AND I WAS YOUNG: Recently I had a bad weekend. A really, really lousy, stressed-out, low, hateful weekend. And at some point I realized something: You know, I used to feel like this all the time! Thinking over it, actually, I used to feel worse than that, all the time. Like between the ages of, say, five or six, and 20. After 20 or so, I’ve had frequent bad patches, grim little self-hate-fiestas, but they’ve been interludes between longer calm, basically happy stretches. This correlates very roughly with my entrance into the Church, which is interesting; I don’t know what to say except “interesting,” because entering the Church has certainly provoked new anxieties and fairly painful self-assessments. But there it is.

And so I was thinking, after the bad weekend had passed, about the particular kind of unhappy childhood I had and what I gained from it. I think it actually cleared away some of the obstacles that might have prevented me from finding truth, rather than creating obstacles as many other kinds of unhappiness might. Here are four benefits of this particular kind of unhappiness:

1) My unhappiness came from a deep sense of personal inadequacy, due to specific failings on my part. (And so this unhappiness did not come from, say, betrayals or failures by my family, who have always been just awesome.) The language of sin, when I got over my allergy to it and started actually listening to what Christians said about sin, struck me as exactly right in describing my experience: I did things, and had intense, passionate desires to do things, knowing that they were wrong. Not “knowing that other people told me they were wrong”–the sense of wrongness was, as far as I can tell, at least mostly independent from other people’s judgments. It was an internal sense that something inside had warped and was inclining toward evil. So I never had to be persuaded that I needed saving. I never bought the Pelagian line that if you just work hard enough you can earn your salvation. I was never even tempted by belief systems that claimed that people were inherently good. The description of man as not good, not bad, but Fallen seemed to me much more like what I knew: People know that there is some standard of good that they have fallen away from, but they can’t, by their own efforts, ever attain that righteousness. Something has gone wrong.

2) I have little attraction to or patience for nostalgia. I think this is basically a benefit, though there are probably drawbacks that I’m ignoring. Philosophically, this helped me see that Augustine’s discussion of happiness (brief and probably tangled synopsis, filtered through C.S. Lewis: How do we distinguish random pleasures from true joy? We must have some standard in mind, and, because of the subjective nature of joy, the intermingling of joy with fear and similarly painful emotions, and the “sui generis” nature of most joyful experiences, our standard can’t just be “what my culture tells me is joyful.” We must have some memory of actual, experienced, full joy against which we can compare the flashes we receive in this life. Augustine speculates that this remembered happiness is Adam’s–we share in his happiness as we shared in his Fall) is not just about missing your happy childhood. (Augustine himself is not exactly filled with longing for the carefree, innocent days of his childhood.) And politically, I think this general non-nostalgic-ness inoculated me from the longing for an imagined past that so many “social conservatives” suffer from.

3) I haven’t had a certain kind of hideous, stomach-lurching moments of disillusionment, when our bargains with the world (“You’re basically an alright world, so if I just behave myself, nothing bad will happen, right? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, World…”) fail. I never held the underlying “benevolent universe premise” that those bargains rest on. (For this I can also thank my mother, who works for prisoners’ rights; once you’ve heard a few horror stories from the American prison system, you at least no longer believe that humans “can’t be that horrible…”) I don’t want to be too cocky here–I haven’t had this moment of disillusionment, but that doesn’t mean I never will have it. I am sure I still have some illusions that will be painfully ripped away before the end of days.

4) I think that I try to keep those who suffer or are alienated from society front and center in my politics partly because of my own experience of deep-rooted alienation. That’s not a claim of moral superiority–there are major drawbacks to that alienation as well, and there are all kinds of other and perhaps better paths to a commitment to the suffering and alienated. But this post is about the uses of adversity. And for me, personally, I think the “first tenet” of rock’n’roll conservatism is so central is in part because of my experiences.