Wishing on a Star
I guess that I should start at the beginning.
*One thing that I will note is that I am a Christian. Specifically, I am a Mormon, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I have been met with hostility before on the Internet because some people think that Mormons aren’t Christians. I wish to assure you that Mormons are about as Christian as you can get.
Since I was a little kid, I’d been struggling with an internal evil. A darkness that I came to love. I didn’t even know that it was something evil until I was older. I couldn’t even tell when I was in the dark. Then in the year 2001 it got worse when another door of darkness was opened, and my dark nature grew worse. (Perhaps in a later entry I will confess exactly what it was.)
In the summer of 2002, I had a spiritual experience at a sort of program for youth in my church that lasts a week at BYU, called Especially For Youth (EFY). Something about my life was never quite the same after that. I knew the dark in me and I wanted to change.
However, the more light that you receive the harder you are tried to be worthy of it. And the bigger the likelihood that you can turn back to your old, dark ways. I want to share a line from the video game “Kingdom Hearts” to illustrate this point. No other sentence I’ve ever heard brings my point across better than this:
“The closer you get to light, the greater your shadow becomes.”
Sometime in the following months, I learned about becoming born again. It’s a Christian gospel concept that, in my religion, basically means you become sanctified by the Spirit of the Holy Ghost, and you receive “a mighty change in your heart”. You have “no more disposition to do evil”, and you have been born of God. You bear the name of Christ and you have given your heart to him. And most importantly, you receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and you have officially entered through the door and are now on the road to eternal life.
I wanted this more than anything for the longest time. Since fall of 2002, this was my greatest dream and greatest wish. But the light in my heart would fall again and again to the dark in my heart—which was so much deeper.
[Before I continue, I wish to make it very clear that every single thing I say next (and this goes for the rest of my blog posts) is true. I stand before God and testify of these realities. Every thing you are about to read is not delusions of a confused teenager. They are real. And they happen. And they happened to me.]
The evil nature within me that was constantly battling was composed mostly of three things: a dark habit, a disease I called “moving pictures”, and something that is termed as a “crime against nature”. Among these things, there was also slothfulness, laziness, and rudeness—smaller roots, the underlying thread that laced around my heart weaving it together being a particularly bitter seed of pride.
Added to these things were severe sessions of temptations where voices, images, or both, would rush through my mind over and over like a mile-long runaway train. These buffetings I refer to as the Hauntings, for that is what they truly were. These were not Hauntings of ghost spirits, but rather temptations of evil spirits that wished to see my soul destroyed. My room became Haunted, literally owned by angels of the Dark One. Soon empty rooms in my house became Haunted, and hallways at my junior high. Eventually, the emptiness in my heart, the empty chambers where light once had been, became Haunted—and in a sense, I became possessed.
This cloud of darkness, this mist of the night, constantly swirled in my heart. Something that best describes it is the following excerpt from the song “Easier to Run” by Linkin Park:
“Something has been taken from deep inside of me
A secret I’ve kept locked away no one could ever see
Wounds so deep they never show, they never go away
Like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they’ve played…
Sometimes I remember the darkness of my past
Bringing back these memories I wish I didn’t have…
Each and every single word describes my feelings. Another song by Linkin Park does the job even better. (I found that it was almost creepy the way Linkin Park’s music described my life down to the proverbial brass tack. This song is something they wrote when they were still called Hybrid Theory.)
”Part of Me”
Part of me won’t go away—everyday, reminded of how much I hate it
Weighed against the consequences,
Can’t live without it so it’s senseless
Want to cut out of my soul and just live with a gaping hole,
Take control of my life and wash out all the burned tastes,
—I made the problems in the first place
Hang my head low ‘cause it’s a part of me,
You’ll hardly see right next to the heart of me
Heard of me? The routine scar? New cuts cover where the old ones are
And now I’m sick of this, I can’t stand the sandpaper thoughts
That grate on my sanity
I’d rather not even be, then, the man that’s staring
In the mirror through me.
Cut myself free, willingly stop just what’s killing me…
I feel it everyday, I feel I’m in my way,
I feel it swell up inside, swell up inside, swallowing me.
(Freedom can be frightening if you’ve never felt it)
Once it’s been dealt with, you feel
Like you’ve been touched by something angelic
And then melted down into a pool of peace,
Cease to be the animal you used to be
Remove the broken parts you know were wrong,
And then feel the calm when the problem’s all gone…
And then you start to see…a little piece of yourself that you can’t let be
Memories of the last fight to free yourself
Take you to the bottom of the depths of the well,
And now, you know
That you can choose to lose
The part in your heart where your insides bruise:
You can live, if you’re willing to put a stop to just what’s killing you.
Alive in me, inside of me, a part of me screams violently, silently,
Alive in me, inside of me, a part of me screams desperately, silently…
This part of me won’t go away…part of me won’t go away…
Everywhere I look around, I see how everything ought to be
And every time I see myself, there’s always something wrong with me.
I wanted to be born again. But with each loss I suffered—losing to the Dark One and his Hauntings, losing to my darkness—my desire became more and more like a desperate wish on a star that’s beginning to blink out in the black night. It became more and more like a bewildered man’s cry for help in the middle of the ocean, where there’s no one to hear him.
For a little more than three years, I was locked in a desperate struggle between good and evil, light and darkness—all within the chambers of my heart. And I was fourteen…then fifteen, and then sixteen…and now this year I am seventeen years old.
*One thing that I will note is that I am a Christian. Specifically, I am a Mormon, or a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I have been met with hostility before on the Internet because some people think that Mormons aren’t Christians. I wish to assure you that Mormons are about as Christian as you can get.
Since I was a little kid, I’d been struggling with an internal evil. A darkness that I came to love. I didn’t even know that it was something evil until I was older. I couldn’t even tell when I was in the dark. Then in the year 2001 it got worse when another door of darkness was opened, and my dark nature grew worse. (Perhaps in a later entry I will confess exactly what it was.)
In the summer of 2002, I had a spiritual experience at a sort of program for youth in my church that lasts a week at BYU, called Especially For Youth (EFY). Something about my life was never quite the same after that. I knew the dark in me and I wanted to change.
However, the more light that you receive the harder you are tried to be worthy of it. And the bigger the likelihood that you can turn back to your old, dark ways. I want to share a line from the video game “Kingdom Hearts” to illustrate this point. No other sentence I’ve ever heard brings my point across better than this:
“The closer you get to light, the greater your shadow becomes.”
Sometime in the following months, I learned about becoming born again. It’s a Christian gospel concept that, in my religion, basically means you become sanctified by the Spirit of the Holy Ghost, and you receive “a mighty change in your heart”. You have “no more disposition to do evil”, and you have been born of God. You bear the name of Christ and you have given your heart to him. And most importantly, you receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and you have officially entered through the door and are now on the road to eternal life.
I wanted this more than anything for the longest time. Since fall of 2002, this was my greatest dream and greatest wish. But the light in my heart would fall again and again to the dark in my heart—which was so much deeper.
[Before I continue, I wish to make it very clear that every single thing I say next (and this goes for the rest of my blog posts) is true. I stand before God and testify of these realities. Every thing you are about to read is not delusions of a confused teenager. They are real. And they happen. And they happened to me.]
The evil nature within me that was constantly battling was composed mostly of three things: a dark habit, a disease I called “moving pictures”, and something that is termed as a “crime against nature”. Among these things, there was also slothfulness, laziness, and rudeness—smaller roots, the underlying thread that laced around my heart weaving it together being a particularly bitter seed of pride.
Added to these things were severe sessions of temptations where voices, images, or both, would rush through my mind over and over like a mile-long runaway train. These buffetings I refer to as the Hauntings, for that is what they truly were. These were not Hauntings of ghost spirits, but rather temptations of evil spirits that wished to see my soul destroyed. My room became Haunted, literally owned by angels of the Dark One. Soon empty rooms in my house became Haunted, and hallways at my junior high. Eventually, the emptiness in my heart, the empty chambers where light once had been, became Haunted—and in a sense, I became possessed.
This cloud of darkness, this mist of the night, constantly swirled in my heart. Something that best describes it is the following excerpt from the song “Easier to Run” by Linkin Park:
“Something has been taken from deep inside of me
A secret I’ve kept locked away no one could ever see
Wounds so deep they never show, they never go away
Like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they’ve played…
Sometimes I remember the darkness of my past
Bringing back these memories I wish I didn’t have…
Each and every single word describes my feelings. Another song by Linkin Park does the job even better. (I found that it was almost creepy the way Linkin Park’s music described my life down to the proverbial brass tack. This song is something they wrote when they were still called Hybrid Theory.)
”Part of Me”
Part of me won’t go away—everyday, reminded of how much I hate it
Weighed against the consequences,
Can’t live without it so it’s senseless
Want to cut out of my soul and just live with a gaping hole,
Take control of my life and wash out all the burned tastes,
—I made the problems in the first place
Hang my head low ‘cause it’s a part of me,
You’ll hardly see right next to the heart of me
Heard of me? The routine scar? New cuts cover where the old ones are
And now I’m sick of this, I can’t stand the sandpaper thoughts
That grate on my sanity
I’d rather not even be, then, the man that’s staring
In the mirror through me.
Cut myself free, willingly stop just what’s killing me…
I feel it everyday, I feel I’m in my way,
I feel it swell up inside, swell up inside, swallowing me.
(Freedom can be frightening if you’ve never felt it)
Once it’s been dealt with, you feel
Like you’ve been touched by something angelic
And then melted down into a pool of peace,
Cease to be the animal you used to be
Remove the broken parts you know were wrong,
And then feel the calm when the problem’s all gone…
And then you start to see…a little piece of yourself that you can’t let be
Memories of the last fight to free yourself
Take you to the bottom of the depths of the well,
And now, you know
That you can choose to lose
The part in your heart where your insides bruise:
You can live, if you’re willing to put a stop to just what’s killing you.
Alive in me, inside of me, a part of me screams violently, silently,
Alive in me, inside of me, a part of me screams desperately, silently…
This part of me won’t go away…part of me won’t go away…
Everywhere I look around, I see how everything ought to be
And every time I see myself, there’s always something wrong with me.
I wanted to be born again. But with each loss I suffered—losing to the Dark One and his Hauntings, losing to my darkness—my desire became more and more like a desperate wish on a star that’s beginning to blink out in the black night. It became more and more like a bewildered man’s cry for help in the middle of the ocean, where there’s no one to hear him.
For a little more than three years, I was locked in a desperate struggle between good and evil, light and darkness—all within the chambers of my heart. And I was fourteen…then fifteen, and then sixteen…and now this year I am seventeen years old.
posted by Alexander at 5:22 AM
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