High School Daze: Crushed

Loving and being loved were sweet to me, the more so if I could also enjoy a lover's body; so I polluted the stream of friendship with my filthy desires and clouded its purity with hellish lusts; yet all the while, befouled and disgraced though I was, my boundless vanity made me long to appear elegant and sophisticated.
--Augustine of Hippo

If someone asked me for one word that would completely describe my entire three-year, high school experience it would have to be crushed.

Oftentimes, we do not even think about what it means to have a crush on somebody. When we are passively interested in getting to know someone more romantically, when we are completely infatuated with that person, when we practically worship the ground that that person walks on but we never tell them exactly how we feel about them we call it a crush. The word itself implies the feelings most characteristic of crushes when things don't work out the way we hoped they would: rejection, depression, low self-esteem, doubt, and heartbreak. Your hopes are crushed. Your heart is crushed. Your dreams are crushed. Your self-worth is crushed. Your feelings for that person are crushed. You add all of these effects with adolescent worldviews and you have a recipe for destructive consequences.

A New York Daily News article published in June last year, reported that suicide rates are rising among high school teens. A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study found that 1 in 6 high school students has seriously contemplated committing suicide and 1 in 12 high school students has attempted suicide. The CDC study also found that suicide accounts for 20% of all annual deaths among 15-24 year-olds (that is one in five).

Sadly, there are many reasons that a person contemplates committing suicide. One of the leading causes for teens to contemplate and commit suicide is depression. Teen depression can obviously stem from any number of things, including problems in the home, bullying, drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse from a person in a position of trust, chemical imbalances, and relationship problems. Although many parents and adults struggle to understand why teens are so vulnerable to depression when their lives seem to be worry-free, the fact that 1 in 6 high school students thinks about cutting their life short is worthy of further investigation.

I don't claim to be a psychologist, and I do not claim to be an expert on mental health and disease. I have no credentials whatsoever to draw any correlations between causes and effects concerning emotional and psychological distress. This episode of my confessions is not to be understood as clinical research or a scientific study. Rather, I'm going to explore my past as a depressed teenager suffering from something I like to call crushed. If you have children in high school, I am willing to assume that your children are suffering from crushed, whether they are home-schooled or not. Although there is no scientific research to back-up any of the things I am going to claim in the paragraphs to follow, I am going to strongly emphasize that this is a problem that every teen is involved with, either being crushed or causing crushed. It's something that parents tend to underestimate, are unable to persuade their children not to try, and feel almost compelled to be passive observers of crushed. If anything else, I hope that this episode will cause parents and adults to re-think teen dating, especially Christians.

Where to begin? As I have already alluded to, I went from total social isolation for four years to complete immersing into high school culture for three years. I was now a sophomore in a public high school, I was completely infatuated with girls (who no longer possessed cooties), and I was suffering from an emotional and spiritual worship of sex via an addiction to pornography. You don't have to be a mathematician to realize that this is an equation for disaster. I have also attested to my desire to be free of my "most innocent" and Christian stigmas, hoping that I could free myself from hypocritical piety and enjoy some of the forbidden fruits that life has to offer. Now that you have the setting for the scene, let the tragedy commence.

I liked girls. I liked the way they talked. I liked the way they dressed. I liked the way they walked. I found myself infatuated with them. Like Charles Darwin discovering the species upon Galapagos Island, I found myself quizzically attracted to studying and knowing everything I could about the girls in high school. What made them tick? What did they like and what didn't they like? Why did they dress the way they did, and why did they talk the way they talked? I wanted to interact with them. I recognized a stark contrast between the interests of high school boys and girls very quickly. The girls loved to talk about the arts: music, books, television, movies, and lots and lots of self-invented drama. The boys, however, enjoyed talking about sports, games, crude jokes, crime, and sex.

Both boys and girls in high school liked to talk about sex, however, they referred to it in different terms. The guys called it sex, and often referred to it in an abased manner similar to animals mating. The girls, on the other hand, often referred to sex in reference to romance, love, commitment, and wanting to experience it via a relationship. The girls would rarely use the word, but they loved to chat about the subject in the most grandiose manner, as if romance was the pinnacle of human being.

I had a lot in common with the girls. Their definition of what love was reverberated my thoughts much better than many of the guys. They were looking for a relationship. They wanted someone in their life so that they would never feel lonely again. They wanted someone to love them for who they were, even if their personality didn't fit the stereotypes. They wanted someone they could depend on, someone that would rather be with them than apart from them. They wanted to play house in a more grown up way than they had as little girls, and I wanted to play that game too for once.

On my first day of school, I had my first experience with the high school dating culture. As I mentioned, after being invited over to a table full of freshman girls, one of the girls proceeded to ask me to date her, point blank. I was shocked but I didn't show it. I nonchalantly answered, "No," as if nothing happened. Something did happen, though. I realized just then that I had just been thrown into the deep-end of a dating culture that in many ways defines many people's high school experiences.

I don't know if it was like this in your high school, but dating had everything to do with social class status and very little to do with romance and love. Ironically, this class system is celebrated every year during homecoming, where the dating royalty of the school is placed upon a pedestal for the whole school to admire and emulate. If you want to be a king, then you must be dating a queen. For many of my peers, dating was a huge part of the popularity contest. You didn't date someone because you necessarily liked them and enjoyed spending time with them, but you dated them because they would improve your social status. Therefore, freshman hoping to improve their social status immediately seek to find an upper-classmen to date in order to put themselves a foot above their peers. It sounds ridiculous, but everyone who has attended a public high school knows what I am talking about.

However popular this form of dating is, it certainly does not define every dating relationship in high school. Some relationships are quite serious; or at least as serious as high-schoolers can get. For some, they would rather date someone they really like than look for someone that will make them more popular. These relationships, however, are the most destructive when they do not work out. There is no ulterior motive to this relationship than what both people involved would call love. The relationship isn't propelled by a popularity contest, but by a genuine love and romantic desire for the other person. Or so the boy and girl think. And when these kinds of relationships do not work out, the heartbreak can be one of the most destructive forces to emotional stability.

In high school, everyone has a hard time separating "like" from "love." The difference between a good friend and a soul-mate is hard to distinguish. No one escapes high school unscathed. We all emotionally latch on to someone that we like more than anyone else. We all let our heartstrings get pulled by one friend that is more than just a friend, or at least we hope. Some act upon their feelings, and ask that person out and they begin dating. However, many never act upon their feelings because the person they admire is in a social class much higher than they or they cannot muster up the courage to act. They live the high school drama during the day, and then they amuse themselves by watching fictional high school dramas unfold in the theater. They find it difficult to separate the fiction from reality, they begin to believe that the romance portrayed on TV and in the movies is the way things are supposed to be, and they wait for reality to catch up to their situation.

There is a movie out there for every high school crush. The nerd who is best friends with one of the most popular girls in high school but hopes there can be something more enjoys Just Friends. The quiet guy that thinks he's falling in love with the quirky, mysterious girl in photography class finds himself watching 500 Days of Summer or The Perks of Being a Wallflower over and over. The girl that keeps to herself but is secretly crushing on her dance partner in the musical stays up late on Friday nights watching She's All That or A Walk to Remember. The Twilight series has been massively popular, and it might have something to do with teen girls hoping to land their real-life Edward rather than their fascination with blood-sucking creatures that go bump in the night. TV shows like 90210, Gossip Girl, and The Vampire Diaries lead every teen deeper and deeper into their romantic fairy tale. They resonate with a character and the person that character loves, and they write themselves and their crush into those parts.

Unable to separate fictional "Happily Ever After" stories from reality, high school students write themselves into their own imaginary, romantic-comedy-fantasy. They go to school, they act out their part, they let their crush act out their part, and they go home wondering what the script will have in store for them tomorrow. They are egged on by the idea that everything always works itself out in the end for those that deserve it. They pick their script, they pick their cast, and they pick their soundtrack. This is the story of them finding the love of their life, and it cannot help but have a happy ending.

That's how I felt, at the very least. For three years, I had my sights set on somebody. She was one of the popular girls at school, but she was different from the rest of them; she would actually talk with me. Every semester, I had at least one class with her and one lunch with her. I was always too scared to talk to her, and usually I would just sit and listen whenever I was around her and her friends. In many ways, I'm sure I came across as a creeper. I'm sure the question Why does Matt always sit with us for lunch? crossed her and her friends' mind often. I would talk to her friends often, but I couldn't muster the courage to talk to her. She was my high school crush.

I always hoped that one day she would just magically realize that I existed, that she would fall madly in love with me, and we would live happily ever after. In the meantime, I felt invisible. She saw me everyday, but never really seemed to notice me. Sophomore year passed by, and yearbooks began to passed around for autographs. She wrote in my yearbook! She called me a "sweetie"! There was hope! Enough to keep the fantasy alive until Junior year.

Junior year came and went as well, and although she seemed to notice me now, I still felt like we were strangers in many ways. She wrote in my yearbook again. After a lonely summer between Sophomore and Junior year, wherein I had no contact with most of my high school acquaintances, I asked everyone to include their phone number in my yearbook. She gave me her phone number and sarcastically wrote "Call me!" Or so I thought. She was quite cynical, and I many time I couldn't tell if she was being serious or sarcastic. The mystery was enough to drive me through another year of crushing on her.

Senior year flew by. At the beginning of my last semester, I found out that my high school crush was now dating one of our school's top athletes. I always knew that I didn't stand a chance, but I had just enough hope every year to keep dreaming that our story might have a happy ending. This is when I began to find myself immersed in television, movies, and music that kept the dream going. The girl I thought I loved was in love with someone else. Woe was me! My music became depressing, my choice of movies became depressing, and everything about me became depressing.

I was held spellbound by theatrical shows full of images that mirrored my own wretched plight and further fueled the fire within me. Why is it that one likes being moved to grief at the sight of sad or tragic events on stage, when one would be unwilling to suffer the same things oneself? In the capacity of spectator one welcomes sad feelings; in fact, the sadness itself is the pleasure. What incredible stupidity! The more a person is buffeted by such passions in his own life, the more he is moved by watching similar scenes on stage, although his state of mind is usually called misery when he is undergoing them himself and mercy when he shows compassion for others so afflicted.
--Augustine of Hippo

I loved a girl that didn't love me back. She was the center of my universe. I spent three entire years around her, and I still felt like we were perfect strangers. My depression didn't invigorate a desire to tell her how I felt, but rather, it fueled a desire to crawl back into the whole I came from and die. I felt rejected and invisible. I felt lonely and dejected. I felt that my life no longer held any purpose. I would watch movie after movie where "Happily Ever After" doesn't come true, and I began to re-write the story of my life to fit their script. I began to have nightmares where I would die in a terrible car accident, and nobody except for my family would really care.

My addiction to pornography became my solace. The pictures and videos I watched loved me. They gave me exactly what I wanted. They made me feel wanted and desired. I didn't feel lonely. I got high on pornography. It took the edge off of my depression. It allowed me to feel the way I wanted to feel. But like a ruthless cycle, the more pornography made me feel good about myself the more depressed I got when real-life didn't follow suit. Pornography led me to a utopia that was blissful and worry-free, but real life kept shattering my hopes. Every time I got high on pornography, my fall to reality would become longer and harder when I hit rock bottom.

Thoughts of suicide were prevalent my senior year, but I never seriously contemplated taking my own life. Although part of my really wanted to flee from Christianity, at my darkest hours, my self-righteous piety tended to voice its opinion of my situation. Take your life and you won't get to Heaven. Is she worth ruining your chances of eternal bliss? These were my thoughts. I did not think about the sinfulness of my addiction to pornography. I did not think about my Heavenly Father who loved the world so much that He gave His only begotten Son so that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life. I hated that verse because it seemed to be the Christian mantra, as if just reciting John 3:16 would convert every doubter. As if my response to it should be, Oh, well since you put it like that, sign me up! However, I could have really used John 3:16 while I loathed in self-pity, feeling rejected by the whole world because the one girl I had set my eyes on was dating the star athlete at our school. I needed John 3:16 not as a verse of the Bible, but I needed it as the Gospel. I needed to know that despite my addiction to pornography, despite my worship of a woman instead of God, despite trading the true love of my family and the people at church for the rejection of a schoolgirl, God could still love me so much that He sacrificed Himself to save me and to adopt me as one of His own.

Just before I hit rock bottom, I received some hope. Honestly, I received hope every Sunday as I sat under the preaching of the Gospel at my church, but I was oblivious to that at the time. My salvation didn't lie in Christ but in dating the girl of my dreams. I was saved when I found out that the girl I liked had broken things off with the star athlete at school. I was elated! I still didn't tell her how I felt about her, but I could start going out of my way at school again to see her and now she wouldn't have her boyfriend by her side.

May of my senior year finally arrived, and I was coasting along towards graduation. I had found an interest in video editing and I was finally starting to generate some interest from classmates for the videos I made for class projects. I wasn't popular, but I was finally known for something besides being "most innocent" and the quiet guy. One night, I was up late watching TV, and Keane was playing Somewhere Only We Know on Saturday Night Live. I crawled in bed that night, and an idea for a movie popped into my head. I called my friends, and we spent a day filming the movie:

Two friends are downstairs watching TV and one of them has to leave. He climbs into his car, and is driving on the rural country roads back to his house. A drunk driver then T-bones his vehicle. The rest of the movie portrays the depression of the friend left behind set to the music of Keane's Somewhere Only We Know. (You can watch the movie here).

Several teachers and students saw the video when I brought the tape in to show them the finished product. A local news station was visiting our school for their safe-driving during prom season initiative that encouraged teens to wear their seat-belts, drive safely, and never drink and drive. I was asked to show my video in front of the whole school for the assembly. You could hear a pin drop in the gymnasium after the video stopped playing. A couple weeks later, I was invited to attend an honorary lunch with classmates and faculty put on by the news station to award students and teachers that made an impact in the Alive to Strive program. Our school won the award for best assembly, and I felt like I had made a difference in people's lives for the first time in many years. That instant, I wanted to become a movie director and film editor.

For the last month of my high school career, it seemed like people knew who I was. I was the guy that made that movie about drunk driving. I had made my mark, and I was happy to be remembered for more than just being innocent and quiet. I wasn't popular, but I wasn't invisible anymore, either.

Senior breakfast came, and I was excited to bring my parents to meet the people that filled my life for the past three years. My friends and I were excited to spend that Friday eating free breakfast, skipping school, and going to see Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy together. In the back of my head, I began to realize that my chances of telling the girl of my dreams how I felt about her were quickly fading. After we graduated high school, we would probably never see each other again. To my shock and amazement, she grabbed me during our senior breakfast and asked her mom to take a picture with the two of us. She pressed her cheek against mine, and a bright flash filled the room. I'm sure I turned bright red. My crush just took a picture with me cheek to cheek.

Now was my chance. I invited her to come see the movie with me. She seemed very excited that I asked, and she said that she would see me there! I was ecstatic! Finally, after three years she noticed me! She almost seemed excited to spend time with me. I never felt less invisible in my life.

The story ends anticlimactically. I was so nervous around her, that I couldn't be myself. I bored her to tears. After that Friday, we went out on three "dates", all of which were extremely awkward. We went to terrible R-rated movie where women were depicted in the most degrading manner (an R-rated pornography). We had a picnic in the park where we both sat there eating our Subway sandwiches and avoiding conversation. Finally, we met at Red Robin for burgers and strolled around the mall before she headed off to college. Three strikes, and I was out. I wanted to tell her how I felt, I wanted to be myself around her, but I could never muster the courage. My heart told me that I loved her more than anything else in the world, but I couldn't have loved her because if I did then I wouldn't have kept it a secret. The end of my drama came, and I just let her walk out of my life.

So, what happens after "The End"? The credits role until the movie is over. I felt like I had just watched the most depressing movie. What a terrible ending. What a terrible let-down. The story seemed to picking up there towards the end. I thought the boy was actually going to get the girl of his dreams. I thought something romantic was going to explode upon the screen. Nope. He got his chance, he got her attention, and then he just let her walk away. What happened?

You see, I got the strange feeling that I wasn't in control of my life and my destiny in May, 2005. I felt like I wasn't the one writing my story. I had no control over the script of my own life. Someone or something got me close enough to a dream come true, made me apathetic to the possible climactic ending, and shook me up after it was all said and done so I could look back at what had just happened and feel very confused. I had what I worshipped for three years within my grasp, and as my dream just stood there for me to take it, I nonchalantly put my hands in my pocket until it disappeared.

I told myself that I never pursued the relationship because I felt a conflict of interest. She wasn't a Christian, she worked at a restaurant that wasn't known for its food but for its entertainment, and she was a pop dancer. I could never introduce her to my parents and expect to gain their approval. I still considered myself a Christian at the time, although I wanted to try not being a Christian for once. If we started dating, I knew I would have to pick between her and my Christian family. I thought I loved her more than anything else, but she walked away without ever looking back while my family was constantly there when I needed them. My parents would have lectured me on being un-equally yoked, and it would have created the worst of conflicts. I thought I could see the future, an ultimatum: me or your parents, and I feared picking her. If she loved me then she would stick around, but she went off to an out-of-state college. I was crushed.

However, I know now that it wasn't a conflict of interest that kept me from pursuing her. She wasn't a Christian, and I wasn't a Christian either. If I told my parents that I was pursuing a relationship with her, then I would have to break the bad news to them that I was beginning to doubt whether or not I was a Christian anyways. More than that, however, was the fact that God made me let her go. She was the beginning of a destructive pattern in my life implemented by God so that I would eventually destroy myself so that I could finally see who I was and who He was. My heart was hardened against the Lord, and I clung to my pride and my desires as gods. God would then plague my life with sorrow and heartbreak so that I could see that my gods were worthless, that they brought me no love and solace when depression hit, and I would crumble under the pressure. I would get a reprieve from the burden long enough to find another god to worship, to place my affections on another object, to call it love, and then the Lord would plague my life once again.

Somehow, I feel I experienced what Pharoah did when his heart was hardened by God. Plague after plague after plague, and you'd think I would learn from my experience. After high school, I allowed myself to be crushed in college by a coworker at the restaurant I worked at. This ordeal only lasted one year, but I found myself repeating the same cycle once again. I was fixated on her, I fooled myself into believing that if I had her then I would have everything that I would ever need. God let me get so close, to the point where it seemed destined to happen, and then I  would just let her walk away for no good reason.

God was not teasing me. He wasn't dangling a carrot in front of me and then yanking it away just as soon as I was about to take a bite. It was actually the other way around. I was teasing myself. I was teasing myself into believing that a pretty, nice, and fun girl would fill the void in my soul. I felt that if I had someone real to embrace and to love, then I would no longer need to plague my life with pornography. I teased myself into believing that my addiction to pornography stemmed from my affection for relationship and that I wouldn't have a problem if I could just focus that affection towards someone and have it returned to me. When the opportunity came along for me to prove my theory, I was stricken with an unexplained apathy. Although I never wanted to, God made me let those girls walk away. I thought they were dreams about to come true, but looking back, they were only nightmares lurking to destroy me.

Both of these girls ended up pregnant in college. The girl that I adored in high school had the baby. The father disappeared, and she moved back home as a single mother. She dropped out of college for a while, and depended on her mother in order to make end's meat. The girl that I adored in college claimed that she had a miscarriage. Perhaps she did, or perhaps she felt guilty about aborting the baby. Either way, she didn't seem too distraught over the loss of the child. She has never tried to do anything with her life, and she continues to work at the same restaurant six years later.

God was preventing me from making a great mistake. He was barring the path that I had determined to pursue. It's as if He was setting me aside for someone special. It was as if He was trying to let me know that He would provide the girl of my dreams, but I would have to wait a little while longer. It was as if He was teaching me that the root of my problem wasn't not being able to garner the affection I thought I needed but was rejecting the love and grace given to me in the Gospel. Girls weren't going to fix my problem. Dating a girl wasn't going to save me from my addiction to pornography. It was only going to exacerbate the situation. I didn't know that, but thank God that He didn't let me learn the hard way.

I was miserable, and I felt destined for a life without love. I grew deeply depressed, and as the depression got worse my addiction to pornography got worse too. I felt like I was crumbling to dust and ashes. Suicide wasn't an option because I already felt dead inside. I stopped eating like I should, and I locked myself in my bedroom day and night. During the day I would live a fantasy life through video games, and at night I would live a fantasy life via movies and pornography. All the while, I am continuing to eat and drink myself to judgment. Physically, I was at the prime of my life, but emotionally, I was slowly deteriorating. I don't know if people noticed, but I am sure that the effects of sin in my life coupled with deep depression had a visible effect on me. I was certainly sickly, and I didn't think things could get much worse. God was merciful, and although things could have gotten much worse, the Shepherd went searching for His lost lamb.

At that time I was truly miserable, for I loved feeling sad and sought out whatever could cause me sadness. When the theme of a play dealt with other people's tragedies--false and theatrical tragedies--it would please and attract me more powerfully the more it moved me to tears. I was an unhappy beast astray from your flock and resentful of your shepherding, so what wonder was it that I became infected with foul mange?...It was simply that when I listened to such doleful tales being told they enabled me superficially to scrape away at my itching self, with the result that these raking nails raised an inflamed swelling, and drew stinking discharge from a festering wound. Was that life I led any life at all, O my God?
--Augustine of Hippo