Inside Out

I'll start today's entry with a poem. It's the most recent one I've written, not old stuff like what I've posted so far. In fact, no one has ever read this poem before whichever one of you gets here first! It's the first one of its kind, a streetlights premiere. Here it is:

Inside Out


isolation underneath impressive
unknown against accomplishment

doing always more being less
hiding in the center of circles

victories full of sound alone
another world in control

politeness over perversion
impeccable outside filthy

confusion masquerading completion
pride intertwining pain

admiration in place
of love impossible
because artificial
because unknown

Don’t let me miss you.




So, this is a highly personal poem, but I share it because I think that it doesn't apply only to me. There are some lessons in it that I'd love to spare anyone else the pain of having to learn the way I did. I guess it's specifically about my ongoing journey of figuring out who I am and learning to actually be that person. I'll give a little bit of my own backstory as well as some insight into my strange poetic method in order to hopefully explain this little poem.

In terms of poetic style, this one is really kind of a personal anomaly. As most of you already know, I'm a big fan of complete sentences and good grammar, sometimes to the point of being a bit anal about it. So here we have this poem that completely resists both punctuation and normal syntax until its very last line. Guess which line of the poem I wrote first and which one is the most important to understanding the whole poem...

I made all those unusual (for me) stylistic choices for a reason though. The best way I can describe what I'm going for in this poem requires a visual aid. Unfortunately, this is the internet, so you'll have to make your own since I can't really show you. Don't worry though, it's very simple and I'll walk you through it. Ok, so to see what this poem is like, you need a sock. Any kind of sock, it doesn't matter, but it does need to be one you aren't currently wearing. I'll wait while you go get one.

...


Ready? Alright, hold the sock in front of you, so you can look straight down into the hole. That top circle of the sock is like the last line of my poem. So, grab the sock by that with one hand, and with the other push the rest of the sock up from underneath so it ends up inside out (get it?) and upside down. Notice, that hole is still in the same place, but now you can see a lot more of what used to be inside it. It's also much less pretty than the outside of the sock, and more disorderly. All that crazy fuzzy stuff you can now see, along with any accompanying dirt, sand, toenail fragments, etc., represents the rest of my poem. Wasn't that fun?

Anyway, the idea I'm going for is that in a good poem, each line that actually appears (e.g. Don't let me miss you) should have all kinds of stored up meaning underneath the surface. This poem takes that one particular cry of my heart and turns it inside out so you can see the mesh and mess that it actually consists of. I've written other poems sort of like this before, now that I think about it, with endings that encourage reinterpretation of the whole rest of the poem in their light. Maybe I can start a new genre! "Sock poems"...

On the more serious side, though, I think the underlying issue of this poem is one that everyone can identify with. All of us want so badly to be loved, and we will really do just about anything to make that happen. The problem is, who we are is not what we do. I've spent (read: wasted) so much time in my life trying to conform my image to what I thought people wanted me to be. I specifically remember in middle school looking at the "cool kids" who picked on me and my friends and analyzing what made them cool. "Oh, so cool kids wear this and act like this... I can do that!" And you know what the scary and really sad thing is? To a pretty great extent, I did.

Now, I had determined beforehand that I would use the coolness I would obtain to be nice to people those other kids would be mean to. I did end up being able to do that in some ways, but I also became in other ways just as judgmental as those people I hated. I knew all along that I was worth more than they were giving me credit for, but unfortunately I solved that problem by trying to attain what was valuable in their eyes, not by realizing their standard was twisted. So while I did eventually largely escape their judgment, I did so by buying into their bankrupt standards of coolness.

To make a long story very short, the result of my quest to remake my image was, on the surface, successful. People started to think I was cool, girls started to pay attention to me, and I was loving it. I used my sense of humor to make myself the center of attention and used my accomplishments and skills in an attempt to force people to respect me. Below the surface, though, something very different was going on. I was in the process of actively forgetting who I was.

I started getting more and more stressed out, and that led into deeper problems like depression. See, constantly managing what everyone is thinking about you is a heck of a lot of work, and it was burning me out while I was unaware. I was thinking about every single action and decision based on what it would do to the image I was portraying to everyone. In the process, I was losing touch with what I actually wanted. I became all the ugly things in my poem while looking like I was all their exact opposites. Worst of all, I wanted love, but all I got was admiration. But how could anyone have actually loved me? They didn't know who I really was! Many admired my fake front or thought it was cool and had things together, but who was underneath? I was largely unaware myself, so how could they know?

Thankfully, God still knew what was underneath. He let me get to the desperate end of my remaking of myself in my own image, and then he came at that front with a sledgehammer. He used people that knew me before my front and some that he just supernaturally told about my issues to challenge me about who I really was. I felt like huge chunks of me were falling off as what was inside was painfully brought out. He showed me through a series of very painful circumstances how broken I was (am) and gave me no other choice but to admit it.

Then the strangest things started to happen. I had thought that God (and everyone else) would reject me if they saw the brokenness I was hiding. But as I became more honest about who I was and began to take off my many masks, I felt God's love more and more. And, people started being able to actually care for me, and for some reason, they wanted to do so! There's really no other word for it but grace.

Here's the thing: if God created us, then it stands to reason that only he knows what we are really made for. Only the maker would. So I think the only way we can ever hope to love anyone else or be loved ourselves is to know God. If we know him, he can tell us who we actually are and give us strength to walk in it. This enables us to love others and be truly loved for who we are in return. It's change from the inside out.

For me, I tried to change my outside to find love, and all it brought was destruction inside. Don't waste your time with that! Jesus wants to move on the inside and let the change flow out in "streams of living water" (John 7:38). Recently a friend of mine reminded me of the prayer of St. Francis. This prayer talks about that kind of inside out change and reminds me a great deal of the streetlights' call, so I'll finish with it (slightly amended with a prayer of my own that should be quite obvious):


Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

God, O God, don't let me miss you.

Amen.