Waiting To Die, Trying To Live

Starting in Middle School and then into High School, I spent so much time planning how I was going to die that I never really thought about how I was going to live. I grew up in a culture obsessed with death. Every Sunday they'd ask the same question: "If you were to die today..." Ok, here's a question: what if I don't die today? What if I don't die this year, or next year, or next decade? What if I live a long, healthy life? What then?

So much of my time was spent just waiting, I got really good at it. Most people hate waiting. They keep trying to take an active role in getting things to happen faster. When you're waiting on God, though, there's nothing you can do. So I learned to amuse myself for brief periods while I waited. Books and games that I didn't really care about but that could grab my attention for a little while. Unimportant things. I was taught that nothing on this earth is important. It's all smoke and vapor, a pale reflection of God's glory. So I made sure that nothing was important to me.

From about 6th grade on, I owned nothing that I couldn't part with. I was sure that if I valued anything it would be taken from me and that I would be left heartbroken. It had happened before, I was sure it would happen again. The only thing I could take with me into the afterlife, I was sure, was what I had learned. So I learned everything I could. I read as much as I could, the Bible most of all, because that was supposed to be the most important thing I could learn, possibly the only thing I could take with me into the afterlife.

For the same reason, I started holding people at arm's length. I was afraid to start any lasting friendships for fear they would be taken from me. I wanted to be able to leave whenever I wanted, no muss, no fuss. I didn't want anyone to remember me, to wonder where I had gone.

If I couldn't be a martyr, I wanted to crawl off into the wilderness and starve to death. Let God kill me in His own way.

The only thing that really got in the way of this was my own family. They had always known me and always would. Truthfully, I didn't really want to die, I wanted to never have been born. If I could have taken a time machine and prevented my birth, I would have. I didn't want anyone mourning me, eulogizing me, remembering me. I wanted to cease to exist, forever and always. I could have had my wish, If I'd thought about it, but I never considered the possibility that there was no Heaven, no soul, that the end of life is the end of existence.

So here I find myself now trying to pull myself back together, to gain some semblance of life. After spending most of my childhood learning to die, now I find myself having to learn how to live. Believing that life is something worth striving for is not an idea that I am used to. But I'm trying.