An Open Letter to My Past Self

When I was fourteen, I didn't want to live past age twenty-one.

I rarely talk about this, especially not so bluntly or so publicly. But today, I felt like I needed to. Seven years ago, I didn't realize what I was feeling wasn't normal. I didn't know it was dangerous. Conversely, I also didn't know anybody else knew what I was feeling or could relate to it. I was torn between the fear that either nobody would understand what I was feeling and so if I opened up, they just wouldn't know what I was saying, and the fear that everybody felt this and it was normal, that feeling like I didn't want to keep living for much longer was a part of life everyone experienced and I just had to suffer through it. I honestly believe that if I didn't have my fiction to pile some of my feelings into, I would have had to face them directly, and might have ended up in a much darker and more dangerous place. 

When I was fourteen, I didn't want to keep living past age twenty-one because I couldn't imagine life as something I could enjoy. I couldn't find joy in anything anymore and I didn't think that would ever change.

But it did. It did change. I'm twenty-one now, and I'm so, so glad that I have many years still ahead of me. The life I once used to dread has become my greatest dream. I've rediscovered the joy that used to evade me constantly. Even with anxiety or caffeine making my heart race right now, sitting on the couch with a cuddly little kitty sleeping on my legs, a fuzzy blanket, a good thick fantasy book, and soft music playing? That's the good life. So, to my past self, I promise, it gets better. You won't be in that darkness forever. You will rediscover what it means to be happy. You won't always face the future with such dread. You will find joy again in the things that used to excite you. It won't always be easy, and in some ways, that darkness will always be with you, but you won't always be in the pitch-dark cave you're in now. You will find a way out into the soft twilight and the cool morning, the darkness just shadows lurking behind bushes and wrong turns on wooded paths. Here's the secret that will keep you going through the darkest night:

It gets better.

So don't give up because you think the rock-bottom you've hit will be the rest of your life. It won't. You will find solace in realizing that the thoughts you live with aren't normal, but they aren't unique either. A fictional character and an author that becomes one of your good friends will help you see that constantly hating yourself isn't normal or healthy but it is something you can walk out of, a pattern you can break. You'll leave the church and pastor that haunt you. You'll find grace in the God that never meant for you to beat yourself up with the Law you were never able to live up to, finally realize that sanctification doesn't mean you're a failure if you're not perfect now that you follow Jesus. Your crazy hormones will come under control, and while they will still mess with your head worse than they probably should, you'll be able to recognize that for what it is. Your health will come more under control, and for the days when it's not, at least you'll know you're not alone in that either. You'll make friends that won't drift away and desert you and be able to handle it when others do. One day, you'll be able to talk about this to others and you won't feel anymore the crushing weight of being alone.

If you're someone who feels like I felt seven years ago, just know that you're not alone. And that this darkness you're feeling isn't all you'll ever feel. It gets better. I won't lie and say that it's always easy, that I'm completely cured and the darkness is completely gone. I can't even say quantitatively what made it better because I don't really know. But life gets better. You will live and love and laugh and dream and you will find happiness again. And you will be so happy you're living to experience it all. Even the darkest times. Even the stress and the anxiety and the college classes that make you want to rip your hair out and the waitressing experiences that leave you in tears and the triggers that remind you of the darkness that still tries to take over sometimes. Because now that you've faced wishing you were no longer there to experience it all, every day that you do experience it is a gift you never thought you'd be glad to have.

And also, just know this: fiction can save lives. It sure saved mine.

All my best,

Addyson

(P.S.: the book series that saved my sanity and probably my life is just amazing and frankly everyone should go check it out right away and yes, I'm not ashamed to make this a post about mental health awareness and a book promo)

Also, if you're ever experiencing thoughts about ending your life or simply wishing it would end by natural causes, don't hesitate to call 988 immediately. Don't be afraid to get help.

Nope, Not a Phan

 Not sure what it says about me that it takes dumb pins on Pinterest swooning over the Phantom from The Phantom of the Opera to come out of my blog hiatus, but here we are.

Ladies, here are just a few little tips to evaluate whether or not the man pursuing you is worth marrying or whether you should, in fact, run as fast as you can to the nearest police station and refuse to leave until the man who wants to be in a relationship with you is locked in the deepest dungeon they can find. 

1. If he sings to you through the walls and teaches you how to sing as well, but refuses to disclose his name, run.

2. If he, while singing to you through the walls and teaching you how to sing as well, implies that he is an angel sent from heaven by your dead father when he is in fact a living human being who has never even met your father, run.

3. If he, while singing to you through the walls and teaching you how to sing as well, overhears you stating that you think he might BE your dead father and refuses to correct your assumption, run.

4. If he continually harasses your workplace, frightening some of your coworkers into quitting and your boss into fleeing by retiring in another country and selling the company, by pranking people, vandalizing the place, imitating a ghost, and causing numerous people near-death experiences, RUN.

5. If he squats in the basement of your workplace and, instead of pursuing gainful employment, extorts the building owners into paying him a wage through vandalization and murder, RUN.

6. If he makes a sport of murdering your coworkers, especially if they insult him, tell frightening stories about him, or literally just stumble upon him while cleaning the basement, RUN, DO NOT WALK, TO THE NEAREST PERSON WITH A SWORD AND/OR A GUN AND DO NOT LEAVE THAT PERSON UNTIL THE MAN PURSUING YOU HAS BEEN LOCKED UP OR KILLED.

7. If he is fifty and you are eighteen and he has been spying on you through the walls for months, possibly years, and now is pursuing you, perhaps consider that that age gap has all kinds of red flags on it.

8. If he has been spying on you through your walls for months, possibly years, in your dressing room and your bedroom, watching you change, CALL THE POLICE.

9. If he takes you to a secret underground lair alone the first time you've ever met in person while still not knowing his name and he's the only person that can actually take you out of his lair, meaning you're trapped there at his mercy, all I'm saying is, his physical deformities should be the least of your worries.

10. If he catfishes you, do not pursue a relationship with him.

11. If he screeches like an unholy demon and calls you a "lying Delilah" for exposing his catfishing, drop this relationship like you'd drop Jack Dawson into the freezing Atlantic Ocean while you hog the door for yourself.

12. If you feel like you can't tell him that you're interested in someone else and hide your engagement to your childhood best friend because you're afraid for your fiancé's life if your voice teacher finds out you're not interested in him, perhaps consider bringing down a countrywide manhunt on your former voice teacher instead of wondering whether you should have chosen him rather than your sweet fiancé.

13. If his only friend reveals to you that he has built the shah of Persia a literal torture chamber, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.

14. If you find out that he so enjoyed torturing people in his torture chamber that he even freaked out the literal shah of Persia for being too sadistic and was kicked out of the country, DON'T JUST CALL THE POLICE, CALL THE ARMY AND THE NAVY AND THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT DOWN ON THIS CREEP.

15. If when a freak accident causes a chandelier to collapse and kill someone in the audience, you're not entirely sure it wasn't engineered by him because he's salty the prima donna got the main female role in the opera instead of you, part of the ensemble, just because he's teaching you and tried to blackmail your bosses into picking you, maybe you should wonder why you had to be reassured he didn't commit that specific murder and look further into how you see his character and how dangerous he is.

16. If he forces you to perform in an opera for him and you have no choice but to do it so you can help your fiancé get him arrested, I don't think a meaningful relationship with him is possible.

17. If he murders your costar and takes his place so he can flirt with you while impersonating another man, grab the nearest gun and shoot him in his deformed face.

18. If he literally strangles your fiancé and threatens to kill your fiancé if you won't agree to run off with him instead, forcing you to choose between a nice, sweet nobleman with a steady paycheck who loves you for who you are and respects you as a person and a deformed sewer goblin who's over thirty years older than you and is a sadistic serial killer, don't feel bad about dumping him. Seriously. He doesn't deserve you, honey.

Via Pinterest

I mean, look at this! Just look at it! Literally strangling a guy to death because he had the audacity to win over his childhood friend and fall in love with her and then object when you kidnap her and try to force her to marry you. Not the mark of a man who would make good husband material. Good husbands don't regularly strangle people.

19. If he fills the basement of your workplace with a ton of gunpowder and threatens to blow up your workplace, killing dozens, perhaps hundreds--especially if he manages to take out several other buildings with the massive pile of gunpowder--if you don't marry him, run and don't look back. Maybe move to Norway, I hear it's beautiful this time of year, all that snow.

NO. NO. No. Just no. Not forcing someone to marry you and not murdering her fiancé because she's just not that into you isn't love. It's not being a despicable human being. Look, you can ship messed up ships because they're messed up and you love reading about or watching the unhealthy dynamics, but don't pretend a ship is healthy when it's not. This isn't healthy. It's messed up. The Phantom of the Opera isn't a good guy. He's a sadistic serial killer that enjoys torturing people, does not hesitate to blackmail and extort to get his way, and no amount of a nice singing voice can sugarcoat the fact that at the end of the musical, he's just finding the one tiny little speck of humanity he had in him by letting Christine and Raoul go, not making some great sacrifice out of his love for Christine. He does not deserve Christine and he sure as Mustafar doesn't deserve someone better than Christine. No. The book was a horror/mystery, not a love triangle. The Phantom is never a realistic option in the book (see the Persian torture chamber stuff and the whole "barrels of gunpowder under the opera house" thing). Let's not pretend Raoul isn't a way better guy than the Phantom (and don't come at me with that dumb Love Never Dies crap, that musical never should have been allowed to exist). Love the messed-up ship if you want, but don't pretend the Phantom is anything more than what he is--that being a dangerous messed-up monster.

Via Pinterest

Via Pinterest

Ladies, choose better. Choose Raoul de Chagny.

Dedicated to my creative writing professor, who, while she always thought Christine should have chosen the Phantom, recognizes that that probably means she has a problem with being attracted to bad boys.

Lessons From a Crappy Movie

So I just watched the 2008 movie Jumper. I honestly only watched it to see Hayden Christensen's acting skills in a movie other than a Star Wars one. And with that, I was suitably impressed. Dude can act, y'all. But the movie itself (and I knew this from the start) is kind of crappy.

Don't get me wrong, the premise is great and has tons of potential, a man who has teleporting powers and is hunted by an organization that wants to kill all teleporters. But the movie had several mistakes along the way that turned what could have been a great movie into a lackluster one.

The biggest problem was that the writers didn't trust their viewers to understand the backstory without voiceover. The first couple of scenes are filled with voiceover from the main character, David (Hayden Christensen). Voiceover in movies is always risky because it's the epitome of telling instead of showing. And us writers know that's a big no-no in most cases.

via GIPHY

The thing I noticed, though, was that the movie didn't even need the voiceover. All the things in the voiceover were shared through the scenes. The emotional beats were strong on their own and would have impacted the viewer much more than they did with the voiceover. The voiceover cheapened the emotional beats that could have made the beginning of the movie strong.

The second problem that doomed the movie was David himself. Hayden Christensen played him very well, no doubt, but the writers gave their protagonist no redeemable qualities and no reason for the viewers to root for him. David was an objectively bad person. He robs banks to fund his lavish lifestyle of hopping around the world with his teleporting ability vacationing all the time. Nevertheless, he could have been a sympathetic character viewers rooted for with just one simple action.

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A common term for making antiheros likeable is "petting the pooch." If in the beginning of his kind of crappy lifestyle, David had pet a pooch, then that could have solved the likeability problem. This didn't need to be literally petting a dog, though. In fact, the movie had the perfect opportunity to have David pet the pooch. After the beginning set-up scenes, David is zipping around his apartment filled with pictures of his travels, generally having a good time and living for himself. He turns on the TV and watches a brief news clip of people stranded in a flood. The reporter even says that there's no way to get those people out. David takes this clip in, and what does he do?

He hops up, gathers a bag, and travels to London to pick up a hot date. He then travels to Fiji, which was just hit by a big storm, so he can catch some large waves.

Jeez. Talk about insensitive.

If, instead, David had used his buildup of supplies and money to help the stranded people and then gone on his vacation, that would have presented an interesting dichotomy, where he is using his gift compassionately, yet also doing terrible things with it and living a pretty selfish life. This simple change could have given viewers a reason to root for David.

One more simple change could have brought this movie up from lame and forgettable to memorable. This is the acceptance of moral nuance and introduction of a character arc. David, a selfish Jumper, is chased by a fanatical organization that wants to kill him simply for possessing his abilities. The movie uses this plot to emphasize the message "Murder bad, David good." However, there were seeds of complexity that could have enhanced the movie if capitalized on. For instance, the main bad guy (he was played by Samuel L. Jackson, so he was too Samuel L. Jackson for his name to register) tells David that all of the Jumpers, even if they start out good, always end up using their abilities for selfish ends, which in his mind justifies murdering them all. This claim actually is a fairly valid one, coming from the classic Invisible Ring scenario, which posits that any normal man, given an invisible ring, would become completely immoral and selfish, taking whatever he wanted because he has the power to do so.

David protests that he's different, but this conversation, which should have come earlier in the movie, could have been the impetus of his character arc (which was practically nonexistent in the movie). David is different, in that he didn't have a slow slide to selfishness but started out that way. A slow realization of his selfish behavior, and that he actually does fit the reasons Samuel L. Jackson wanted to kill him, could have slowly transformed him from the selfish man living for himself to the man you got a glimpse of in the pet the pooch moment we didn't have. In the end, without the character arc, David ends up in pretty much the same place he started out in, as does the bad guy, except for the fact that David has a girlfriend now.

Hayden Christensen is a good actor, but the writers for this movie really dropped the ball.

via GIPHY

It's All Greek to Me

   When I was little, my mom read D'aulaires' Book of Greek Myths to me and I was intrigued by all the crazy stories of Greek gods. I got a little older and read more in-depth stories of the Greek myths (two in a row that said the exact same things and I have never let my mom forget it). A couple years after that, I read the Percy Jackson series, and in high school I read The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex. I can explain the story of Atlas and Prometheus and identify Aphrodite in Renaissance paintings.

   I have noticed that many Christians are afraid of letting their children be exposed to views opposite of their own, telling their children not to read the part in history books about Greek myths, banning movies that mention such things as evolution or magic, shielding their kids from anything that might make them doubt Christ for their entire childhood. This has never been my experience. I listened to The Wizard of Oz on four cassette tapes over and over again when I was small, even though my mom didn't believe in good witches. All I got was a warning, "There's no such thing as a good witch," and I was free to memorize The Wizard of Oz and the preview chapter of Pinocchio to my heart's content. I've studied evolutionary theory from a Christian perspective and I read On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (I might be a little bit obsessed with the full title). I've read the Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx had issues, man) and several different books explaining the prevailing worldviews in the world today. I watched Star Wars at age eight and Lord of the Rings several years after. I read The Hunger Games at twelve. 

   My parents were open to letting me be exposed to the world (at appropriate ages, of course) and discussing views that differed from ours. In no way did this hinder my connection to God, but instead it strengthened my convictions. I was not hidden from the attacks Christianity has come under and was able to learn the counterarguments to these attacks. I know evolutionary theory probably better than most who believe in it, and so understand the weaknesses inherent in the model. I can recognize communism in the world, and I didn't become a Communist by learning about the worldview. I was allowed to question everything because in that way I received answers and grew in knowledge and understanding of my faith and the world I live in.

   In many ways, I can't help but see how such a restrictive, protective lifestyle actually hinders the Christian walk rather than helping it. When one is told what to think and not how to think, that leaves the person vulnerable to any person with an authoritative stance on a subject. A faith cannot truly become personal until it is tested, and a child raised in a Christian home is crippled by not exercising his brain and solidifying his faith until he grows up and is thrown into the real world as an adult. As Thomas Jefferson once said, "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear."

   Not only does the absence of exposure to differing worldviews hinder faith, it makes it almost impossible for a Christian to relate to those in the world, understand them, and reach out to them. This world has been built by those who did not follow God, and if one does not understand their beliefs, one cannot understand our world either. For example, let's go back to my good ol' Greek myths. Sure, they were the center of pagan worship of false gods. Yes, they seem kind of silly to us today. But the Greek myths have permeated Western culture far more than any of us quite realize today. At the Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor in Walt Disney World, Mike Wazowski tells a joke about Roz and how ugly she is: "The face that launched a thousand lunches." It's a silly thing about Roz being so ugly that she makes people throw up, but the joke is also a twist of the classic "face that launched a thousand ships." This phrase references Helen of Troy, who was kidnapped by Paris because Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, and the Greeks went to war with Troy because of it, launching a fleet of a thousand ships across the sea to fight for Helen's honor.

   Missing out on this joke because of a weak understanding of Greek mythology doesn't truly hinder anyone in much. But this is just one example of how much Greek mythology has affected the world we live in. "Achilles heel". "Between a rock and a hard place." "Trojan horse." "Mentor." "The Midas touch." "Opening Pandora's box." "Narcissists." Many of the Renaissance paintings done by Christian men, such as Raphael, Michaelangelo, and Botticelli. That hideous statue of George Washington hidden somewhere in Washington DC that posed him like Zeus. Without an understanding of Greek beliefs, we can't understand why the Renaissance paintings so frequently featured naked people. Even in Acts, the Greek and Roman gods are mentioned. In one town, Paul was labeled Mercury because he spoke to the people and the man accompanying him was called Jupiter. In Ephesus, he was not very welcomed because he was cutting in on the merchants' sale of Diana (Artemis) statues to those who came to visit the temple in the city. Without an understanding of Greek mythology, we miss out on the context of so many things that have come to be in this world. 

   If Greek mythology is so integral to understanding the world, how much more is understanding modern belief systems important? So many times I have heard Christians insult those who believe differently than they do from an attitude of superiority when they don't truly understand why they believe differently. Without understanding of those differing beliefs, you cannot have compassion for those who believe them or have a real conversation with them. And without compassion, you will turn people away from Christianity rather than bring them in. If you do not deign to understand what those who are different than you believe or participate in cultural landmarks such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, how will you ever be able to understand those who live in the world and befriend them? If you cannot befriend them, how will you reach them with the truth? And how can you ever make a difference in the direction the culture is going if you won't participate in or understand where the culture is now?

   I can't say I understand the move to keep your children from everything you disagree with. To be frank, it's all Greek to me.