Walking With Christ

Psalm 139:13-16  (13)For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.  (14)I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.  (15)My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.  (16)Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.(ESV)

“This too shall pass” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) is my mantra.  It gets me through quite a bit in life.  There are times when it just doesn’t work.  In those times I turn to this section in Psalm.  Today is one of those days.  I’m going to be a bit open about a few things that I don’t normally talk about.

My brain doesn’t work like a normal brain.  I am also coming to the conclusion that normal isn’t.  My brain doesn’t filter out the normal environmental stuff like most people do.  In a quiet room, I can hear the lights.  LED lights are quieter but they still make noise.  If the room is quiet enough, I’ll be able to hear the muscles as they move under my skin.  I can hear the electricity in the walls.  It puts off a visible blue aura on most days.  The worst days, I can taste it and/or smell it.  The best way to describe it is that it tastes blue.  Like I said, different.  It’s not unheard of though.  I’ve heard many others talk about these things as well.

I have to listen to music to get a certain part of my brain to be quiet so that I can focus on my work.  There are times that I need some kind of distraction like that just to carry on normal conversations.  If not, I have an internal monologue that picks up every twitch from the other person to analyze and interpret.  Every tonal inflection gets torn apart and inspected from hundreds of different angles.  This isn’t because I don’t trust the person talking.  It’s that I have three distinct mental tracks racing at all times.  I’m trying to learn.  The first is the one that everyone interacts with.  The part of me that is listening to the other person and actively trying to remain engaged in the conversation.  The second part is like Google translate in that I have to translate everything I hear or read into my own internal language before I can actually comprehend it.  Then I have to reverse the process to create a response that might be received by the recipient in the way that I intend.  A lot of stuff gets lost in translation.  The third part is a completely separate track just for emotions.  I process emotions differently than most people do.  I can completely disassociate and shut off emotions as needed.  Doing this can lead to unexpected emotional outbursts though.  The hormone therapy doesn’t help this part at all.

My brain sometimes processes sensory input differently, which means I occasionally see, hear, smell, or even taste things that aren’t physically present.  I’m usually aware when this happens, but it does affect my perception of the world.  It’s not constant.  I can usually filter these things out.  I’m almost always aware when it’s happening, hence the filter.  The unfortunate part is that memory has no such filter.  I know that some memories are distorted by the altered perceptions.  The overactive imagination at work.

Simply put, I don’t work the same way that most people do and that makes communication a bit of a struggle for me.  I tend to operate by strict rules and procedures that rarely change.  My communication style tends to be extremely formal.  I don’t like it when patterns change.  It throws me off.  I’m especially sensitive to changes in patterns.  Is that a survival mechanism or a learned behavior?  It’s hard to say.  With my history, it could be either or both.

Some days, it’s easy to feel like I’m out of place, like I don’t fit in a world designed for ‘normal.’  But then I remember—God doesn’t make mistakes.  He designed every intricate detail of who I am for a reason.

If you’ve read this far, this isn’t a sympathy post.  It’s days like this that I have the best reminder of how great our God is and how specific His blessings are.  Nothing in life works the way it’s supposed to for me.  Even if there were an owners manual, it wouldn’t apply to me.  I know that this isn’t a mistake.  I know that I’m not a mistake.  I also know that my struggles are far from unique even if my perspective on them might be.  I listen to music to quiet the noise in my head.  The world comes into sharp focus when my wife is around, much like music—it quiets the noise.  She is the grounding rod to my lighting rod.

I know that a lot of what I wrote today won’t make any sense to a lot of people.  That’s ok.  If it did make sense to you, just know that you are not alone.  The daily struggle is real.  Normal isn’t.  There are people who pretend to be normal and then there are honest people.  Normal is a social illusion.  People act like they have it all together, but the truth is—we all have struggles, insecurities, and quirks.  Some just hide them better than others.  The honest ones acknowledge that we’re all a little different, and that’s okay.

I managed to put my pants on right (I think), my shoes are on the right foot, and I managed to drink my coffee this morning without spilling anything.  I’m married to my best friend and greatest blessing/treasure.  God is good.  And today, that’s enough.