Should I try to take you in?
Pretending what you have not felt
In passion sorrow sleep or death eyes closed
Eyes closed
Eyes closed
Eyes closed
Here there´s only faith no doubt
You can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place
With pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit
Where all who come are taken in
Should I try to take you in?
Who´ll pity me if I forget?
It´s said to be and not to be in love
Is to regret
Regret
Regret
Regret
Here there’s only faith no doubt
You can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place
With pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit
Where all who come are taken in
Should I try to take you in?
Who´ll pity me if I forget?
For those who’ve never been in love
Need to forget
Forget
Forget
–Tracy Chapman, “Taken”.
Oh my, i guess it’s been some time, hasn’t it?
I’m sitting in my apartment right now, willfully ignoring grading sophomore quizzes on World War II, and sipping some rooibos tea out of a bizarrely pretentious china cup given to me for Christmas. It’s blue and white, with a touch of gilt around the rim, a little spot of chinoiserie in my little house. I realize I’ve invited precious little people to my place, and spend so many more hours outside of it than in it, but it’s a strangely comforting thing to be home tonight. I’ve lowered the lights, lit some candles, and its just me, my tea, and the endless cascade of thoughts that rush and tumble inside my brain, constantly pinging off each other, neurons flashing bright with anticipation, confusing and God knows what else.
I realize that, per usual, this is probably my first night home without something “to do” in nearly a month if not more.
It’s an odd feeling, to not be rushing, constrained to do something, hours busy from the alarm clock until the crashing into bed. It forces me in a lot of ways to look around, reassess, figure out just what the bloody hell I think I’m doing. As usual, I tend to find myself careening madly in a dash, trying to care for everyone, put on a show, be outgoing, smile, work hard, and get all of my shit together. With my personality, I tend to stuff down negative feelings, and choose to avoid negative thoughts and emotions in one of the few socially acceptable methods–busyness and interaction. Besides, street drugs are expensive and cliché. 
Should I try to take you in? Who’ll pity me if I forget?
And the kettle’s blaring again. I’m growing positively British in my beverage choices tonight.
Let’s talk about spaceships–or anything–except you and me, okay?
It’s been so hard lately. And that sounds foolish and whiny to say. So hard? As if I were the only one, or that my experiences were novel. But a lot has gone on. A promising relationship with a beautiful and funny girl took an unexpected turn that ended in a lot of tragedy, heartbreak, and devastation that I know I’m not even really beginning to understand. I’ve been rocked in a lot of ways, and I don’t want to believe that I’m lovable. For so long, I believed that I was destined to play the best friend role, and I’d accepted, “dealt with,” and worn the label proudly. I’d waved it like a banner, I’d identified with it personally. I’d made peace with the idea of the neutral, sexless friend who didn’t have emotional, personal, romantic needs because he was above those, because he was deathly afraid of turning into his father, a man who routinely used, abused, and exploited women around him. Then she liked me. Really liked me. I didn’t know how to deal. I still don’t. And it all went to shit so fast, eh? And so horribly, horribly wrong. So broken.
And what’s that saying again–’they’re only words, and they can’t kill me’?
But I can’t even spell them, and the cadence to what she says is well.
Let’s talk about spaceships–anything–except you and me, ok?
On top of that, the most momentous thing ever happened. All the work I’d been moving towards, all that effort, the last two years here in SD–paid off, and I was rewarded beyond my wildest dreams. I got into graduate school. Woot! I was accepted to five PhD programs, and they all wanted me. They thought I was smart, they thought I was brilliant, and in a lot of ways, I flashed back to April of 2001, seven years ago, when I was a wide-eyed, slightly more conservative senior in high school, when the world was changing, but at the very least I still thought things were and could be ’simple.’ I’ll never forget the day I got the letter saying that I was a President’s Scholar to Stanford. “For all your hard work,” it said. “This recognition is for you.” Mom wasn’t home. I was by myself. It was two days before my seventeenth birthday, it was 3:15 in the afternoon, and a warm breeze floated through the smoggy Los Angeles air. And I sat on the floor and cried. I’d gotten in! I’d done it! I’d done—-was that all? Was that all it was?
And in that moment I knew that I’d never be defined totally by my studies. I happened to be a guy who did well academically; that wasn’t who I was. And somehow I feared that this shining jewel of academia, this instant stamp approval of my cleverness, wouldn’t be enough. I needed something else. I needed to grow. To grow up. To see so much of myself outside of academic cleverness.
And with a heavy heart, but with a sense of purpose, I went to UC San Diego, and as this journal shows–did so much. I did grow up. I learned so much about myself. I plumbed the depths of my loneliness, and I learned that Jesus was more than just a secure belief–he was supposed to be everything. And I began to see through my own energetic, friendly personality–I learned I was far more deep and complex than that, I began to learn to share that, and I began to see that I couldn’t be everything to everyone. And in the meantime, I led tours, TA-ed classes, advised residence, scaled mountains in Africa, and studied scriptures from Jesus to Jainism.
And I experienced the euphoria of success, endured the heartbreak of not getting into PhD programs, and marveled at the f—ing awesomeness of becoming a high school teacher that impacted students. And now this circle is closing. The period I wanted so much to end, the time I wanted to be over–has come, and I don’t know if I’m ready.
I can’t believe that I completed that cycle. That yesterday, I told Stanford again, no thank you, and again decided on a well-regarded but less “name-recognition” school. The University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign. An amazing academic institution in the middle of effin’ nowhere. Surrounded by cornfields, but full of awesome thought and knowledge. Man, what the hell have I signed myself up for?
I thought about this today as I walked to the grocery store, the April breeze pulling at my wayward afro tendrils, the music of Tracy Chapman and Say Hi To Your Mom pulsing through my earbuds. I have no freaking clue what I’m getting myself into these next five years. Ten years ago I was a freshman in high school, a diehard Republican conservative and shameless know-it-all that stil wanted to be likable. Five years ago, I was an over-involved, overeager sophomore getting ready to start orientation leading and resident advising, a process that would involve me losing my identity in the job, and having to find it again in Jesus while alone on a mountainside in South Africa. Five years from now, I will be 29, with ridiculous stories, and hopefully in the final stages of my dissertation. I’ll be Dr. Tallie, and will still not find my identity in the damn academia, but be inspired by it. Ten years from now–hopefully a tenure track professor at a respectable university by 34, engaging and caring for college students, reminding them they are meaningful and that they are valuable while being a bizarre, entertaining performer o’ knowledge. One can hope.
One final thing, since this return to journaling is long enough. These past two days my school, F——, has been doing a program known as “Every Fifteen Minutes” in which drunk driving has been examined in a deeply emotional and frighteningly powerful way. Designated students were taken from class (one of mine was taken first period) by police officers, who announced their death at the hands of drunk driver and placed a picture with an obituary in every room. I was incredibly shaken because it was so possible–death comes so swiftly, unpredictably, and unfairly (at least by my estimation). Later in the day, we were treated to a horrifying tableaux in which students had perished in a drunk driving accident, and emergency teams came to pry their dying bodies from twisted car frames, painted crimson with their own blood. Today, there was a mock funeral, and the parents and students read final farewell letters, emphasizing the immediate, destructive consequences of drunk driving, poor decisions, more brokenness. I cried for nearly an hour, my breath coming in quick gulps while I struggled to look composed in the assembly as a teacher, taking in how broken we all are, how messed up, how hurting, how needy. How twisted and shattered. My mind desperately wanted to come up with something else to meditate upon, spaceships perhaps, or a witty comeback. But I was left with brokenness, and the need for hope. Hope that I do find, unwillingly in God, in a Jesus I struggle to trust and hope in. And I was reminded of how while I am so accessible, loving, and caring, I trust very few people deeply. So few are let in to see me on a deep, real level. So few are trusted because they might hurt me deeply. They might leave me. They might, like several people, end their own lives selfishly (or attempt it), leaving me broken in their wake. So I find trust is very hard to come by, although I offer it unflinchingly to others. And last week, I really realized that I trust Jesus so very little. And he keeps asking for me to trust him. And that makes me furious, because he’ll let me down, I think.
But he hasn’t yet. And I’m trying to trust him, love myself as much as I do other people, and try to accept my brokenness–all while getting ready to enter a radically new phase of my life.
And so winds down my seventh and final year of life in San Diego. And it’s a mixed year indeed, no?
Should I try to take you in?
And hope for the prefect docile pet?
Hope that you’ll not defile or wreck my home–Sweet home, Sweet home, Sweet home.
Here there´s only faith no doubt
You can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place
With pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit
Where all who come are taken in….
