by Sturm, Lacey
Guided Screaming
I believe each person is created with passion. Sensible, respectable voices of the world do their best to dim our passion, because someone driven by passion could cause a cultural stir. Passionate people can be dangerous, reckless, and revolutionary, for better or for worse.
I saw many things in life that stirred me, that angered me, that confused me. I knew in my core that there was something very wrong with the world. I possessed a strong sense of its injustice, like it caused a fire to boil in the center of the earth, and everything was tainted by the smell of its sulfur rising from cracks in the earth’s surface. Screaming was my natural response to injustice.
I guess I’ve always searched for truth. Whenever someone was bold enough to scream about something, it made me think that person must really believe what he or she was saying. Like screaming was some kind of truth serum. I assumed whenever people screamed, their heart of hearts would be wrapped up in the loud voice somewhere. Many times when someone screamed at me, my reaction was either to receive what was being screamed as truth or scream back—my clarion call to right the injustice.
When I started writing music with screaming in it, the point was to hit someone back. Singing, speaking, yelling—it all felt like an appropriate response to being alive, like I had a responsibility to change the world because I was breathing, and so my voice was meant to be a tool of change. Before I believed in God, my venting, ranting, and screaming always had some searching in it, but most of all it felt like I possessed a destructive power over the things I hated. There was honesty in my hatred, and even back then, some of my hatred and anger were flung toward gross evils.
So in cursing evil, I had a vague sense of being able to change it. But my idea of justice against evil was, many times, just more evil in return. After God rescued me, however, I found a purpose for my screaming: to speak truth over the lies in people’s hearts. Lies like the ones I believed about myself when I wanted to die. Lies like, “Joy will never come,” or “Nothing can break the chains around my heart,” or “Everything would be better if I wasn’t alive.”
Injustice exists in the world—like people using our God-given gift of speech to make others believe they’re worthless. I used my voice as a judge, calling some people worthless. The ones who abused and used others were worthless to me, so I sang, screamed, spoke out about them. I screamed for anarchy because I witnessed abusive authority. Anarchy appeared to be justice for the abuse of authority. I screamed because it felt like something to live for. It felt good to think I had a voice in life, even if only I could hear it. It felt good to stir up passion over anything. It made me feel alive and gave me a vague sense that my life had some small impact or meaning.
Sometimes things will stick in your gut and drive you nearly insane when you think about their injustice. For me, it is atrocities like human trafficking, rape, sexual abuse, violence against defenseless victims, and so many other issues. God places these passions in our hearts so we will never forget the good, so we will never forget that someone always needs help. So many people live twisting in the wretched winds of despair and grief and anger, and they do so in relative silence. My passion, my drive, was to scream because it felt right. It felt like it might change something in some mystical way. It felt a little like prayers feel to me now: like my most honest response.
When I encountered God, I noticed that many Christians weren’t passionate about much, at least on the outside. Maybe I was screaming because in some odd way it put me closer to a God I know cares about injustice—it breaks his heart. The broken heart that makes me scream comes from the broken heart of a God who moves within me, aching and yearning for his creation to know how beautiful, valuable, and loved it is.
Phil Anselmo helped me understand that there is something wrong in the world—an injustice to scream about, an injustice to try to remedy.
But God helped me understand that his heart breaks when we hurt. He helped me see his compassion and lovingkindness. He also revealed to me that he is a roaring lion of a Father who wants to end our brokenness. In fact, he became broken himself in order for us to become whole and healed and well.
Later, the Bible would also confirm that my words can be creative and also destructive, and that the passionate heart behind my words can and will change the world for better or worse. But God still trusted me with a voice. There would come a day when I would pray for him to use it to bring life to people who had been destroyed by other voices—lying voices. I prayed God would use my voice to scream justice over every lie seeking to destroy the very people he made for great things. That’s all of us. If only we would believe that truth! If only we could reject every lie that tells us something different.
8
The Reason
I Wanted to Die
The first story in the Bible is all about the importance of words. The whole first chapter of Genesis repeats:
“God spoke!” And it happened.
“God spoke!” And it happened.
“God spoke!” And it happened.
Then God makes a human, gives him breath from his own mouth, and tells him to speak. But I never needed the Bible to tell me how life and death lay in the power of the tongue. I could feel it for myself when certain people spoke to me.
“You’re ugly.”
“No one likes you.”
“You’re stupid.”
“You’re always in the way.”
“I hate you.”
I felt myself begin to die. Then God would send another voice along.
“You’re beautiful.”
“I like you.”
“You’re smart.”
“You’re a good helper.”
“I love you.”
Then I felt myself coming back to life.
I don’t believe bullying is the main thing that makes us want to die. I believe that it can be a trigger for people like my young self who already feel unsure about their purpose and identity—people prone to sadness, people restless with a world that seems to offer so many shallow answers to the deep questions that make their hearts heavy.
But even though it isn’t the only cause of people wanting to die, verbal and emotional abuse are powerful and destructive in the mind of someone searching for identity. For years I carried a heavy backpack full of destructive words. I learned to be clever and poetic in my hatefulness by pulling things out of my backpack that others had put in there. I learned the demonic “wisdom” of verbal and emotional abuse by being that demon’s target.
I was also versed in the demonic “wisdom” of lying, cheating, stealing, manipulating, arguing, arrogance, gossip, division, and on and on. I kept building my arsenal in order to do things that I considered to be good. I found noble reasons to exercise these demonic “wisdoms.” I convinced myself that as long as I was accomplishing a greater good in the world (whatever I decided good was), I was more than justified in using any of these weapons. And I was deeply offended by the concept of sin. I felt like it was just a vindictive tool for the people who wanted to point fingers at you, to make you feel like crap and control your life. So I purposely dove into what I knew to be a Christian’s view of sin. Anytime I met someone who hadn’t been “liberated” by enjoying these “sinful” things in life, I would work really hard to “set them free” by getting them to do the thing they considered most taboo.
Any moral compass I possessed was fueled by my emotions. I let my emotions dictate right and wrong to me. I called this “listening to my heart.”
As I dove into my ever-changing morality, it all kept my heart distracted. And I had to stay distracted so I could keep telling myself that I was fine. But when everything got quiet and everyone went home, and I was alone in my room, I could sense emptiness growing inside me. Not being able to sleep was horrible, because when I laid on my bed at night, I felt myself opening up to a scary reality, a reality that whispered, You’re just fooling yourself, Lacey.
Maybe I was just ignoring reali
ty by being distracted. I felt restless and agonizingly uncomfortable with myself when I was alone. I felt sick, wrong, and messed up, but I had no language to explain it and no answers to understand why. Of course, most of the time I could see what hurt my body, and often I could see what would help me heal: time, a bandage, some Neosporin.
And I could see what hurt my mind. Most of the time I just needed to not get high before school if I wanted to do better on my first period math test. I could even see what hurt my emotions sometimes, and if I cared enough about a relationship, I could go to the person who hurt my heart, talk it out, and try to make it right. So even those hurts could heal.
But late at night, my restlessness, my strange, deep aching felt like it came from somewhere beyond my body, my mind, and even my emotions. There was this eerie nagging I didn’t want to face that maybe there was more to me than I understood; maybe there was something in my life I was hiding from. But to think that way forced me to face myself in a way I feared. It forced me to consider that I might be just as messed up as all the people I hated and thought were a waste of space, and maybe now I would have to face the same judgment I had cast on so many others.
When I’d reach the edge of myself like this, I’d start justifying all the things I was questioning in my heart. I would explain to myself why I was different, why I was justified, why I was excused. And eventually my thoughts would die down. My heart, mind, and body would feel exhausted. But something deeper in me still wouldn’t let me sleep, and the restlessness, the aching, the empty feeling were still there.
And then, worn out on the inside, I’d begin to cry.
It was such a familiar feeling, crying at night. It felt like an appropriate response to life. Something just wasn’t right about it, and there were no answers to make it right. There was a deep loneliness in those moments that I only felt in the mornings. The two quietest, emptiest, loneliest parts of my day were when I laid down and when I got up.
It’s amazing to me that these two moments would soon be the most fulfilling times of my day. These moments would become the times when I felt the God I worked so hard to not believe in embrace me like no one else ever could.
Later on I discovered I’m not just a body with a mind and emotions, a heart and a soul. I would realize that within my soul there was a spirit that I was neglecting. Within my soul there was a spirit God formed to be the roots of all that I was. It would be my source of life—or if neglected or poisoned, my source of death. Even then I knew my body was more like my vehicle than my real self. But I only considered my self to extend to my soul: my mind, will, and emotions. So to find a deeper part of me was a surprise, a relief, and it made so much sense out of so much chaos and turmoil within me.
Pain made sense to me. I could feel it. It was when I went numb to pain that I felt so anxious. Eventually physical and emotional pain would start to numb me completely. Bono sang the truth I felt during this time when he said, “The only pain is to feel nothing at all.” It is one of the emptiest, deadest feelings.
You can see what hurts your body and emotions in this life, but you can’t always see what hurts your spirit. I think my addiction to being sad culminated into an addiction to rage and violence. I knew if I pushed my mother to a certain point she would fight back. If my mom wasn’t around, I would push my older brother. If he wasn’t around, it would be directed toward people at school.
I loved to fight with anyone who was sensitive to being challenged. I was so messed up that I would actually create horrible situations in order to cry about the injustice of my life. I would get bored with peace and act out, causing crazy drama to ensue. I was addicted to emotional pain. If I didn’t have anything to hurt about in my own life, I would hurt about something in someone else’s life, like it was my own problem.
The emotional pain I desired deadened me.
Eventually life circumstances had to be traumatic in order for me to be affected by them at all. But over time the pain lost its flavor and I discovered I was numb.
Death and Truth
Though I felt numb, the insatiable desire for something still existed in me. That never goes away. That’s the very reason I was in the place I was. I was seeking something beyond me, beyond you, beyond the gross pain in the world.
Writers of great literature talk about this deep desire. They call it sehnsucht, a German word that literally means “longing.” A friend of mine showed me these lines from the haunting poem “The Buried Life” by the great poet Matthew Arnold:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire.
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.1
I feel like I can almost reach out and touch the thoughts of this old poet. In these lines he describes the longing, the sehnsucht. One of my favorite writers, C. S. Lewis, also talks about this deep longing that propelled him toward an encounter with God. I didn’t know it then but that deep desire, that desperate longing for something more, would also land me right in front of God, just like it did for Lewis. It’s like that for us all, really. You and I experience a deep thirst for satisfaction. But this satisfaction does not come sexually, or through material possessions—though that is how we try to quench that desire. We think money will make us feel safe or content, but it only heightens the desire.
Lewis, or Jack as his friends called him, initially thought this deep longing was nothing more than romanticism. But through conversations with friends and his own reading of Christian authors, he realized that it was not a great poem or a beautiful song or a great book that would give him unending joy. Rather, it was the thing behind the poem or song or book—and that “thing” was God.
For me, though, this deep desire to be known, to be loved, to be healed, to be satisfied through and through drove me to places I never want to visit again, dark places. I’m not sure if Jack ever visited the dark places I frequented, but I’m sure he felt the letdown of thinking, Aha! This will surely satisfy, and finding that it was only a shadow.
Every morning I awoke feeling like a burden to the world around me. I wanted to disappear or find that thing to satisfy my deep desire. Let me say this about suicide: it’s a liar. It will whisper to you and fill your mind with just the right amount of evil mixed with something resembling truth. But those are the best lies! Suicide will tell you to cling to the drama, to the people who hurt you, to the tough circumstances of your life and say, Look at all this! It isn’t worth it anymore. You aren’t helping anyone. You make no good difference. You only make everything more inconvenient. You will always feel empty and achy. Living is too painful, so why are you doing it? You just need to sleep forever.
The truth is that we do need rest, but not the kind that sleep gives. And believing that suicide and sleeping forever are the same thing is to believe a lie. Dead bodies only look like they are sleeping, and our bodies are only temporary vehicles anyway. Our vehicle may feel worn out, but our soul is the thing that needs help. And at a certain point the only help it can get is for the marrow of the soul, the spirit, to come to life.
We need rest for our souls.
My soul was trying to be its own life source because my spirit was so sick it was almost dead. And a soul trying to stay alive without a spirit is like a beautiful autumn leaf that falls from a tree. It may be beautiful and awe-inspiring because before it fell it turned the most intense red, and it may have looked exhilarating and alive even as it fell to the ground, but very soon that beautiful leaf will turn to dust. I thought that my soul was coming to life whenever I would listen to certain music, or read certain books, or find romance. But it never stayed. The bril
liance of the colors would always fade.
I asked myself, Do I long for something beyond the songs I love, beyond the books I love, beyond my boyfriend or girlfriend? None of that seems to really satisfy me. Is the answer to end the longing? Or is the solution to go into the beyond itself and see if the light has anything to say about what is dark?
__________________
1. Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold (London: Henry Frowde, 1906), 154–57.
9
The Reason
I Couldn’t Kill Myself
When Jazilyn came home from the hospital, I was five years old and officially a big sister. I took this position very seriously. I planned to teach her everything I knew. How to color, draw, read, make up stories, put on plays, make peanut butter sandwiches—everything.
She didn’t start getting into trouble until she began to crawl. Boy was she fast! She always headed right for the cat food.
“No, no Jazz! That’s Bowie’s food! It’s yucky for babies!”
“Thank you, Lacey, but I’m the momma. I’ll take care of your sister,” my mother would remind me.
Jazilyn was brilliant. She had white-blonde hair and big blue eyes. She looked like my granny. When she first started talking she would mimic everything she heard. She loved to pretend she was on the phone when you were and babble everything you said right after you said it. She was really good at sounding like whomever she was mimicking. We called her Lil’ Mockingbird. By the time she was five she was an excellent impersonator and totally hilarious. She was a great performer and loved to put on a show. She is still one of my favorite storytellers. She and I have very different personalities though.
Jazilyn was definitely a girly girl. She loved to wear dresses and bows and wanted her hair fixed just so. She was organized and would collect all our junk mail and shove it into the ugly old purse we got her for a quarter at a garage sale. She called them her “important papers.” She held that thing on her arm like it had gold bars in it. If you ever touched her purse she would start screaming like a banshee.