Meet Tim

My college graduation came and went not with a bang so much as with a breathy little pop, like breaking bubble wrap; the potential thrill of commencement was dulled by the looming real world. I didn’t exactly have a job, although I’d planned on temporarily continuing to work as a youth pastor’s secretary. With its flexible hours, this had been a rather cushy job for a college kid, but an hour after I graduated, it suddenly looked puny as it rammed up against my student loan debt.

That summer, I did a little writing, most of which never saw the light of publication of any sort. But I did successfully submit one short essay and one truly heinous, very lamely rhyming poem to an online outfit, the former a highly unoriginal rambling on the occasion of an ex-boyfriend’s wedding.

That one earned me two or three e-mails from readers, which of course made me pink with pride. The responses were largely similar: I feel the same way, thank you for sharing, here’s to better days ahead for all of us. I replied politely to each, unsure of what to say and wary of the pseudo-intimacy I suddenly had with these faceless surfers.

A week or two later, I was goofing off online when my Instant Messenger chirped to inform me that Internet user SmithTim had sent me a message. Did I want to accept?

I recognized the name as belonging to one of the more theological of the e-mailers and cautiously clicked “Yes.” The message looked like this:

SmithTim: Hi, I’m the one who e-mailed you about your article. I saw that the address you listed was an AOL address, so I decided to see if you were online, and here you are!

Crap.

I wrote back something like, “Oh, hi.” He asked if I had any other writings online, and I directed him to the awful poem to throw him off my scent. He pretended to like it, and then shared the link with a friend, and then the friend pretended to like it, and so I had no choice but to thank him for his dishonesty. The subsequent conversation looked something like this:

SmithTim: So what fills your days?
Opaquesquid: I’m a youth pastor’s secretary. I just graduated from college, so I’m kind of in transition, I guess.
SmithTim: Where did you go to school?
Opaquesquid: Large Evangelical University
SmithTim: Wait . . . are you in Random City??? *

Crap.

About a minute went by before I cautiously typed, “Yeah,” conscious of my finger on each key, and clicked “Send,” regretting it slightly as I did, furious at myself for allowing this potential whack job to ferret out my location.

He was in Anytown too, it turned out, doing graphic design for a medical missions organization I didn’t know existed. His next message was, “Well, maybe you know some of my friends,” since he belonged to this gigantic Bible study that attracted a lot of LEU people.

Surely not, I thought. I wasn’t exactly homecoming queen at LEU—I commuted from home all four years and rarely hung out with anyone outside of class. But, to my chagrin, I did recognize one of the names he threw out, a guy I sort of half went out with a few times freshman year. Our parting was ostensibly friendly, although thereafter I sensed a pretty strong snubbing from his best friend.

“Yeah, I think I do know that guy,” I typed, hoping SmithTim and I wouldn’t become friends.

But we did become friends, or at least Instant Message buddies. We talked about things like school and relationships and church. And then one night, he messaged something like, “Hmm. I think I need some coffee. Would you care to join me?”

There was no way. For one thing, I hadn’t even decided whether or not I wanted to meet him in person at all. Plus, it was 9:00 at night, and I lived with my parents in the suburbs, and there was no way I could tell them that their daughter—who practically never went out—was going to drive into town for a coffee, not without them asking whom she was meeting. And if I told them the truth, I would have to face their freaking out.

So I dodged, steering us toward other conversation topics successfully, I thought. But only a few posts later, he queried, “Are you sure you don’t want some coffeeeee?” The extra e’s seemed to wiggle in an attempt to tantalize.

“Well, I really can’t,” I replied. “I have to pack. Going to Capital City tomorrow morning for a job interview.”

“Leaving us, huh?” That was the plan, I told him breezily, callously.

Driving to the City, I chewed on chalky antacids, and then I choked a little when I realized I’d managed to take the wrong entrance to the highway. It took a dangerous turnaround to get me back on the turnpike. My nerves didn’t get any better, even after I arrived and shook hands with the pastor of the inner city church where I was interviewing, who was probably the kindest, most disarming human being I’d ever met.

I felt this pressure applied by my recent graduation, a pressure that gave all my decisions a sense of urgency and gravity and had everything to do with proving to the world that I wasn’t going to make a mess of my life. This made trying to decide if I fit in here at this church—trying to decide what I wanted to do for the rest of my life—confusing and difficult. Did my anxiety indicate that I should pass on the job, or was I just scared of the unknown, afraid of the impending change?

When I came back to Random, I told Tim that I felt conflicted and anxious about the job. He advised me to stay.



*See, what I've done here is use generic names for stuff like cities and schools. Tim's last name isn't Smith, either, so that's not his real IM address. Carry on!

Paging Planet Earth

I don’t remember what we were arguing about. Terry wanted me to ask someone to do something for me or with me, I think, to reach out to someone, and I didn’t want to. “Why?” he was asking me, and I answered with something vague.

“And why is that?” he pressed, annoyingly, gently.

“Because,” I drew the word large in the air between us. “Because I don’t trust anyone to care about me.”

Terry nodded deeply and smiled a little.

He would return to this idea throughout the rest of our time together, in sessions and in books he told me to read—this idea of reaching outside my walls and asking strangers to know me. He would assign me to think up three ways to draw attention to myself, for example, and he would try to get me to date. And soon something became blindingly obvious: The task before me was to come back to the world, slowly, one step at a time. It was the only way my own world was going to get any warmer.

I fully, resolutely intended to avoid this task. I didn’t realize that soon, out of nowhere, these people would show up and start turning on all the lights in my head. They would push me forward, not realizing that they were saving me.

Over time, I would come to trust Terry. I think it was because he gave me something I needed but refused to ask for or even acknowledge: He gave me permission to want to believe that I was good—and he even pried open a little bit of hope that I wasn’t as wholly bad as I thought.

For a long time, I had journaled somewhat zealously, logging lengthy prayers into steno pads. The journal I was using when I started seeing Terry had a plain blue cover and was about a quarter full with prayers about not having enough discipline and not having a good enough relationship with God and hating myself and wishing I were doing better.

When it grew nearly full, I decided to collage the cover with images clipped from magazines. The photo I chose for the center came from National Geographic and showed a small boy in a sandy Middle Eastern country playing something akin to king of the hill. He stood tall on top of an eroded building, his arms stretching wide and slightly upward like the sides of a bowl, with his collarbones as the base, his palms flat against the plane of the photo. His head leaned back so that his nose became the very peak, standing just above the arc of his brow, and I could see his upper lip curling to form a word, something perhaps determined and victorious that painted everything below a shimmery golden color.

I think I wanted to see myself in him, to relate to him in some way. For the first time in a long time, his kind of youthful, dauntless survival-spark seemed like something I could possess myself.

“So who are your friends?” Terry asked at our next session, pen poised.

“Well, um . . .” I began, then listed off a couple names, one of which belonged to my boss.

“Mm-hm, mm-hm. Now, those sound more like people you work with. So who do you just hang out with?”

Not a single name came to mind, and felt confronted with the reality that normal people did something called “hanging out,” rather than working and going to class and studying all the time. I tried to sidestep his question, embarrassed and feeling like the most gigantic loser ever, but I knew he knew.

There was this long pause, a tactic I would become familiar with, something he used to get me to realize something or elaborate on what I said just before.

I might have been more cooperative if I hadn’t found my aloneness so humiliating. Talking about how and why I’d managed to remove myself so completely from the world felt like admitting that I was a nerd and that I had no life and that no one wanted to be my friend.

And so I stayed tight-lipped. I didn’t tell Terry that I’d stopped wanting to be around people because being around people sometimes had a way of piercing my heart, and then this numbing sickness would fill my blood, making my arms heavy with its self-loathing. I didn’t tell him, not then, about how one minute I had been the kind of high school junior who aspires to be described as “on fire for God,” and the next I was sleeping half the day and crying a fourth of it. I didn’t tell him that trying to talk to friends about this shift felt like sending messages from space.

And so Terry’s silence continued unbroken. But it was the kind of silence that came over and sat beside me on the couch.

Luke, I Am Your Father

It was a Friday afternoon during my senior year of college. I parked my car outside the Shadow Mountain Office Center and walked into the mazelike structure, sniffing to conclude that apple cinnamon air freshener was being pumped through the ventilation system. It took me several minutes to wander through the building, passing insurance agents and hair salons, and locate Terry’s office, which I only half wanted to find.

Terry ran a center that provided free counseling to anyone referred in by a pastor, and I’d filled out the extensive intake forms a couple of weeks before this, my first visit. Something about the walk up stairs and around corners felt like a scene from a Star Wars movie, and I don’t think it was the ‘80s architecture.

The door jingled when I opened it, and I shakily sat down on the lobby couch, wondering if the bell on the door would suffice or if I should try to announce my presence in some way. The decision was made for me when Terry himself appeared from down the hall, smiling and offering his hand.

Terry looked more like the counselor type than anybody I’d ever seen in my life. His round face protruded him into the world softly and gently, with thin lips and eyes and wispy medium-brown hair. I was terrified of him and his loafers.

I followed him to his small office, where he took a seat at his desk chair, and I sat opposite him on a squishy, cream-colored chenille couch. He fiddled with a tape recorder before squeezing the play button, taping our conversation.

“So,” he began, still smiling. “What we usually do here is first I tell you some of my story to make it easier for you to talk about you. Okay?”

“Okay,” I returned, my voice robotic and extra loud in my head. I think it was the second word I’d said since I got there.

Terry’s story took at least twenty minutes to tell. It involved his early, somewhat impromptu marriage and the depression that long plagued his life. I nodded and murmured, “Mm-hmm” a lot, trying hard to quiet my nerves and pay attention.

The story was skin-crawlingly uncomfortable, mostly because I knew that when it was over, I would have to talk. Terry would ask me questions to find out why I had come, and I would have to say things I didn’t want to hear myself say. The truth was that I had come to lay myself there on that couch like a broken toy.

I was just so cold. All my tissues had frozen, and everything hurt. It hurt to move or talk or breathe.

My mother had this kitchen knife that curved upward, the serrations exaggerated like bite marks for the optimum cutting of limes. Every time I saw that knife, I wanted to throw it away, hiding it at the bottom of the trash so that no one would miss it until it was gone, because I had become afraid of it. I was afraid that it would one day hurt me, with my own hand doing the hurting. That was why I came here. Because I was afraid.

But I didn’t tell Terry any of this for some reason. I answered his questions scantly, and then I just sat on the chenille couch and cried.

I've Been Away for Awhile

I was not cool in high school. I played on the academic bowl team. I ran cross-country, which was not quite the sport of prom queens at my school. My arms hung like needles from the billowing sleeves of whatever giant shirt I’d decided to wear that day, and my wide-leg jeans stopped near my ankle bones to reveal, often, trouser socks and clunky Oxford dress shoes.

I had footwear issues in general, really. I completely lacked whatever gene it is that tells a person which height of socks they should wear with which shoes and which pants. Thus the high-water issue, and thus my pairing of ankle socks with skirts. And I wore this pair of über-hippie clogs—which were, in retrospect, clearly summer-only shoes unsuitable for wear with socks of any kind—over thick woolen ones in the middle of winter.

Despite my stunning lack of cool, though, I had a great group of friends, a pack of six girls together (more or less) since elementary school. We could make each other laugh shrill, almost manic laughs by speaking only two words to invoke an inside joke. I remember my throat aching almost every afternoon of the fall of eighth grade as we played driveway basketball in the autumnal chill. And I remember listening to TLC’s “Creep” about nine hundred times.

The day would come, though, when we would graduate and scatter, and it would be time for each of us to start all over and form a new group, only I wouldn’t do a very good job. I don’t know quite how to say it: I simply fell off the planet for a few years. It's taking me a while to make my way back.

So this blog is focused on those adventures and misadventures, the comic and the tragicomic. Come watch me be socially awkward. It's great.