I’m Not Sick, But I’m Not Fine

I’m Todd Mayson, and this is Audio Story Time - a place where songs, memories, and the life behind them meet.

This first episode is called I’m Not Sick, But I’m Not Fine.

There’s a difference between knowing somebody’s story and understanding what that story has taught them.

My story includes childhood trauma, running away, addiction, prison, music, faith, and eventually finding a language for things I’d carried most of my life.

But I don’t want to tell these stories simply because difficult things happened to me.

I want to understand what they can teach us about the way we see one another.

Because when somebody is struggling, we usually see the behavior first.

We see what they did.

We see the disruption.

We see the mistake.

We may not see what the behavior is carrying.

Years ago, before I had a diagnosis or understood much about trauma, I wrote a song called “Festival of Time.”

I knew the words meant something.

I just didn’t understand how much they knew about me.

There’s a passage in my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, that begins with two lines from that song.

I’d like to read it to you.

Memoir excerpt

There is a line in Festival of Time that may describe my teenage years better than anything I could have said back then.

In this festival of time
I’m not sick but I’m not fine

That was me.

I was not sick in a way anybody knew how to name.

No one looked at me and saw a diagnosis. No one sat me down and said, “This boy is carrying fear, shame, confusion, grief, and a hidden self he has no safe place to put.” No one looked at my running, my pot smoking, my cutting school, my lying, my sexual confusion, and my trouble and said, “Something has happened here that needs tenderness.”

They saw behavior.

They saw trouble.

They saw a boy who would not stay where he was supposed to stay.

A boy who would not go to school.

A boy who would not obey.

A boy who kept choosing the road over the room.

From the outside, maybe I looked rebellious.

From the inside, I was not fine.

They saw behavior.

That line matters to me now because behavior is often the first thing we use to define a person.

We say somebody is difficult.

Lazy.

Angry.

Addicted.

Unreliable.

Rebellious.

We take what we can see and turn it into an explanation for the whole person.

Sometimes we even turn it into their identity.

I know that because it happened to me.

I also know I’ve done it to other people.

Most of us have.

We’re often more comfortable judging behavior than becoming curious about pain.

Judgment gives us a quick answer.

Understanding asks us to stay in the room longer.

Understanding doesn’t mean pretending that harmful choices don’t matter.

Trauma isn’t an eraser.

It doesn’t remove accountability or undo the hurt we may cause.

But accountability and understanding don’t have to be enemies.

We can tell the truth about what someone did while also asking what happened to them.

That second question changed my life.

For years, I asked:

What’s wrong with me?

Why couldn’t I stay?

Why did I keep running?

Why could freedom feel unsafe?

Why could love feel dangerous when it came too close?

Why did I keep leaving rooms I desperately wanted to belong in?

Eventually, the question became:

What happened to me?

That question didn’t make me innocent.

It made me understandable.

And becoming understandable to myself was one of the first forms of mercy I experienced.

I’m not suggesting that every difficult behavior has the same explanation.

I’m not trying to diagnose everybody we find hard to understand.

I’m saying there may be more truth beneath the behavior than the behavior can tell us by itself.

A child may not know how to say:

I don’t feel safe.

I’m carrying shame.

I’m afraid that love can disappear.

I have feelings I’ve been taught I’m not allowed to have.

A child may only know how to run.

An adult may still be running without realizing the danger ended years ago.

That doesn’t make every place we run toward healthy.

It doesn’t make every decision harmless.

But it helps explain why simply telling someone to behave differently may not reach the place where the behavior began.

That’s where music entered my life.

The guitar gave my hands somewhere to go.

Songs gave my feelings somewhere to live.

I could write something before I was ready to understand it.

I could sing something before I was ready to say it in conversation.

“Festival of Time” didn’t explain my life.

It didn’t diagnose me.

But it recognized something.

I’m not sick, but I’m not fine.

There’s a lot of life inside that sentence.

It refuses two easy conclusions.

The first is that nothing is wrong.

The second is that the person is nothing more than what’s wrong.

I wasn’t fine.

But I wasn’t beyond reach.

I wasn’t beyond understanding.

And I certainly wasn’t beyond grace.

The song also contains a prayer:

Would you shine some feeling into my eyes?
Would you shine some easiness into my mind?

I didn’t have the theological language I have now.

God had become tangled with fear, judgment, and the feeling that I was always failing some test.

But something in me continued reaching.

Even when I didn’t know whether God was safe, I still whispered the name.

Looking back, I don’t hear spiritual failure in that reaching.

I hear longing.

I hear somebody asking for a little room inside his own mind.

I hear a person who hadn’t given up on mercy, even though he didn’t yet know what mercy could feel like.

Healthy faith, as I understand it now, should help us see the whole person.

It shouldn’t make us quicker to condemn.

It should make us more willing to become curious.

More willing to listen.

More willing to hold accountability and compassion in the same hands.

Jesus repeatedly saw people others had reduced to a label.

The outcast.

The sinner.

The unclean.

The unacceptable.

He didn’t pretend their lives had no complications.

But he refused to treat the label as the whole person.

That continues to challenge me.

Because mercy isn’t only something I hope God offers me.

It’s also a way I’m being taught to see somebody else.

That’s why I’m telling this story now.

Not simply so you’ll know what happened to me.

But because someone around you may be communicating through behavior they don’t yet know how to explain.

That person may even be you.

The behavior still matters.

The consequences may still be real.

But before we decide that the behavior tells us everything, perhaps we can ask one more question.

Not only:

What did this person do?

But also:

What might this person be carrying?

Sometimes the behavior people judge is the language of a wound no one has learned to hear.

Sometimes a song hears it first.

And sometimes mercy begins when somebody finally listens.

I’m Todd Mayson, and this has been Audio Story Time.

You can hear “Festival of Time” and learn more about the music and my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, at toddmayson.com.

Thank you for listening.