I wasn't looking for a song that said kinda what has happened to me, I was just looking to hear the song that had been stuck in my head, but I ended up with something that is leading me to this blog post.
The lyrics:
Good Times Bad Times
(Bonham/Jones/Page)
In the days of my youth, I was told what it means to be a man,
Now I've reached that age, I've tried to do all those things the best I can.
No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam.
*Good Times, Bad Times, you know I had my share;
When my woman left home for a brown eyed man,
Well, I still don't seem to care.
Sixteen, I fell in love with a girl as sweet as could be,
Only took a couple of days 'til she was rid of me.
She swore that she would be all mine and love me till the end,
But when I whispered in her ear, I lost another friend, oooh.
* Chorus
I know what it means to be alone, I sure do wish I was at home.
I don't care what the neighbors say, I'm gonna love you each and every day.
You can feel the beat within my heart.
Realize, sweet babe, we ain't ever gonna part.
So it's really a song about a girl leaving you. But that first part, and I know I'm not the first person to blog about it, says a bit more.
I've had a hard time over the past two years or so. I've dealt with depression for the first time in my life, and I have experienced a lot of changes. Thus far I have viewed this as a very unfortunate occurrence to have happen at the same time I finally have achieved a lot of my life goals. I now have a wife, a house, two dogs, a nice car, my own home office, and I'm going to NCSU. But I started to realize a few days ago that maybe there is something different going on. Right now I'm trying to read Stephen Covey's "8 Habits of Highly Effective People" and one of the things he talks about is paradigm shifts. I'm familiar with the concept, but I think it has become a mainstream idea that I have encountered in the past because he wrote this book. At any rate, a paradigm shift is a change not in the way that something is, but a change in the way that you view something. He correlates this to things like when we realized that the earth is not the center of the universe. I have experienced things like this before in my life, like when I started to view my financial situation in a different way. I didn't change the situation, I changed the way that I saw the situation, which then allowed me to handle it.
So as for the song, and how it relates to the last two years. Like I said, I have seen the last two years as a very unfortunate time period in which I had a bad section that just happened to occur when these great things in my life happened. I'm starting to see it as a phase shift. There was a very definite phase shift that occurred for me when I went from childhood to adolescence. It wasn't overnight, but it was over the course of about 6 months. My ways of seeing the world changed drastically. I went from being the nerdy kid that I was growing up to being someone more interested in music, socializing, and had my first interests in art. I wasn't a completely different person, I still had a lot of the same personality and interests, but a lot did change. And there was a catalyst in this, actually two. My parents got divorced, which kinda meant both of them were more lenient and my dad married Beth, who did a lot to help me loosen up from my geeky past, and I became friends with Nick, who also helped me loosen up. The two of them could have been considered bad influences, but I hate to think what I would have become if I didn't go through those changes then. I think what has happened in the past couple of years has been another period of change. And its not that all this stuff happening in my life is being enjoyed less because of my stress level, nor that they are the cause, but that they are the catalysts in another life period starting. As I leave that adolescent period and enter adulthood I'm already starting to see things differently. Probably the biggest difference is that I am now very interested in leaving a positive mark on the world. I never cared about this in the past very much. I thought it would be nice, but it wasn't a priority. Now I am fairly sure that I want to do something in some sort of church outreach, or missionary, or educational way. My family is still the most important thing to me, but I'm more interested in who I help than what I have. This all sounds very sappy, but it's less of an altruistic dream and more of a need to do something. There is also this urge to be kinda artsy/hippy. I've always been very into art and music from a distance, but now I really want to live more of a Carrboro/Asheville/San Fransisco weirdo life. I still find the majority of those people to be pretentious, and the ones that aren't to be weird, but that is the direction. Also, I don't see the more recent period as bad. Even though it was fairly self-centered, I think it was needed. It made me a normal person. It taught me a lot about how to socialize with others. This not only helped my self-confidence and self-image, but also has allowed me to develop some charisma that I think will be important to achieve what I want to do in life.
A big part of what I hope to do is to be an influence on people as a christian. I was raised in a church going family, but when I was a teenager I developed this idea that religion was a crutch that the stupid used to explain what they didn't understand. Throughout history we have thought everything was magic, and then we eventually realize the science behind it. The big change for me was one time talking to my maternal grandmother. She was one of the most intelligent people I have ever known, and I thought that she basically was a Christian in practice only, not in true faith. I thought she was scientifically minded enough to realize it was a farce, but went through the motions just because she was raised that way. But one day we were talking about God and what I would do with my life and she told me in a very genuine way how important it was to her that I lived my life as a Christian and I realized that she wasn't just going through the motions. I think people at least see me as a fairly intelligent, reasonable person. I want them to see me that way, not as some weirdo, and then see that I really have a faith in this stuff, and hopefully influence them in the same way my grandmother influenced me.
So this different paradigm kinda gives an explanation for the depression from two points. One is that I am yet to achieve much in helping people, and to be quite honest I'm scared to. I see the beggars on Hillsboro St. or around New Hope Commons and I want to help them, but I'm not quite ready to deal with them. I think what I really want to do is influence unchurched people that it is not a joke, and hopefully later on have the money and influence to help people through organizations. I want not only to help people with faith, but also in opening up education, censorship, and art. The other hard part goes back to the influence of Nick. I haven't really had someone to walk me through a lot of this. My Mom's boyfriend John has helped me a lot with the art stuff, and has been a great confidant. But I haven't had a Nick. I have a good friendship with my wife, and I have a good friendship with my brother-in-law, Jeff, Maggie, and my parents and in-laws, but there isn't really anyone that I have connected with on the same level that I connected with Nick. And of course Nick and I have really drifted apart since he got married. I struggle with the loss of that bond, and perhaps even more with the total lack of replacement. Before now I thought it was really just the loss of Nick, but now I wonder if a lot of it is the loss of that slot.
"No matter how I try, I find my way into the same old jam."
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