A Few Words on Paranoia

I debated on whether or not to make this post, but ultimately, I think it’s a good thing to be transparent, if in that transparency somebody else can take encouragement or solace or, well, something good. I joke about reclusiveness in the somewhat silly About the Author section of my website, and unfortunately there’s a lot of truth to that with me. I don’t mean to be—I didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become more indrawn—but fear is something I contend with very heavily, and over the last three plus years it morphed into a much bigger enemy of my peace.

The story I’ll share here is the short recounting of a summer day during my high school years, and with that I hope anybody reading it can take encouragement in the fact that, despite the deep valleys we have to forge through in this often-strange world, God is still good. Things aren’t always easy, often aren’t easy, but there’s so much good and light to be seen each day! And that’s all, so here’s the story…

During the summer of my sixteenth year, an eighteen-wheeler was put in park at the end of Robin Road, just shy of the stop sign. Mine was the cream-colored house with the red shutters which sat on the corner, behind which was a yard and a shed and a treehouse with a hole through the center of the plank floor. When the truck stopped at the end of my suburban Connecticut home, it was early afternoon and being that it was summer I wasn’t at school and therefore saw the thing when it did. This wasn’t right. To label it paranoia would likely be a fitting vestment, one exaggerated by an over-active imagination and having seen The Sum of all Fears at some not so distant point. 

As certain as that day was a summer one, and as certain as Mike T had fallen through the plank floor of the treehouse my dad built many years prior, I knew that that eighteen-wheeler must have been suburban-camouflage for a nuclear weapon set to detonate shortly thereafter it had been put in park. Just my luck. So what do you do when a truck harboring a planet-breaker stops directly in front of your home, and only illuminated you are aware that everyone’s world is about to change? Well, if you’re me, you hop on your bike and try to pedal outside of the blast radius. I pedaled so far as the local convenience store maybe a quarter-mile from the soon-to-be epicenter of hell-made-incarnate, and then decided that going half-a-mile was a worse fate than the disintegration. And so I turned back. 

I don’t remember if the truck was already gone when I got back home, but that I’m writing this—on top of the dearth of nuclear activity in Nowhere, Connecticut—should give some indication that things turned out less-than fatal. And it’s interesting to think back on it now, because at the time—and for a long time after—that never seemed anything outside of a sensible conclusion to as unusual an event as the truck stopping. Nor did the fact that I searched my house with a baseball bat for intruders most days when I got home from school. So, when I look at the bone-deep, heart-rattling fear of death which has sat on me these past three years or so, it’s not as unexpected a thing, perhaps, as I sometimes imagine. And I don’t fully know what the point of recounting that story—dredging up that innocuous memory—is, save to remind myself, and maybe encourage another, that God’s with us and for us even if our natural proclivity is one to trend toward some degree of paranoia. I’m still here. Do I, the healthy thirty-year-old man, fear I’ll have a heart attack on a near-daily-basis? Yeah, I do. But I’m still here. And so are you. And God is still good.