Peniel - Day 3...3:55pm

My life became a private torment. The question why is this happening to me consumed me. But my fear kept me from asking anyone but God, and he never answered. My masks I learned to wear so well hid the depths of my pain from the world around me. And while God didn’t answer my often repeated question, I did. It’s my fault. I didn’t know why, but I knew it must be true. I felt personally responsible for everything that happened to me, for every unacceptable feeling and thought.

I remember watching the movie It’s a Wonderful Life as a boy and just knowing that if that were done with me, if I were given the chance to see what the world would be like if I had never been born, then I would find a much better world with those I cared about happier and better off with my absence. I’m not sure what gave me that idea, but I know once it hit me for the first time I never quite shook it. That feeling haunts me even now. All I knew was that I was the reason for the pain.

Could it be as simple as this? At the tender age of four or five when I began to feel the pain, confusion and emptiness, when it first felt like bad things were happening to me, did I then with my child logic evaluate the situation, declare that good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people and conclude that I must therefore be a bad person. Then a little boy is left to struggle with the question of what is it about him that is so bad and unacceptable when he can’t figure out what he did that was bad except feel these hurts. Self-branded as bad, I could no longer believe it when I was told I was good, when someone showed pride in me I thought, why? I thought they can’t be right, because if they’re right then why do I feel this way. And if they’re wrong, then it’s because they don’t know how I really feel and am. If they find out they won’t feel pride and love for me. I will no longer be accepted. I had love and acceptance, but I didn’t because I believed it to be for some other boy they saw and not for the me who lived beneath the mask that boy wore. I traumatized myself with this idea that having done nothing wrong I was still bad and that noone could ever see that truth because then I couldn’t be loved or accepted anymore. And so loved and accepted I was neither. And a hunger for those two things was born. I became the person who starved to death while sitting at the banquet table a thousand dishes within reach.

Fear entered my life. Fear that I would be discovered as unacceptable, fear that I would lose the love in my life that I didn’t really feel was mine in the first place. Fear that I would never be able to measure up. And fear brought his friend guilt. My new and constant childhood companion. I took personal responsibility for everything I felt was wrong in my life and more. For a year now I have struggled with guilt and the idea that the drop in the size of my father’s congregation while I was in prison was my fault. I have wanted to talk to him about that many times, to hear that assurance that of course not, it hasn’t anything to do with me or what I did. But fear and guilt say don’t bring it up, because if the suspicion and feeling is hurting you how are you going to deal with it when you find out it’s true? This foolish responsibility for the lives of others, some of whom I never even met, in this new, improved, healthier me of the past year is nothing compared to the weight I put on myself as a boy. Where oh where did this nonsense come from? How did I begin to take responsibility for and feel guilty for anything and everything bad that happened around me? Of course it was my fault. I was bad so bad things happened. But I wasn’t bad. I wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t bad. But here we are again, right back to that same place. A little boy with no major wrongs somehow concluding he was, at the core, a bad person. How did this happen? I think I may finally be getting close to the root. And I feel beaten and exhausted. I think I need a break. Maybe go drop a line in the lake and bask in the nice afternoon and the presence of God and try to realize that whatever that little boy felt, no matter how it effected every day after that, it wasn’t, it isn’t necessarily true. Not everything I feel is real. This is where it begins to matter that I know I am forgiven and loved by my creator. And where the anger burns again. How could a small child of four or five feel this way and nobody see it? How could a God who loved that little boy let that happen?