The Duality of Me

While I would acknowledge the extremism of my high school years, my intense identification with my soccer team and my equally repugnant view of basketball, 95th percentile in every category of my Meyers-Briggs, the intermittently single-minded obsession with Diablo II, I would say that the past few years have resulted in a tempered and more moderate me. In fact I said so last night. This prolonged period of unemployment has put a crack in what I now understand to be nothing more than a veneer, hiding my polar freakshow of a personality.

Every day is a blank page, and my lack of both job and schedule mean that I put pen to paper without the benefit of an assigned thesis or structure of an outline. I have come to realize that I have almost no capacity for mediocrity. I find God’s truths either provocatively seductive or mundanely troublesome. I am either splendidly thoughtful – bursting with thought and passion and constructive zeal – or abysmally lethargic, wallowing in decadent and ultimately dehumanizing hedonism. Yesterday I woke up at 8, decided to go back to sleep until 10, and then spent the entire day watching a horrible television show online, my self-loathing mounting with every episode (1).

The other days are polar opposites. I wake up early, sincerely dedicate the day to the Lord, and as I read, my brain almost explodes with ideas, each one shooting through almost too quickly to grasp hold of, each thought promising to unravel into something deeper and more complex. Reading becomes so engaging that I will not waste a precious moment for even the most basic of needs; food becomes merely fuel, and even the disruption of the restroom can be circumvented (2). Whereas on the lazy days even the thought of constructive activity is an anathema, the good days are so filled with thought and productive impulse that I don’t have enough time to follow up on them all, and so I create ever-lengthening lists which I alternately ignore like the plague or furiously lengthen, fleshing out one thought whilst adding three more.

There is also a sense of desperation, a sense that I must make the most of the good times before becoming subsumed by the darkness, before descending into a stupor. I see the enemy behind and before, and so the days of clarity are filled with both a feverish opportunism and the prayer that I might be given the strength keep the darkness at bay. I feel the frenzy of Charlie Gordon and the nightly panic of Prince Rillian, knowing myself to be in a blessed but fleeting state, hating the stupor not for who I become, but for who I become in light of who I could be. Frenzy and panic, but not defeat. Though habit and natural inclination may have set this in stone, even stone can be carved, even steel recast. I have put a head on the beast, and I will not capitulate. This is my declaration, and this is my standard, that though I may fail time and again, I will remain faithful in the belief that the God who levels the mountains, breaks down gates of bronze and cuts through bars of iron (3) also has plans for me (4).

(1) If anyone ever asks you to watch Moonlight on CBS, hit them on the head and run the other way. You’ll be doing everyone a favor.
(2) Aim with one hand, read with the other. Hells yeah I do.
(3) Isaiah 45:2
(4) And they don’t involve any damned Nintendo.