You tell me I'm never too far gone, it's difficult to be so strong

In getting engaged, I'm faced with parts of myself that I'm not entirely sure I'm comfortable with sharing. My weird idiosyncrasies and quirks have all been kept fairly under wraps because I've been able to. When you're not accountable to someone else, it's easy to become the kind of person who you don't want to be accountable for. For instance, I became the kind of person who prefers to be not spend a lot of time around other people. It makes me feel like I'm a bad person sometimes. Not that I hate people or anything like that, mind you, but more that I seem to want to be alone more than most people I know. As a consequence of this, I've forgotten how to be around people for periods of time longer than class time. I'm having to relearn how to interact with people and it scares me to death. What if people start to see through my exterior and realize that I'm really just an overgrown manchild who can't think of anyone but himself? What will I do when someone else catches on that I'm a big phony? In inviting someone else into my life on that level, I am giving her power to see that part of me. Terror.

Another thing about myself that I'm learning is that I have a really really really hard time accepting the selfishness of my existence. I've always been a fairly selfish person (aren't we all?), but in controlling how much I was around people, I could control my selfishness and then let it out when I was by myself. I would do whatever it was that other people would want to do, and then I would go and be by myself and do what I want to do. I couldn't (and still can't) seem to allow that I am allowed to have an opinion if someone else is present, and it's really not anything anyone else is doing, either. I just feel guilty. For no reason. No. Reason. I'm getting better at asking for what I want and need, but I'm not getting better at not feeling incredibly guilty for wanting to do my own thing.

I am finding that fear is one of the ruling forces in my life and that it has been for a long time. I could control this fear and everything attached to it very easily when I was alone. I am afraid of being out of control (probably one of my biggest fears), and I am afraid that taking control of situations makes me a jerk. I've written several times about my bands that I was in. Everson in particular means a lot to me, which I think is very obvious from what I've written. What I haven't written about is how I felt like a huge jerk when I would push and pull. Jon used to always tell me that I was the one everyone looked to for direction, and whether that was true or not, I started to believe it, and so I started to act like a leader. In doing so I would manage to separate myself from my friends and remove the enjoyment from the situation. The terrible dichotomy of wanting to be in control and hating myself for having opinions began to take its toll on me. There were many times that I felt uncomfortable with how I would do things during practice, telling people what to focus on, making comments and suggestions about songs, all of that. I came to resent myself for doing it and I never apologized to the men of that band for doing that to them. The tie-in to the rest of this post comes from the realization that I've come to that I feel that level of personal dissatisfaction if I start to take control of a situation. I am noticing that I have been teaching myself to shut down my brain if I feel like what it wants (what I want, let's own this) is contrary at all to what other people want. I don't want any conflict. Strangely enough, this in and of itself can breed conflict, and even then my brain (me) doesn't stop pushing for what it wants, which makes me feel like a big ol' douche when what I want is mentioned anyway.

The biggest crazy realization I'm having lately is that life isn't a fairy tale. There isn't going to be some fairy with a magic wand who is going to swoop down and make it so that I can live the rest of my life traveling and writing or playing music or just doing whatever it is I would do if I didn't have to do anything else. I have to work for my place in the world. The world works against me making my place because my place might displace someone else's place.

Long story short, my brain is full, and bulimia sounded like a good option. In case you couldn't already tell by the crazy pile of half digested mush you just read. Also, I am more messed up than I want to admit, and I hate that other people have to deal with my crazy. Hate. It makes me feel vulnerable in some truly horrifying ways.

I need to do my homework.

How many more years?

Last night I got a call from my little brother that got me thinking about my life that I had in Provo. Lately, Cat and I have been watching a show that takes place in New Mexico, and the terrain is very similar to that of Utah. I have been thinking a lot about my friends, and I really really miss them.

I miss the friends I had there that I had such a close connection with. This isn't to say that I don't have good friends here, because I do. It's also not to downplay having Cat here. It's really nice to have someone always there. I just miss my friends. I want to live by them again. I want to be able to drop by their places and just hang out with them. I miss that.

I miss how simple life was in Utah before I left. I went to work, I came home from work, I had fun with my friends, I went to sleep, I did it all over again. I look forward to finishing my degree (soon enough) so that I can go back to just having a job. Granted, I'll have a family which will change the experience, but school is a huge source of stress for me. I like learning, but I don't like freaking out about it, and I never ever did well in school until the last 2 years. That's 2 years of good school work compared with 15 years of being terrible at it. It's almost like I'm waiting for the bottom to drop out and to start really sucking at it again. That thought terrifies me.

Strangely enough, I miss Utah. I think about the Utah summers and my heart yearns to be in that time and place. Summer in Utah is really a beautiful thing. Even just writing this makes me feel this powerful homesickness that I haven't really felt since the mission. That's a weird thing to admit. I miss the desert and I miss the Utah landscape.

I miss being in a band. I miss playing the musics.

I've never considered myself a particularly nostalgic person, but I've learned in the last year or so that I am a really nostalgic person. It almost seems like I never felt nostalgia because I was moving to better and better situations in life before now. Now, to be clear, Seattle is a wonderful place. It certainly is the most beautiful city I've ever lived in, and Cat and I constantly comment to one another that this city has ruined us in terms of pretty cities. I will go on record and say that I don't think a prettier city exists, at least anywhere that I've ever been. It just doesn't really compare to the people that made the last chapter of my life so beautiful. At least, not yet it doesn't. I can only imagine what I'll be saying when the time to leave Seattle comes.

Oh, my brain. You so crazy.

Who am I?

I am many things.

I am smart. I am insecure. I am capable of overcoming everything, but I suck at it when I know someone else is in on the process.

I am engaged to be married on March 17th to an incredibly intelligent, beautiful woman who constantly surprises me with her ability to be my friend and support me.

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I believe that there is a God and that Jesus Christ was who He said He was - namely, the Son of God. I believe that He died for my sins and for your sins, and that through Him, we can receive the greatest gifts God has to offer.

I am a musician. If musical talent were money, I would be the 1%. I can play anything I pick up and I can generally fake it until I know what I'm doing. I have been in several bands that have had music featured on the radio. I have made 2 music videos and played to thousands of people at shows over the last 10 years.

I am a student at Seattle University, getting a Master's Degree in Psychology. I am kind and caring and have a burning desire in me to be able to help the people around me live better lives.

I get scared easily but I never, ever quit. I may be weak, but I am indestructible. I am able to make things happen in my life. I am proud, and this is a difficulty for me to overcome. I hate asking for help, but as I get older I realize more and more that I have to ask for help on a fairly regular basis. I feel guilty for asking for things for myself, but I feel compelled to do it anyway. I firmly believe that I will not fail at life, no matter what. There is literally nothing that can overcome my ability to overcome.

I generally think I am a good writer (though a few sentences in here are cringe worthy to say the least).

I have a good intuition with other people. People trust me. I have a hard time really trusting other people, but there are people I trust with my life. I make quick judgments but try to overcome them. Sometimes I even do. I have a lot of faith in the general goodness of humanity but very little in myself.

I am a pot of contradictions and logical fallacies.

I have the finest friends on earth, and I mean that. I would put my group of friends against anyone else's group of friends, and I have literally 0 doubt that my friends would never come up wanting. I have the kinds of friends that movies wish they had. I love them and cherish them with every ounce of my being and would cut off my fingers for them if they needed me to.

I am scared of the future but believe that, ultimately, it will be beautiful.

I am complex, but I make sense to myself. I am sorry for the difficulties that being around me brings with it, but ultimately, I'm not too sorry, because despite everything wrong with me, I am a good person.

I am Taylor McCarrey. Hear me roar.

Last night's dream

I'm walking through a wilderness. I'm surrounded by my cohort from school, and we are the first people to ever walk on this planet. God has created us from nothing and we know it. After we have walked with Him and talked with Him, He gives us magnetic balls to carry and sends us on our way. We don't know where we are supposed to go, but in the end, it doesn't matter because we can feel the pull of the Eternal in the form of the magnets in our hands. We are on bikes heading down a path towards the unknown when someone in the group says "did you feel that?" Everyone else begins to say they have felt something, a pull, and they insist that it is God pulling us in a different direction. I felt nothing.

As we begin in our new direction, we cross a road. I am starting to feel the pull myself, but quickly lose track of the pull when I see that we are starting to bike through mud. I look down and watch my tires get swallowed by the wet earth. Someone's magnets slip through their hands and fly into the air.

We are suddenly at a building in a desert. The desert is vast and the building stands alone against a backdrop of a broken sky. Everyone files in. Everyone's magnets are going crazy except for mine. They are flying out of their hands. They are shooting out through windows into the distance. I see one of my cohort run to a door and shout "TAKE THEM BACK, THEN!" I watch in horror as he throws them away willingly. I look through a window and realize that he was throwing them to a figure standing in the distance. He thinks he is giving the balls to back to God. Suddenly, in a coordinated effort, all of the magnetic balls return and begin attacking the building. Through the chaos of breaking glass and screams, I see who my friend had given his magnetic balls to. He is walking towards the debris. I recognize him. As he walks towards the building, I say his name. "Satan." He stops in his tracks, shocked that I recognized him. He has short, tidy hair, and is wearing neat slacks and a green polo shirt. My heart stops in my chest, but only for a moment.

I am leading a line of survivors away from a burnt out building. I have my magnets in my hand. I don't know where we are going. I tell everyone not to look back as I see the smoke being blown in front of us by hot desert air.

A final paper

The following is a final paper I wrote for one of my classes. The topic was to encapsulate parts of the class or program that were especially meaningful to me. I don't know why, but I feel like I should share it with the interwebs. Enjoy, interwebs.

As a whole, this quarter has blown my mind on several different levels. The idea of choosing which of the many things I've learned has affected me the most is a little bit difficult to do. How do you quantify the amount of meaning that a particular discussion has for you in your goal to be a therapist? And how, after assigning number values, do you know that the numeric legend will be universally true? In the coming years, I don't know which of the many discussions will come to mean the most to me. As it stands, I feel I must start this paper by apologizing for not being able to include a definitive answer as to what the most important things I've learned have been. Instead, I shall have to make due with what sticks in my mind right now as the most important things that I have experienced.

One thing that really is sticking out in my mind is the Levinasian idea of ethics. What a beautiful thing! The other is, in fact, my responsibility. I feel like my parents should be informed that their training has been vindicated and authenticated by a Lithuanian-born French Jewish philosopher. I consider myself a very religious person, and I do try to adhere to the idea of being as Christ would be if He were in my position. How fitting that a Jewish man has so thoroughly captured the teachings of another Jew.

Thinking about Levinas has changed quite a bit of my daily life. As I walk to and from the bus, I cannot help but look around to see what I am doing with my responsibility. The homeless person on my path now calls to me. I don't say this to make my professors feel good or because I want to kiss up. I honestly cannot help but look at every homeless person I see and really ask myself if I can do anything to help. My whole life I've been taught to be a Christian and somehow I missed the point. In one quarter, in learning to see through a set of eyes made in the phenomenological tradition, I have come to find what it means to love and honor the face of an other as the One I call “Savior” did, which is to say without reservation and without first casting judgment. Levinas somehow found a language to define what it means to honor an other, and in describing it, he has gifted it to me, which will allow me to gift it to others.

As I write this, I am struck that my first inclination is to use the word “gift”. An ethical and unavoidable life based on loving and honoring the other is a life based on opening oneself to an infinite amount of pain, the trauma Levinas spoke of, as it were. This brings to mind a discussion that I had with a very good friend of mine a few years ago. We were discussing the nature of God and where the source of His power lay. Initially, my thoughts were that it was based in the ability to command the universe and be obeyed universally. My friend rightly pointed out that this cannot be the source of His power because we as people do not always obey when He commands. I mused about infinite wisdom, infinite ability, and all of the other “infinite’s” that God possesses. My friend listened and agreed that they were all parts of His makeup that differentiated Him from us, but that each still lacked what truly defines God as our God. My friend then suggested that maybe being God has less to do with being infinitely powerful and more with being infinitely vulnerable. His point was that, because of who God is, His power does not protect him from trauma in a Levinasian sense, but rather puts Him in a place where He has to feel it. As such, it is my opinion that this program is not only in the business of teaching one to be a good therapist or even a good person, but to be more like God.

This opening to trauma is not shied away from. Nothing in anything we have read or discussed in any of the classes tries to sugarcoat that one at all. We are putting ourselves on the path to an existence marked by the pain of the other. I have really come to appreciate the way that this class in particular has made it clear that we as therapists will be changed irreversibly by our contact with clients. My experience has always been that therapists who have been in the game for 20+ years have a certain serenity that can't be forced or faked. This isn't to say that seasoned professionals are zen masters who float on a cloud of personal existential Nirvana, but rather that they seem to know a beautiful secret that is only learned in listening to and accepting the pain of others. I think to my experiences as a full-time missionary and how they have changed me. There was a time when I was walking with my companion to an appointment. We were living in a little town called Daugavpils in Latvia at the time, and as we neared the apartment complex we were headed to, we saw a man on the ground looking around, stuck in the daze brought to him by the alcohol he had drunk. Forming around this man was a puddle of blood that was collecting from a gash along his jaw. We were shocked to see people walking past, openly looking at him but ignoring him. My companion and I rushed over to pick him up. The man we were to meet with stuck his head out of his window, and we called to him, asking him to phone an ambulance. We pulled the man off the ground and sat him down on a bench. He looked at us incredulously, like we had just done something that should have been impossible. People were walking by and giving us the same look. One of them actually said “that's very nice of you two, but you're wasting your time on him. He doesn't deserve your help”. I was horrified. I looked at this man and saw in his eyes that he agreed with the words spoken by the passerby. I looked at his face and realized that his gash was caused by a rock that had gone through his face and broken his jaw. I don't think I'll ever forget that man. Moments before the ambulance got there, he looked me dead in the eye and said “are you angels?” This is the life that we are choosing. We will be the ones to lift, and we will do so because it was what angels would do, and we will be changed because of it.

This program makes room for a life based on faith in ways that I didn't think psychology ever would or could. I was taught by Brent Melling, one of the more influential professors I had during my undergrad years, that the word “psychology” originated from the understanding that the psyche meant the soul, or the uniquely lived human experience. Since hearing this and contemplating the implications, I have been very sad that psychology as a whole didn't seem to make room for the lived experience, for the presence of faith and hope, in a person's life. As I have come to find out, this lived experience is precisely what we are taught to honor in this program. I think that is a beautiful thing.

My experience with my cohorts has been one in which we accept and love one another. At least, I hope that has been everyone's experience. It certainly has been mine. When I had to miss a day of classes at the beginning of the quarter, I was afraid to ask for help. Past experience had taught me that asking for help would be met with luke-warm responses at best. I didn't think I would receive 10 emails from other members of the class who were not only willing to help, but almost seemed happy to do so. I have never had such a support system in any academic undertaking. I didn't think that such things existed! That experience was so telling to me and such a beautiful relief. It inspired in me a desire to be the same for my classmates. I want to be there for them, and I want to give them help as freely as they have so often given me help.

I have been humbled by the incredible intelligence exhibited by every other person in this program. The experience of being around people who are intelligent is not new to me. I have always been very fortunate to have friends of the highest caliber in terms of intelligence, drive, and compassion. However, in general, my experience with intelligence in the classroom has been one in which a kind of competitive undertone exists. That undertone simply does not exist in this group of people. Not a single person in the class is trying to step on anyone else to showcase how smart they are, and it is so beautiful to be a part of! It seems I am amazed at the incredibly well-thought-out and well-articulated statements of my classmates on a daily basis. I don't think there is a single one of them who has not impressed me with something they've said in class. Their drive and proficiencies inspire and make me want to be better in my studies and understanding. I have found that I cannot do my best work without first consulting with them. Their ideas and ways of understanding are proving invaluable to me. I am not used to having this type of experience. I have never ever been one to consult with anyone else when it came to school work. I have always hated group projects because they invariably turn into one or two people doing the work for the rest. There always seemed to be that one lazy person who could not have possibly cared about less the task at hand or how they could contribute anything of worth to the experience of collaboration. Somehow, the lazy, unmotivated student does not exist within this group.

I am finding myself changed by the experience of having a workload like this put on me. Nothing about this quarter has been easy. I have been separated from my girlfriend (who then became my fiance) by a distance of about 1000 miles. I have been in a new city where I knew next to no one when the program started. I have never been good at school. I have had a job that I've kept up for most of the quarter, and I have a position at church that requires me to spend my Sundays in meetings discussing teaching plans and the needs of the members of our Parrish. To top it off, I lived in a house on Beacon Hill that was very lonely for me, as no one interacted with each other beyond the minimal salutations common decency requires of people sharing a space. I have been broken by far lesser things. Somehow, though, I am still progressing forward. I haven't missed an assignment in any of my classes, which is particularly amazing to me when I stop and realize that I have never done that for a single class in my entire life. To say that this has been an easy time in my life would be a bold faced lie. This is hard stuff. The pressure to perform well, the fear of making mistakes, the changes that my life has brought to me, all of them push down on me in ways that I didn't think I could handle. Yet, through the exterior coal that makes up my imperfect self, I can see shining bits of diamond starting to form. Perhaps it is a bit egotistical of me to say that I see myself as a diamond in the making, but on some level I think it's true. Whatever I am made out of right now is being changed by the pressure of this program into something of more worth and beauty. Even better is the understanding that this change is occurring in a way that I could not accomplish on my own.

I am grateful to this program for giving me a language to describe what I have always held in theory to be the way a life should be lived. Further, I am grateful that this deepening of a theoretical orientation, this phenomenological view, is giving me permission to live it.

More Strength to O'ercome

Tonight, I went to a Stake fireside that featured one Mr. Richard L. Bushman, author of a fantastic biography of Joseph Smith. It was a fairly basic fireside at first glance. His wife spoke, and her topic was the importance of keeping a journal. When he spoke, he talked about Joseph and Emma and their relationship, which was very moving, and then took questions from the audience. Nothing ground shaking, but lovely nonetheless. The purpose for writing about it really comes from the closing hymn. It moved me into a very tranquil space. See, the last 2 weeks have been pure insanity for me. The next week will be very nice for a few days, and then another week of unbelievable torture, and suddenly, my first quarter is done. Then I get a month off, during which time the 5 months of living apart from Cat will come to a close. With all of this in my head, with the frustrations and terrors of that come as part of school, and with the ever increasing dissatisfaction I am experiencing with long distance dating (it's the best thing that ever happened to us, but never again), I was grateful beyond words to have that little moment when I felt the Savior close to me.

St. Peter's Cathedral

When I started dating Cat, I don't think I knew what to expect. Scratch that. I know I didn't know what to expect, but I only know that now because of the gift of time and hindsight. That we are even together is a miracle. We should not work. We are so different in so many ways, and yet we have so much in common.

Our relationship has gone in stages since last February. When we first started dating, we both expected it to be over soon. She told me later that she thought we would date for a month, I would leave, and we would both go on with our lives because we gave it a shot. I think we were both shocked when things went really well really fast. Despite both of us feeling that we could never be the typical Provo couple, we said I love you after two weeks, and I think we both meant it. I knew I loved her very quickly in the relationship. I knew I wanted to marry her very quickly as well. I think it was after two weeks that I brought up that I didn't want to rush things, but I couldn't help thinking about the upcoming summer. I knew I didn't want to be away from her. In Provo, we were enamored with being with each other. We didn't have any pressures or obligations, and if things didn't work between us, that was ok because we hadn't been dating very long. Somehow, she came to the conclusion that coming with me to Seattle was what she wanted to do with her summer. I thought I knew what love was when we left. I thought it was the crazy, intoxicating feeling I felt when I was around her. I was wrong.

In Seattle, things took a turn for the difficult very quickly. I was incredibly depressed because I missed my friends in Provo and couldn't find a job. Because I thought that love meant being able to word vomit on someone without any recourse, I would talk about how sad I was all of the time, never once stopping to consider how that would make her feel. She said she loved me, so that meant she wanted to hear everything, right? Wrong. That is not love. Love is not using someone as an emotional garbage can to throw out your wasteful feelings and thoughts. Love is finding acceptance in the face of another, a safe place as it were. The kind of toxicity that comes from constant selfish spewing is poisonous. In love, you have to love yourself and be okay taking care of yourself. You can't put that kind of burden on the other person. It's just not fair.

Even though things were difficult, and even though we came very close to calling it quits for good, we stuck it out. She stuck it out. Even though I put her through the wringer with my selfish complaining, she stuck it out. She would come to my house on the bus, a two hour ride from where she lived. We would spend all of our time together whenever we could, and I loved it. Even when I didn't love it, I couldn't get enough of it. There were certainly times when I didn't want to be around her, but invariably, after dropping her off and saying goodbye, I would drive away wishing she was still sitting next to me. It was in one of those moments that I realized that love as it really is makes room for bad times.

When Cat left to Utah, I was crushed. I had to learn to function without her and struggle with my own fears and inadequacies. My last long distance relationship was many many years ago, but the distance killed it, or rather, the distance brought out the reasons it needed to die. That breakup was ugly and bad, and I was so terrified that it would happen again. Somehow, it didn't happen. The first few months after she left, we actually grew stronger and closer. Things weren't perfect. They never were, and I honestly don't think they ever will be, but that imperfection and what we do in the face of it brings us closer to the truth of Love than anything else can.

The last two months have been crazy. Two months ago, I didn't know which way it would all go. One month ago, I knew she wanted to get married, but there was no ring and I was afraid that the lack of a physical token on her finger would somehow convince her not to want to be with me. The logic isn't there, but it's the truth. Today, she is in Utah with a ring on her finger and I am in Washington. Somehow, the difficulties of a long distance relationship still exist. Our relationship has difficult things about it. I have doubts and worries from time to time, and I know she does too. This, however, I think is the closest to Love that we have yet come. I don't get a crazy feeling in my stomach when I think of her. My heart doesn't beat faster and I don't lose my ability to talk or reason when I hear her voice. That's not real love. What I do know is that she is there for me in the best way she knows how and that I am there for her in the best way I know how. She has stuck by me through some really hard times, and she has done it in circumstances that I know I couldn't have stuck it out in.

I guess what I'm saying is that Love is not simply an emotion. When I see her, I do smile like an idiot, and there are certainly times when she makes my heart pump faster, but those times are none of your business. Along with those moments, our relationship has moments when I get upset or hurt, and I know that there are times when she gets upset or hurt by some of the careless things that I do. And yet, on March 17th, she and I will be sealed for time and all eternity. Love transcends our weaknesses that become so apparent. Love allows room to grow out of our weakness, and we do so with the support of the other. Love is beautiful because it exists in the face of the great difficulty of combining two lives into one. Simply put, Love is the choice to commit oneself entirely to the betterment of the other, regardless of how difficult it is and how little the other can deserve it at any given moment. Cat loves me, and I know this because I am so undeserving of such a perfect commitment, and yet she gives it to me. I love Cat because I can't help myself. Through thick and thin, she has been there for me from day one. Looking back at the last 275 days (I counted, don't worry about it), I am grateful for her consistency and strength, and I love her so much for it.

I can't wait until forever. With her at my side, everything is going to be okay.