Is this worth all worth it?

“If I say, ‘I will not mention him,
    or speak any more in his name’,
then within me there is something like a burning fire
    shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in,
    and I cannot.”

Jeremiah 20:9 NRSVA

The prophet Jeremiah literally just cannot even with us anymore

The Spiritual Gift of the Inability to Shut Up

The prophet Jeremiah is, anachronistically, a patron saint for the ADHD disciple. I know the weariness of “holding it in,” the exhaustion at keeping my thoughts inside. Astute scholars will note that contextually he is speaking of proclaiming God’s Word, and I, on the other hand, do not always, even usually, proclaim God’s Word.

I do understand that feeling, though, that something has to be said.

Like many Bible verses that find themselves naked and contextlessly cross-stitched onto Christian wall décor, Jeremiah 20:9 ought not to be pure positive affirmation. Only two verses prior, Jeremiah admits the social cost of his bluntness. “I have become a laughing-stock all day long; everyone mocks me.”

Now, religious people from Biblical prophets to online evangelists have a long history of melodramatically insisting all opposition to them, the ones speaking God’s honest truth, is oppression. We too seldom consider the possibility that people are mocking us because we are, genuinely, annoying. Or worse: not actually speaking for God at all.

My innate trait of “within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones” is prophetically neutral. It is a trait that we can label, diagnose even. But whether or not it is good for the world is a question of channelling it.

Some of us truly struggle to sit still, to shut up. I do believe in our need to try, so that we listen to others, too. People who only talk, without listening, are a blight upon the world, frankly. But the people who talk, boldly and loudly and even unrelentingly, after having listened to many others’? They change the world for the better.

I have spent my professional life trying to be a safe place for the shy and quiet to speak, and thousands have. And without betraying any individual confidences, the totality of what they have said to me is something I ought to share. Sharing someone’s private confidence is a betrayal, but so is knowing what I know and remaining in comfortable silent complicity.

My work life has primarily been among the young and marginalised, people who our societal and church systems routinely ignore. While my innate inability to stay silent may well be annoying, may be clinically ADHD, it is also a gift from God when I use it demand justice.

My worst, but least regretted, professional experiences came from the very times when the pleas for justice from the vulnerable felt like a burning fire, and I blurted them out in meetings where I was laughed at and ignored.

How Different Are You, Really?

I once had a romantic partner who felt my two or three Facebook statuses a day were massively “oversharing,” while she spoke, as an adult, to her mother on the phone for an hour daily sometimes, recounting every single event and thought. We did our math of “oversharing” differently. I had no problem sharing a few passing quips to hundreds of people, a number that terrified her. I would never share the amount of detail she shared with her mother, though, to anyone. A tension in our relationship was that we both, sincerely, considered the other to be a serious oversharer!

One thing I see in retrospect is that the desire to share our lives itself is more consistent than we often realise if we only focus on how one shares.

I admit I spend a lot of time on social media like TikTok and Threads. One may rightly say, of me at least, that it is a place of loners who have nobody to talk to in real life. That is, more or less, in fact true of me. I share a passing thought on Threads in part because I am single, often alone, there is no other person nearby eager to hear what I think. Sometimes, a person or two likes what I have to say. Sometimes a thousand. The algorithm of which will be which is mostly a mystery to me. I have found “my people,” the ones who think my special interests are, in fact, interesting and my humour, in fact, funny primarily online.

Is that morally inferior to finding them in a bar?

Is this all worth it?

I give sermons. I wrote a play. People pay me to speak. I have managed to build a life where I very literally cannot afford to be silent. In that way, I do it for the money. But social media has reminded me that I also don’t do it for the money. It is on social media, after all, that I reach the most people but am paid nothing.

Yesterday, I made a post on Threads that went slightly viral. 1,000 likes in a day. Affirming, lovely experience, right?

I attempted to use humour to teach a little bit about my church and talk about parenting. 1,000 people liked it. 1,000 people seemed to understand exactly my point.

One person. Literally one person was quite mean. Because they openly shared their own profession and workplace, because though they were a stranger, we had a dozen mutual colleagues or friends, I tried to politely assert myself, to see if they would reconsider what they publicly said, an attack on me that felt to me unfair to what I actually had said.

This morning I awoke to even more vicious comments from them. I took a deep breath. I looked at the statistics. One person against over 1,000. But it wasn’t a random “troll,” it was an ordained minister who people I like say that they like, and my only experience of them was as a bully to strangers. So they took my emotional energy.

In “real” life, we do not have access to the statistical data that social media allows. On social media I can double check. “Did I really say that?” No, I didn’t. Okay. Does everyone hate me? No, just one person hundreds of kilometres away. Okay. In this limited way, I find social media can be a healthier space than “real” life. When dozens of people walk out of church happy but one person angrily insists I said something in my sermon that I objectively did not say, can I remember these ratios?

The Minor Existential Crisis

I pondered, a recurring pondering, today if I should just quit, just shut it all down. Close my Threads account, my TikTok, my Facebook. Is it worth it to be subject to the hate of strangers? Sometimes for who I am and what I think, but often for their own imaginary version of who I am and what I think?

I went to my city pool and swam a kilometre. My best time in years. I was obviously upset. My athleticism statistically correlates with my existential dread. I thank my smart watch for making that joke a verifiable claim.

Swimming is my happy place. The faster I swim, the calmer I feel inside. It is a paradoxical happy place. One that was hard to come by. Thirty years ago, I failed grade seven gym class because I refused to swim. I refused to get changed in an open locker room in front of other boys. I refused to be in a bathing suit in front of classmates. I was too terrified of them noticing, commenting on, hating my—in retrospect—unremarkably ordinary body. I would rather fail a class than be seen and judged. Of course the one kid refusing to change and participate was far more noticeable than one of dozens in a swimsuit.

A lesson I learned, too slowly, but eventually, is that trying to hide from judgment does not work. Judgmental people judge. Because that is their nature. In the absence of information, they make assumptions. The audacity with which people assume other people’s motives never ceases to amaze, and sadden, me. But I have learned silence does not improve it.

I might as well be me.

Me prefers being in water over being on land. Me loves swimming and is fine with my body, to paraphrase Cookie Monster.

Tonight I casually, as I do nearly every day, did what scared me most thirty years ago. I went into an open locker room. Got changed in front of strangers. Walked out to a pool in a bathing suit. With my body, which was not remarkably young or old or fit or out of shape. Swam neither the fastest nor the slowest. And then back into the locker room.

When we go through our lives, whether sharing our thoughts or swimming or getting changed in a locker room, some people will moralise about how much of ourselves we “expose.” Celebrities on the beach being photographed on the beach get accused of “flaunting” their bodies. When they literally just went swimming.

We are all just out here existing, whether we bare our day’s events, our thoughts, or our swimsuit bodies. Other people choose how much they look, how much they judge, how they react.

Most people do not care. The next biggest group quietly wish us well. A very small number of people are total jerks. And would be no matter what we did or did not do.

It is all worth it.

I admire people who find genuine joy in solitude.

I am not one of them.

I often think of myself as introvert. I am in the sense that in many situations, I would rather be alone. But it is I would rather be alone than with someone who is cruel. I believe in genuine introverts, but I think they are rarer than we imagine. I suspect many of my fellow introverts have found solitude is statistically safer than company, but would rather not be alone.

I travel alone a lot, because I don’t know anyone who wants to go with me on the little day trips and adventures I spontaneously whip up. (No human, that is. Thanks be to God for dogs.) I share so many photos on Instagram because there is part of me that only thinks it matters if I share it.

Do I share little jokes that made me chuckle onto the void of Threads, just to fill some sad little void in myself? Yes.

When people openly share who they are, they make it safe for others.

The people who lift the lightest weights at the gym. The people there in their comfiest athletic attire regardless of societal norms. The clergy who admit their imperfections. The therapists who don’t have all the answers. The professors who share screen in lecture as they themselves look it up.

That safety scares some people. Some people’s own sense of security comes from a sense of superiority. But those of us who want to create safe spaces for others cannot let that stop us so much.

Last night I thought how often, with a bad boss or a controlling partner, I would let one cruel person motivate me into self-censorship, forgetting the 1,000 who might like what I have to share. I am not immune to being hurt by trolls and bullies.

I also cannot let them control me.

Literally, like Jeremiah, I cannot let them control me.

My social life may go smoother if I had that gift. But my gift is a fire in my bones that exhausts me to hold in. Sometimes that fire is the Word of God and sometimes it’s just my own annoying quirks.

I suppose, though, when it comes to my own dark sense of humour, my own diagnoseably atypical mind, my own average middle-aged body at public pool in a swimsuit—or maybe when it come to your own humour, and insights, and body—in whose image and likeness do we think those were made anyway?

It may be hubris to think sharing who we are is sharing the Word of God, but I pose a balancing question: might it be hiding God’s light under a bushel to insist that we ought not to?