Unshackled Echo ~ July 9, 2019 ~ Terminally Unique

I can remember the first time that I heard the words terminally unique. Someone helping me with my early days of recovery used them to turn the volume down on the pity party I was throwing. She couldn't make me stop feeling sorry for myself, but she could kill the soundtrack. "Dalyn, you are seriously not terminally unique." She went on to tell me that in all the years that she'd been in the rooms of recovery she had never talked to anyone who hadn't expressed feeling the feelings I was whining about, especially in the start of the process.

But it's different for me. If you just understood what I have been through, what has been done, you'd drink/drug too, or at least you would see why I do. If you just understood what they did to me you would understand why I have to hold on to this particular resentment. I know Jesus said to forgive, but He wasn't talking about this kind of situation. You just don't get it. Etc., etc., blah, blah, Nobody understands me and what I'm feeling. I'm dying inside, and nobody sees why but me. I'm alone. I'm different than everybody else. The pity party anthem of the terminally unique echoes out of tune.

Like many teens, when I was younger I put up posters in my room, mostly of bands and cars I'd never drive, much less own. But I had one poster of a tiger looking like an overgrown depressed kitten. The caption on the poster consisted of three words. Nobody Understands Me. My father hated that poster. I know because he told me so. I didn't take it down though. If he had only understood how I was feeling he would understand why I loved that poster. But he did understand. He saw and understood me reacting to pain, confusion, disappointment, rejection and fear by isolating and playing the victim, and he saw the danger of it.

I just didn't get that the truth that there is nothing new under the sun includes emotions and the way I feel. Of course we all have unique experiences. No one has lived the exact same life as anyone else. Even the friends I strolled through hell with all did so from a slightly different angle and perspective. But our fears and emotions and reactions are far more mundanely average than we would like to believe. Being used and abused and treated wrong means we have at some point been victimized, but it takes wallowing in self pity and, yes, pride over it to play the victim. To take advantage of another, to have brought destruction into someone else's life means we have at some point played the victimizer, but it takes pride in being predator rather than prey and, yes, self pity to revel in killing before we can be killed. And the feelings and motivations of both extremes and the states between are predictable and boring and anything but unique.

Even if we could come up with some situation that absolutely no one we know could possibly understand and empathize with, Christ can and does understand how and why we feel what we do. In fact, He not only volunteered to  experience our hell, but He gets it and understands it even better than we do. From our perspective at the center of our own universe we may indeed seem terminally unique, but in truth our actions, reactions and emotions are common and shared by millions.

Rather than taking our pain and fear as an excuse to hide and wail that no one could possibly understand, we can run to the One who understands us even better than we do, who can help us, heal us and transform us, and then we can courageously share our experiences and what we felt with others so that they can see that they too are not alone and that there is indeed a solution.

Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on

July 9, 2016.

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