Red Like Tango

Tag: movies

  • A Sacrifice of Vulnerability

    I got on here to publicly shame the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower. (If you haven’t seen it, know that there are spoilers in this post.) I planned it throughout the entire movie because I thought it was going to be like every other movie. I thought this poor kid was gonna fall in love with this poor girl and she was going to totally miss it and treat him badly and then realize it toward the end and that would be that – requited love, which is rare and frustrating to watch – and I was going to ask insightful questions about what that movie says about what our culture is telling us about love, and then the end happened.

    You wanna know why I watch movies? I watch movies for the moments that open me up. You are wrong: I could not be doing better things with my time. I live to feel raw and awake and alive to the Story – the story of brokenness and redemption.

    Like the part when this kid’s parents find out what his aunt did to him, and his dad walks in to his son’s room in the psychiatric ward and walks up to him and takes his head in his hands and kisses his forehead. You just have to see the movie because the whole time his dad is this disinterested non-person, and then this, this understanding! This gentle. encompassing. closeness.

    The big questions now are not for you or for our culture. They’re for me. Like: What happened to me that makes me seek out sickness? Why is it I want to be like that kid? I was way too young when I was introduced to sexuality, but I wasn’t abused like he was.

    I just want to be understood, you know? Yeah. I want to walk next to be people who get it. This kid finds a group of people who get it, and that rings this big bell of longing inside of me.

    But the sickness… you wanna know something? I was relieved, six years ago, when a psychiatrist told me there was a strong possibility I was developing schizoaffective disorder, but it’s not for the reasons I used to think. I used to think I just wanted to be sick, to be lazy, to have excuses. I mean those could be part of it, but the real, deep undercurrent was that I could maybe, now, be free to be me. I thought schizoaffective disorder would provide a lens through which I could finally see myself clearly. I thought it could explain the darkness inside me.

    But I don’t think that’s all of it, either. When I came home from that appointment, my sister was the first person I told – I didn’t want Mom and Dad in the room with me when that psychiatrist told me because I didn’t know what her diagnosis would be (or maybe I didn’t want them to hear that I wasn’t ADD, that I didn’t have an excuse for totally failing at college) – and when I did, when I told my sister, she just hugged me and said, “I knew there was something else going on.”

    But what was it? What else was going on? It wasn’t schizoaffective disorder. I always felt different, but I know now that I’m not.

    That’s the point here: We’ve all got the same story. We’re all trying to fill the big impossible holes inside of us. I’ve always felt different but I’m not. I am seriously – but not fatally, oh no, thank you, Jesus – narcissistic. Or I was.

    The Gospel really is wonderful.

    I was led to pray recently that God would restore the innocence I had when I was three, because when I was four, it was gone. I was that young. (That would certainly qualify as an answer to those questions.) I didn’t understand it at the time. I understood that I had to hide it from Mom and Dad, and as I grew older, I became so. ashamed. so full of guilt.

    You know what opened me up? Another person’s honesty. Michael’s honesty. He told me what happened to him, and I thanked God at that moment that at least my offender was only a little bit older than me and that she was a she.

    What is going on in the quiet?

    I’m not trying to scare you, really, but we have to be serious from time to time. We have to ask ourselves these questions. And if I’m not vulnerable about all of this like Michael was, you might not ever see it in yourself. You might not ever come out and ask the questions which are eating you alive because you don’t even know they exist. You might not ever talk to someone about it.

    And if that’s you, you have to. You have to talk to someone about it.

  • Fiasco

    I had an absolutely awful day at work yesterday. Almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. In hindsight, it was mostly due to lack of foresight (and accompanying preparation), but I’m also learning that my strengths do not lie in organization or administration. The details are boring unless I’m telling the story in person, so just know that, in the world of Panera Catering, my failure was catastrophic. Never in my working life have I been so directly responsible for such an unmitigated disaster.

    The subject of this post is what happened in the middle of it.

    If you’ve read my blog before, you know I’m a Christian. You also may know that I’m rarely good at it. Very often, I’m a gossip, a manipulator, a liar – “hypocrite” is a good summation. So yesterday, I was trying, again, to walk in the Spirit (the lifestyle to which we Christians aspire), and I was singing songs to myself in order to remember that “My soul finds rest in God alone” while delivering orders which would arrive unthinkably late, anticipating getting reamed by the people kept waiting for their food, when I started thinking about movies.

    The first one that came to mind was Cameron Crowe’s feel-good drama Elizabethtown. Orlando Bloom plays Drew, a designer for a shoe company who, through poor planning and execution of a new shoe, loses his company $900 million. There’s a scene in which he’s telling his love interest, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), about his failure, trying to explain to her the magnitude of it, and she says, “SO WHAT?!” Then she says nice things like, “Have the courage to mess up big and keep showing up. Make ’em wonder why you’re still smiling.” And I thought to myself, That sure sounds nice, but man, that’s not easy. Then I thought, Actually, Claire doesn’t give Drew a foundation for her sunny outlook. How is he supposed to react any differently from contemplating suicide if he doesn’t have an identity alternative to that of the successful shoe designer? More on that later.

    The next movie was the comedy Meet the Parents. I have never liked Meet the Parents for the following reason: I become extremely embarrassed on behalf of people who do embarrassing things and to whom embarrassing things happen.* At least, I used to think that was the reason. But yesterday, while everything was going wrong, I realized that it’s not embarrassment I’m feeling. It’s terror. I am terrified that everything is going to come unraveled like it does for Ben Stiller’s character, Gaylord Focker, and for that reason, seeing it happen to other people is almost unbearable. It feels like watching my own inevitable end.

    (Another common occurrence in which I feel very uncomfortable is being in the audience when someone is singing or playing an instrument and they don’t quite hit the note or series of notes they’re looking for. They’re flat or sharp. This happens a lot on music reality television like American Idol, which is hard for me to watch because, unlike Meet the Parents where it’s mostly about bad things happening to a person, these are poor performances given by people who think they’re performing well. I am also terrified of that. I am terrified of thinking I’ve done well when, objectively, I haven’t. I haven’t measured up. I’ve shown up to school wearing only my underwear or walked out on stage naked. Terror.)

    There’s a lot for me to deal with, here. I mean, this is raw revelation you’re hearing, not some well-thought-out past experience, my preferred writing fodder. Some things do immediately occur to me, like how my identity/acceptance/sense-of-belonging is found in Christ, not in my ability to accomplish a given task or my job title or the group of friends I have. This is, of course, the alternate identity Drew needed in Elizabethtown. Taking hold of that truth in the middle of messing up big time is hard, but I already knew that. In fact, I talk about it so much, I’m afraid it’s starting to lose its meaning.

    I am sure that this fear of devastating failure, unwitting inadequacy, or just plain embarrassment has knotted together and stopped up many channels in my metaphysical world – creative output, to be sure – and I just know that if I can beat it, if I can stop being afraid, there’s a whole new world on the other side.

    Two other things happened aside from this revelation which were also good: (1) I didn’t quit my job, and (2) I showed up to work again today. Those might be a given for you, and though they are for me now, too, it wasn’t always so. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when such failure would have been too much and I’d call in sick the day after and then again the next day and on the third day I just wouldn’t show up. (An interesting juxtaposition.) So I guess that’s some sort of proof that my identity issues are slowly but surely being dealt with.

    *This is sometimes referred to as Second- or Third-Party Embarrassment syndrome. Second-Party Embarrassment is the embarrassment felt when an embarrassing act is witnessed, like Person A witnessing a speaker fart on a stage. Third-Party Embarrassment is the embarrassment experienced by Person B when Person A tells Person B about the speaker’s outburst. (I couldn’t resist.)