Been thinking a lot, fighting quite a bit. And listening to a lot of DAS (well, music in general). There's a triad of his songs that seem to work together as a trilogy for me now:
Reach,
In Your Hands, and
Slo Glo One (better known as
Glory). Today I shall prattle on about the first one.
Reach actually took a really long time to grow on me. I always appreciated the chorus, but something about the song irked me; something about the execution of it. I never could figure out what it was, but apparently it's not an issue now because I can't remember what it was that bugged me (probably the tempo -- I'm still young enough to like my music fast and fairly complex).
I have a history of locking up inside myself ('history,' heck -- I'm doing it as I type), convinced that nobody could love me, even if they tried. I actually believed (and sometimes still do believe) that for somebody, anybody, to care about me was impossible. Depression is funny that way... it seems so obvious to other people on the outside that people love me and that I'm resisting their love, but depression is truly a mental illness. It actually blinds us to things like that. It's not a wilful ignorance of our 'worth' -- we actually truly cannot see it. We need you to tell us every single day that you love us because our diseased minds discard the truth mere minutes after you speak it to us. You can't rely on our 'knowing' you love us though you never say anything and you can't rely on thinking 'well, I told her that one time that she was pretty cool.' Depression is hell-bent on destroying those it infects. One offhand instance of 'You're pretty cool,' as much as you may sincerely mean something by it, simply does not stand up against my own mind telling itself it's worthless twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
For years people would get frustrated with me. They would always say to me, "Just
let yourself be loved!" They tried to say it kindly, but there was often pent-up frustration in their voices. I could not wrap my head around this idea that they seemed to take for granted. Here I was figuratively screaming for somebody to care for more than five seconds, and you're telling me it's
my fault? I can't let you love me if you're not
showing any love for me to allow in. That phrase is still a source of frustration for me.
(End rant -- my apologies...)
But although Brian Healy uses the words,
Let Him love you, he does not stop there, and that's what gives his exhortation more weight. He doesn't expect that vague, tired phrase to magically fix everything, and realising the weakness of language itself makes a huge difference in how one comes across because it does inform and change how you communicate. Healy continues his thought with
Let Him show you... Let Him touch you...
Let Him heal you.
Reach out your hands... and take what He has to offer. It's a gentle invitation, not an outburst of exasperation. And ultimately it's not by my strength that I can reach out and take it anyway. Grace has to visit me in order for me to have the strength to take it. Taking and accepting love is perhaps harder even than almost anything I can think of. To give love is easy enough. Even when the other person doesn't want your love, it's relatively easy to give it. But to take love someone else is holding out to you... that's well-nigh impossible. There's something in my mind that still tells me it's not real, it's a facade like everything else. It'll turn out to be just somebody else trying to relive their guilt about not loving me by
pretending to love me.
How do you surrender yourself to someone else's love?
Title:
Reach
Artist: Dead Artist Syndrome
Album:
Prints Of Darkness
Year: 1990
iTunes
here; YouTube
here.
