More Than Meets The Eye
Excavating the Symbols of Belonging
“For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many.” - The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians Chapter 12
“Was there not a time when you felt that the world did not understand your grief, could not heal it, could not give you any peace, that this had to be in heaven, if heaven was anywhere to be found… Was this not so? And what would you call this condition if you did not call it death, and how would you describe it except as darkness?” - Søren Kierkegaard, introduction to The Sickness Unto Death
At some point in most of our lives, there was a time and place where the world felt full of possibility and potential. We weren’t locked into well-worn personas, social roles, job descriptions. We hadn’t clocked in at our first job, hadn’t had our heart broken, or made up our minds about politics and religion. Maybe we were fifteen and getting behind the wheel for the first time. Maybe we were twenty-one and getting dressed for the club. Maybe we were six and sitting on a swing in the backyard, or down in the sand with a plastic figurine in a cape.
There are whole industries based on trying to reconnect us with these feelings, usually through the vehicle of nostalgia. My generation has what is sometimes referred to as the “kids on bikes” genre - Stranger Things and JJ Abram’s Super 8 are good examples, themselves owing their very existence to E.T. and The Goonies - but it’s almost the same genre as the classic car-loving “remember the 50s” flicks from the 70s and 80s. It turns out that nostalgia as a vehicle sells pretty well.
We all have our own totems and talismans that hold those pre-dread shards of Self. Start digging and you will find different kinds of objects at different layers, like some sort of anthropological excavation of the personal. Varied eras of youth and fullness, varied amounts of fear and doubt settling into the soil. As you sift through the sediment, these icons of plastic and metal and spirit are revealed.
My first car was a navy-blue Chevy truck. One bench seat, a cassette deck, and a lingering smell of the chain-smoking former owner. There were two R.E.M. tapes that I wore out in that truck: Fables of the Reconstruction and Out of Time. I have vivid memories of the twenty-minute drive home from school spent listening to those albums - dappled sunlight, window down, the warm but crisp October air licking at my left arm (back when October in Houston still had a crispness to it). I had other tapes, many that were home-made mixes of songs off the radio, but those two R.E.M. cassettes held a lot of spirit in them. They held the spirit of temporary freedom, of the forbidden knowledge that I could just keep driving if I wanted to, not go home, head to wherever seemed best. They held a spirit of joy and exultation in the sing-along-with-us melodies and rhythms. But by that point in life, there was already a spirit of fear and despair that had worked its way in, and it was being kept at bay during those drives by the voice of Michael Stipe and a tank of dollar-a-gallon gasoline.
Dig a little further down in the sediment and we get to the middle school and late elementary years, where we gingerly unearth the well-worn paperback box set of Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These copies belonged to my mother when she was growing up. I had read The Hobbit as a younger kid, seen the cartoon movie and liked the story pretty well. At some point my mom casually mentioned “you know, there’s a sequel to that book that you might like.” And brother, lemme tell ya - I was hooked from the get go! There was a whole world to get lost in, all-of-a-sudden like, not just as I stayed up late and got up early to read but long after I put the books down. And not only a whole other world, but one that had been hiding in plain site all along, there in the pages of a children’s book, right in front of my very eyes, just like Bilbo’s “funny magic ring.” Those same paper-back copies of those books are still sitting on my shelf - torn and cracked with covers held together by masking tape and pages yellowed and smelling of dry ink and age. They’re full of the spirit of a lasting freedom, one that was maybe more elusive than others, but that could also be hidden just out of sight, tucked away in my mind like a portal behind the coats in a wardrobe (if you’ll excuse my mixed mythologies).
Yet even that far back, those other darker spirits could still be found.
Growing up I had what my mom called a melancholic personality, and what a doctor in my late twenties would finally tell me was depression (and boy was that a useful rearview mirror to have). I’m not certain when it first started to show up but I think it was fully moved in and its bags unpacked by the time I was ten. My memories of childhood and adolescence are sometimes spotty and a little blurred, but I’m pretty sure I spent a lot of time fighting depression, and a lot of time succumbing to it. The time off in-between was just normal kid stuff, which I assume felt great: riding my bike around the neighborhood, or shooting basket ball (poorly) in the driveway, playing with and picking on my sister, sleepovers and pizza parties, family movie nights, family vacation, church, Boy Scouts. Life was certainly not bad, and our parents did a lot to provide a good one for us. We just didn’t have any sort of structure or framework for mental health concerns, and so there weren’t any obvious answers to my dark turns of mind. The depression didn’t go unnoticed but it did stay undiagnosed, and no one knew quite what to do about it, me included.
The form I remember it taking the most was persistent… “thoughts,” I was going to say, but they were more like “beliefs.” Persistent beliefs about who I was or what I would amount to, what I was capable (or incapable) of. Maybe most kids think these things? I’m not sure. But these beliefs were not passing moments of fear and nervousness. They felt like core certainties. And they stuck in me enough to introduce a personal sense of despair at a very young age. These were beliefs about me as a person. About my life in the future. About not belonging and never finding a place to belong. If you are looking for evidence in the world to support your thesis, you’re bound to find it, and there are plenty of horrible social experiences in those formative years to stare back at you and say “see? I told you you’d never fit in/be wanted/be good enough.”
I was really good at fighting the depression though. Maybe there was some masking of it, but honestly I’ve never been good at hiding my feelings. I wear that mess on my face. So as often as not I wasn’t putting up a good front - I was just on the front lines. Music was a big way I fought it. Singing, playing, and listening to pretty much anything that even remotely interested me. In high school I first made a group of friends through church, and then later another group of friends through the drama program at school, both of whom were life savers and my first experience of a chosen family. They were another important weapon in the fight. Reading played a big roll, and writing became vital too, along with coping mechanisms like overeating and relying on sugar when it was available. But there was always the looming moment where the fight was too much, and the succumbing began.
My memory of those times is much more in the body than in the mind. The feeling of laying on my back and staring at the ceiling for hours, or laying on my stomach and breathing into the pillow all afternoon. Of sitting in my room with the lights off. I know at one point I locked myself in the bathroom with a pocket knife and threatened to slit my wrists. I don’t know how old I was, but fairly young - elementary school I think. There was the feeling of being separate, or separated. Separate from the people at school, separate from the other kids in the neighborhood. Separated from my family because of how I felt, and separated from God because I was a sinner (a core tenant of faith in the version of religion I grew up in).
I didn’t have a lot of hope for myself. But I wanted to believe that there was something inside me that was better than these beliefs, better than the thing I was afraid was on the outside, the thing others would see and reject me for.
If there was a time that these beliefs didn’t hold sway, it has to be further down. And so we continue our excavation.
In the deepest layers of the dig, we find something now quite ubiquitous and common. We find the toys. They are flimsy at first glance, perhaps. Mass produced, endlessly marketed each and every Saturday morning.
But you have to look closer.
These are the emblems of my unfettered childhood. The things of story and wonder. Super heroes with special births on alien planets. Reptilian ninjas transformed into their best and most noble selves by fate and science. Rebels who acted selflessly and strove to be at balance with The Force. Robots in disguise.
I recently found myself the recipient of many of these toys for the second time in my life. My parents had been cleaning out the attic and garage, and found a treasure trove of 1980s action figures. Sorting through these relics was astonishing. There was no despair in them whatsoever. Their auras were ones of excitement, adventure, of blind faith. They were icons of safety and assuredness. They were symbols of belonging. They represented people who could strike out on their own or come to the aid of their friends. They could hide in plain site as something ordinary, only to transform into a flying god-man or a giant protector. They could combine to bring their very selves together as the parts that form a colossal body - a body not made up of one part but of many, a whole. They all had purpose, and they all belonged.
These were the holy treasures of a young person who as of yet had no concept of his own limitations, real or perceived. No identification with depression or separateness. They belonged to a soul without despair, one who had infinite potential, one who had purpose, and who belonged.
There’s no easy way to return to that time, to that boy. No nostalgia trip in a movie theatre can summon him, and no franchise reboot can drum up his support. Not even enshrining those six inch Autobots or Jedi masters will bring him back now. But I take great joy and some comfort knowing that I used to be him, and that somewhere in this body’s nerves and tissue and synapses he is remembering himself.
I still often feel dark and dreary about my life and my future. I frequently worry that I don’t belong. I look at myself and I experience a loneliness that is at times unbearable. But that boy doesn’t feel that way. He comes from a time of plenty and promise, and he knows that there is always more than meets the eye.
Beautiful, profound writing. Thank you for sharing this.