns into a thirst for sadness. And it bends and twists into a very dark, animal-like thing, as if the sadness has given birth to an evil so sly and cunning that it seeps in and suddenly you’re contemplating death, like I was. Or cutting. Or puking your food out all the time.

Don’t Be Brave

A few years back I traveled with a disaster relief organization called Samaritan’s Purse to some far-off places in Alaska. In these tiny villages, the natives are on their own. It broke my heart to find out that suicide is their number-one killer. One teenager told me, after the death of a friend, “I wish I was brave enough to do that.” But this is an example of how people get suicide so backward. It is not brave to kill yourself when things are sad and difficult; it is brave to live anyway.

It is brave to find ways to lay down your life to serve the people around you.

It is brave to forgive and to choose to love those who hurt you even though they don’t deserve it.

It is brave to trust that the God who gave you life in the first place has a good plan in mind, even when everything around you looks like hell. It is brave to live.

I recently met a brave man from Alaska named Bill, who grew up in the trenches of what many of the suicidal kids in these small communities deal with. One of his earliest memories as a child is his loud, obnoxious uncles prodding him to down tequila shots at just five years old while his father was passed out upstairs.

His parents divorced because of his father’s drinking problem. His mother worked three jobs to support the family on her own and was rarely home. A close male friend of the family sexually abused Bill for several years of his childhood. When he reached his teen years, the man verbally and emotionally abused him, and threatened to kill him.

But I love the way Bill’s story doesn’t end there. Bill encountered Jesus and found deep inner healing from everything he went through. Bill was brave enough to
live
, even after all the pain he endured. And now he is the president of a wonderful suicide prevention program called Carry the Cure for native teens in his area.

Kurt Cobain could have led millions into a kind of life where fame didn’t matter, where pride was replaced by serving your fellow man. But he got out. He left us all in the lurch, wondering what to do.

It’s amazing to think of it now, because when I read about Jesus I can’t help but come away with a feeling that, although he was superhuman, in many ways he was also as regular as Kurt Cobain, except Jesus chose death in order to give us all life—a life that means something, a reason to live.

The same day my mom’s car came through the wall, there were some walls that came down in my heart as well. Walls that were meant to keep me safe. Walls that taught me that suicide was wrong. Walls that kept me from self-destruction. Nirvana’s message of humility would soon become perverted into self-loathing. Their message of compassion and
empathy would become perverted into depression and deep sadness over the darkness in the world. My newly understood identity was now becoming warped. I didn’t realize I was made for more than self-hate, depression, and a future of suicide.