Recently, one of the loyal readers of this blog asked me a rather simple set of questions that is nonetheless rather complicated to answer: who I am, how did I get where I am, and where is God taking me. It is a rather complicated answer because I’m a fairly complicated person, with a complicated background. The sort of topics I write about are deeply connected with questions of my personal identity and purpose, and the fact that in many ways I am not sure about where I am going makes such matters difficult as well. Nonetheless, I thought the request a fair one, and probably something that many people wonder about (but are not curious or brave enough to ask), so I thought I would answer it for a broader audience, even if some parts are not very pleasant to discuss.

I am not someone who talks a lot about who I am as a person or where I come from in a very personal sense, largely because I come from a very scary place that is rather difficult for me to speak about fairly, and also because it is something I do not think a lot of people would really want to know. Whenever I have given personal introductions [1], they have generally been very short and polite, implying what could not be said in a public venue in polite conversation. Likewise, I am somewhat hampered by the fact that I do not come from a religious tradition that values personal testimonials, and because my own native modesty and reserve about my personal life tend to hinder me from talking about such matters with others (and it certainly discourages most people from talking about such matters with me with any degree of comfort in a personal way, even if they are aware of what is going on).

Nonetheless, it is a worthy tale, and so I will attempt to do it justice, even if it is a very long story. I will attempt to tell this story both as honestly and without rancor or hostility as it is possible for me to do. I suspect that some people will be surprised that there is so much rancor, and that others will be surprised there is not more. In telling such a story as my own story is, that sort of situation is inevitable, and it might as well be admitted at the outset and faced openly and honestly to the greatest extent possible. Nonetheless, I would like to comment here that I will answer these questions in a slightly different order than they were asked, to provide a chronology of where I came from, who I am, and where I am going, at least to the very limited extent of which I am presently aware.

It is hard to know where to begin. I was born to a father who was a farmer and a bus driver until the last six weeks of his life, after having a massive stroke while driving back along the four hour or so drive between his church in Akron, Ohio and his home in a 130-acre family farm in rural Western Pennsylvania just outside of the small town of Irwin. I was born to a mother who has been on disability for the last few years, and who spent most of her work life as a quick-typing office worker. Both my younger brother and I were born in a steel town, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a town whose wealth and influence ended when the steel mills closed down, a state of ruin and decay that is deeply symbolic of the world in which I have lived.

Several aspects of my early childhood proved particularly major influences: child abuse, the spectacular and relatively rapid collapse of my parents’ marriage (about which there was little agreement on both sides about what really happened, except that a lot of mistakes were made), and an extremely early ability to read that made books and education a safe place in an extremely unsafe childhood. Each of these three aspects had a huge degree of influence on me personally in shaping who I am. Sadly, the response of my family to my rather difficult childhood was not a gentle and loving upbringing, but a pretty harsh one full of severe and strict discipline that seemed very disproportionate to the fairly minor offenses of childhood [1].

I spent my childhood from the ages of 3 to 14 in rural Central Florida, just outside of Plant City, which I found very uncongenial to my personality and talents. Despite my love of God’s way and learning, neither church nor school was a refuge at all, for my honestly seeking and questioning ways were taken consistently as challenging authority (not viewed very highly [2]), and teasing and bullying, including physical violence and death threats, were a part of what I had to deal with through high school. Authorities in the family, church, and school worlds were far too interested in trying to bolster their authority and avoid any threats to their control than trying to seek further truth or show very much encouragement for someone who wanted to poke and prod at the boundaries and go beyond cliches and superficiality.

Given that neither family life, nor the neighborhood, nor school or church were really particularly safe or loving places full of encouragement and support, I developed a particularly rich life in books and imagination (characteristic of the lost child in abusive families [3]). Lost children tend to struggle with seemingly irrational social experiences and deep loneliness and horrific struggles with intimacy, and this has certainly dramatically shaped my own life as well. There are certainly many people in this present world who want to try to save others who they think are lost, but few who wish to find the lost.

After spending my high school years in Tampa growing up as a white teenager in a mostly black neighborhood (the high school students who rode the bus with me thought that I was “air conditioning” because I was so light-skinned, seriously), and graduating with my IB diploma, I went to Los Angeles as an undergraduate student at USC for civil engineering with a history minor. Those years went fairly well (all in all, despite the poverty and the fact that my grades weren’t that good, they were the happiest years of my life so far), largely because it was the first and so far only time in my life where I have had a regular community of fellow intellectuals to talk (and eat) with on a regular, consistent basis.

After finishing college, almost (that’s a story for another day), I went to the area just outside of Cincinnati where I spent about 8 months at the Ambassador Bible Center. Though I had previously had a good biblical knowledge, it was a very useful place for at least two reasons, knowing some of the deeper matters that go beyond mere scriptures to an understanding of rules of interpretation (which I liked) as well as an understanding of how political a church’s home office or headquarters can be (which I loathed).

After that I went back to Tampa, took the last class for my undergraduate degree, got two master’s degrees while I was reviewing modular building plans, struggled with chronic depression for several years after the death of my father, revelations of my early childhood, and other issues, and then in 2009 the economy went south, I had a disastrous two years of trying to find good work and finding only sales jobs available, and I took the opportunity to do something meaningful and also make some space between myself and a rather unsympathetic family, and so I am now in Thailand for about ten months more or so. That’s the short version of how I got here.

Who am I? That’s a somewhat complicated question, depending on what it means. I am a person of complicated interests that require a fair amount of balancing, as I’m not someone possessed of only one passion but a fairly strong and wide variety of them that require a lot of work to keep in harmony. I suppose I am glad to be quirky and unusual, but it is sometimes difficult to keep everything more or less in working order, given the many talents and drives I have, and the substantial and serious issues where I struggle with and that require fairly consistent attention.

For example, one thing I am driven to do is write. I’ve written since childhood, when I wrote a series of rather drily humorous limericks about life and my interests (including fried chicken from the point of the view of the chicken). I’m a person who finds it much easier to write than to say what I think, and so writing is a natural way for me to solve my problem of needing to think externally without having many people that I can talk to, being isolated as I am. I have found that the forms I have written have changed with age and hopefully maturity–when I was younger I wrote mostly poems, then I had a few years where I wrote many plays, and now I mostly write essays. Perhaps I might have a time of my life where I write a great American novel. Maybe.

Besides writing, I am a musical person as well–I sing and play the viola, and generally need to be active in music also as a way of expressing myself, particularly emotionally, in a way that is based less on words than on conveying myself through music. Nonetheless, despite my interest in music I have never studied it formally (though, truth be told, I have never studied writing or literature formally either). In my education too I have sought to balance my interest in sciences and math (as an engineer) with my interest in the arts and history. I even have one M.S. (in Engineering Management) and one M.A. (in military history) as a sign of that balance between the world of the arts and sciences, and a sign of my own complicated personality.

A good way of examining who I am and how I came to be that way may be to compare my father and I. Both of us have serious similarities and differences. Both my father and I share a love for books and learning, but he was never a particularly intellectually inclined person, and his education was stopped at the undergraduate level due to an issue with the Vietnam War, which required him to serve four years of work on a farm in Big Sandy, Texas on the I-W program. I am much more educated, but have an unsustainable Greece and California-like burden of college debt. Pick your poison. Another profound similarity/difference is that both of us shared similar experiences with child abuse, but my father took it as a sign of a collapse of anarchy and the threat of disorder and was a “good soldier” sort of person his entire life, while I saw the abuse as the threat from tyranny, and have remained harshly opposed to tyrannical and abusive regimes, which I take as a personal and imminent threat, to be responded to publicly and harshly. It just so happens I have found many such regimes, political and otherwise, during my time on earth to this point.

It ought to come as no surprise that one of my deepest unfulfilled longings to date is the longing for a loving marriage and family. I have not even had a relationship for about five and a half years, much less anything approaching marriage, and have found meeting suitable partners very difficult. There’s not much else I really have or want to say about that subject, until things get better, and then everyone will probably know before too long, given the general nosiness people have about such matters.

And where do I think God is going to lead me from here? That’s a hard question to answer. In many ways I simply do not know. I will make the best plans I can and do as much as I can ahead of time, but at this point I do not know where I am going or what I will be doing. There are a lot of possibilities, but I’m not sure what opportunities there will be to take, what open doors. And until I do, I will not be able to give more details. Only time will tell. Whatever I do and wherever I go, I will continue to seek balance, strive for respect and competence, and seek to use my experiences and talents to help make the world a better place than I have known, and that is the best that I can do.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/book-review-thy-rod-and-thy-staff-they-comfort-me/

[2] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/04/19/on-the-bi-directional-feedback-of-culture-and-membership-in-the-20th-and-21st-century-experience-of-the-church-of-god/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/book-review-another-chance/