Insights Into My Insanity

I suppose the best way to introduce this piece would be simply to recount the thought process that lead me to it.

I was doing one of my long drives, and my thoughts were wandering, and I began to think about the ways in which I’ve tried to deal with different aspects of life, and the various systems I’ve set up, and the various problems I’ve encountered. As someone who admittedly has the “blogging bug”, I thought that this might be something that would make a good blog entry, or perhaps a short series. As with my series recalling the back stories of my Chimes articles, it would be a short break from the usual update to a reflection on events during high school and college.

In the sense that blogging is primarily a release, the main benefit of this would be to me, but perhaps someone else might be able to find some inspiration off of it, or more likely learn from my mistakes and save themselves the trouble of repeating it. I thought I would do a short little series on some of my half-baked philosophies, and entitle it “Experiments with Truth.” The title is stolen from Gandhi’s autobiography, but I’ve always liked it. It would imply that I haven’t found the truth, but here are the results of some of my experiments in my attempts to find it.

But as I began to think more about it, it began to occur to me that what I would be describing could more accurately be described as insights into mental illness or neurosis. And I thought that this might be as good a time as any to come out and acknowledge straight on what I perhaps have always been dancing around ever since I started this blog: I’m not normal, and I realize that.

I’m well aware that everyone else knows it, so I just thought I might as well just admit it rather than trying to pretend.

I’ve always been a little bit different. I remember in kindergarten being too shy to talk to any of the other children around me, but I don’t remember this bothering me at the time. I guess at that age maybe you don’t have a sense of self developed, so maybe you can’t really feel like there’s anything wrong with you.

It was during middle school that I remembered feeling really upset about it. I wanted to be popular and I wanted to be liked by the girls, but I just didn’t have a clue as to how to go about it. I couldn’t carry on a normal conversation, I didn’t know how to talk to girls, I had no idea of what was cool or what wasn’t, or how to become popular, and all of these things seemed to be things that my classmates just intuitively knew. I wondered why it was that everyone else seemed to know these things, and I didn’t. It was as if I had been absent the one day of school when all of these things were explained, and I felt like I was playing a game in which everyone else around me seemed to know the rules, but I didn’t.

Of course middle school is a rough time for a lot of people. High School was a bit better, or at least it became better by the end (the first couple years were a rough start).

I began to discover that I had an unintentional sense of humor, and that people often found me hilarious when I was trying to be serious. People liked having me around because they found humor in my oddities, and I learned to capitalize to this to a certain extent and tried to play up the aspects of my personality which they found humorous. I began to realize that many of the more popular kids were always happy to have me hanging around, and I began to shift my social circles.

In high school I achieved what I suppose might be regarded as some degree of popularity. I was voted on the home coming court, voted the friendliest person in my graduating class, and selected by the chapel committee as one of the seniors to speak at the “senior chapel” at the end of the year.
There were perhaps two aspects to this. One was a desire for acceptance at all costs, which occasionally disguised itself as kindness or friendliness. At times my desire to be liked was a pleasant aspect of my personality, at other times I became someone without principles or backbone. I remember sitting silently when racists comments were made, not having the courage to speak up because I desperately wanted the approval of the person making the comments.

But the second reason I was popular was because my personality quirks were an object of interest.

I remember one of my classmates saying to me once, “Whenever I talk to you I feel like I’m tripping. For someone who has been walking the straight and narrow for a as long as you have, you sure have a whacked out perspective on things.”

Despite the fact that the first couple years were pretty rough, I always had the feeling that Christian High had been pretty good to me. I had absolutely no social skills, but had achieved a degree of popularity anyway. I thought if I had been at any other school I probably just would have been completely ignored. One of the reasons I choose Calvin is because I thought the social environment would be similar to Christian High.

There was a time when I wanted very much to be normal and act like a normal person, but I’ve made my peace with that. I’ve concluded that there is no such thing as normal. Everyone has their quirks if you look closely.

I am well aware that my brain often doesn’t seem to be on the same frequency as everyone else. I know I’m perhaps a couple clicks away from rational thought some of the time. I know that I have the social skills of a twelve year old. I realize that if I lived in another time period I would have starved to death long ago.

I also have would perhaps boarders on an obsessive compulsive need to make systems and sets of rules to run my life.

When my friend Brett came to visit me in Japan, he did a great deal of complaining about how dirty my apartment was. But at one point he said, “Alright, when you do clean, what’s your system? Because I know you’ve got some system for how you clean.” I tried to deny this at first, but Brett insisted. “I know you too well. What’s your system.”

I then admitted that I had several rules for how cleaning should go. The first was that any kind of food matter or organic garbage had to be picked up off the floor first. Then next I had to wash any dishes in the sink. Thirdly I had to remove clothes from the floor and do a load of wash. Only then could I move on and clean trouble spots as I saw fit. When the load of wash was done, I had to immediately remove it from the washing machine and hang it out to dry. Unless of course I was gone by the time the washing finished. If I was putting on my shoes, it counted as being gone, but if I was just walking towards the door, I had to come back and hang up the wash.
Cleaning had to be done everyday. The only exceptions were if I left the apartment for social reasons or for exercise. If I got back late, I still had to clean, but I didn’t have to stay awake past whatever time I needed to go to sleep to get 8 hours. But I couldn’t ditch out of cleaning for any more than 8 hours sleep. Unless I was sleep deprived from the night before. Then I could take a nap in the afternoon, which would get added onto the sleep total from the previous night.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I had so many rules I made for myself. But I felt like I needed these rules. If I just told myself, “I’ll clean whenever I feel like it,” it would never get done. And in order to keep food from rotting in the sink, or clothes from molding in the machine, I felt like I had to make rules about this as well.

In the next few days I’ll try and post my experiments concerning my relationship with material possessions, time, and food. If anyone can get any benefit out of reading these, or learn anything, so much the better.

Otherwise if these strike you as just neurotic or crazy, maybe you can get a laugh out of them.

Insights into my Insanity 2: Wealth and Material Possessions

Whether excessive materialism is a uniquely American phenomenon, or whether it is something that all human beings struggle with, I will leave for others to debate.

I think it is safe to say, however, that as Americans we are all immersed in a materialistic culture, and that even as children we begin the craving for material things. Or maybe I should say especially as children. I think we’ve all seen a child throw a temper-tantrum in the toy store because he didn’t get the toy he wanted (or been that child). Or we all remember as children ourselves being obsessed with the toys we would receive on Christmas day, and no amount of preaching from Sunday School teachers could turn our attention to other aspects of Christmas.

But somewhere along the line I began to get the impression that I was even more materialistic than most of my classmates. During middle school was when I first started to notice it. I was obsessed with getting things. What exactly I wanted was always shifting. At one point obsessed with getting certain action figures, at another point comic books, at another point trading cards, at another point certain books. But whatever it was, the anticipation of owning it was always occupying much of my free thoughts.

I went through the standard stages. At first I told myself I wasn’t materialistic; I was a collector. Lots of people have collections as hobbies.

Then I began to justify it by focusing on the small value of everything I was accumulating. But of course that was only relative to my small income, and my interests.

Next I went through a period where I felt guilty about things. And finally I decided to take action.

The first thing I did in Middle School was to attempt to divide up my income. I didn’t have a lot of money in those days of course. Just my monthly allowance and in the summer extra money from cleaning the pool. Of course in those days, I didn’t have any expenses either. I didn’t have much of a social life, so thing I needed money for was to buy things I wanted.

Whatever money I got I would divide into little jars. 50% of the money would go to the poor. 10% would be tithed to my local church. 10% in saving for the future. And the remaining 30% I could use for buying things.

The problem with this was that it didn’t decrease my desire for material goods any less. All it did was increase the amount of time it took for me to save up for them. I began to notice that a majority of my thoughts were still focused on material objects I wanted.

The next stop was to attempt forbid myself from spending any money on material goods I didn’t need. The problem with this was my weak will power. I would see something I wanted, buy it, and then tell myself that it would be the last time. Soon it became almost a joke. I was spending all of my money on material things again, while promising myself sometime soon I would stop doing it.

Near the end of my Sophomore year at Calvin, I decided I would just get rid of everything once and for all. This would prove to myself that I wasn’t fooling around. I wouldn’t be able to buy anything on impulse any more, because even if I did temporarily break my own rules, I would still know that in the end I would have to just get rid of it again.

This was also a result of the growing awareness that materialism is not just the desire to acquire new things, but also being overly attached to the things you already have. I thought that if I could just get rid of all these material possessions that were distracting me, I could focus on the things that were important in life.

This philosophy had a lot of problems, and I’ll get to those in a minute. However on the whole, I do still believe that this was a step in the right direction. After all, did not Jesus command us to sell all that we have and give the money to the poor? Can we truly be a follower of Christ without attempting to follow this commandment?

In my view, the church has chosen to selectively interpret which sections of the bible are to be taken literally. For instance the gospels and the book of Acts command over and over again to share all that we have with the poor. But the church tells us we are not supposed to take these literally. However condemnations of homosexuality and fornication, which in the New Testament appear only in the epistles of Paul, and only appear briefly when he is listing off numerous sins, are where the modern church has chosen to focus its political energies.

But interpretations of scripture are a broad subject for anther post.

It was my belief that material possessions, beyond what are needed, do not bring any happiness. I, like most college students, was very into collecting CDs at that age. But does having a CD increase my happiness? There was once a time when I had never even heard of “Radio Head”. Was my life in someway deficient before their CD came out? Did people who live in previous generations have an unfulfilled life because they didn’t have the CDs that we did? What about people who lived before recorded music was possible?
Thoughts on the Post-Calvin World
(This started out with a very simply question: has anyone else besides me noticed a big difference between our Calvin circles and the post-Calvin world. But then it got too egocentric and too self-centered.)

This is probably a bit random, but my thoughts just happened to lingering on the difference between my life now and the Calvin bubble, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts and throw it on the blog to see if anyone had any similar experiences.

Now my experience might be especially unique, in the sense that even for a Calvin graduate I was more sheltered than most. I went to Christian schools all my life. In my old neighborhood I knew the kids on my block, but we moved when I was in third grade to a much bigger house with a much bigger yard in a neighborhood where the houses were far enough apart that neighbors didn’t really interact. Growing up all of my friends were either from my Christian school or church youth group. I spent two summers working at a grocery store, but then after that worked for the Calvin dorm cleaning crew, and further isolated myself into the Calvin bubble. Forget non-Christian friends, I would have been hard-pressed to even name any non-Christian acquaintances.

Now granted even at Calvin there are two different worlds you can fall into. There was the world of underage drinking, smokers pits, Friday night house parties, and even the occasional casual marijuana, made up primarily of other Christian school grads who, like me, ended up at Calvin out of tradition instead of conviction.

And then there were was the other half of Calvin, made up of late night dormitory devotionals, Monday night bible studies, and daily morning chapels.

Because of my introverted nerdy nature, the fact that I was more comfortable studying in the library and getting to bed at a decent hour than I was partying all night, I ended up in the second group, even though my views were probably more at home in the first.

Of course having written that I realize it is a gross oversimplification that doesn’t do justice to the real people I knew, but the point being I realize I can’t complain too much about being the odd man out, because it was by my own decision. I chose to hang out in the circles I did. And no complaints, you were a great group, all of you. But it wasn’t without its tensions.

The political debates were always great. I complained sometimes about always being outnumbered, or always expected to defend the liberal position whether I was in the mood or not. But for the most part I love a good political discussion as much as the next guy. I usually enjoyed rolling up my sleeves and getting right into the argument.

The political discussions were abstract enough that they never got to personal. The only times I can recall the discussions getting a little heated was on the issues of abortion, or homosexuality. (Although I’m sure he’ll hate me for bringing it up 9 years later, I remember a roommate of mine once saying he wasn’t sure he wanted to room with me if I didn’t believe homosexuality was a sin.)

Things got a little more tense when it concerned my personal life. For instance I don’t know how many hours I spent defending my decision not to go to Church on Sundays. I do know it sabotaged things with some girls I was interested in, but then again I have no one but myself to blame for choosing social circles where I knew I would be the odd man out.

(I primarily objected to church because of its passive nature. My own idea for a more active Church, “Open Church”, never really took off to well, but I always liked it. The strength of an idea, after all, should never be judged on its popularity.)

Although I was never a huge drinker, my belief that there was nothing morally wrong with under-age drinking (old enough to go to war, old enough to have a beer I say), and my insistence on putting this into practice on a couple of occasions, also caused some tensions. I’m reminded of one instance in particular when some Bennick girls, on the pretext of inviting me out to watch tennis with them, ambushed me into a lecture about my drinking habits. I tried to laugh it off, but they were dead serious about it, and it proved to be a very awkward tennis game.

And then of course there were the conflicts over my views on pre-marital sex. Even years later, I’m reluctant to write too much about that debate because of the emotions and strong views involved.

But perhaps most