Jesus Surprised You Think Your Brain is a "Nice Place"

In Which I Watch Adriana's Instagram Reels

I was yesterday years old—is that how you’re supposed to say it? it’s such a weird grammatical construction—when, because of spending an appalling amount of time just scrolling on Twitter instead of doing something useful and productive, I discovered a young person named Adriana. She, I don’t think it would be too much to say, is beautiful, besides also being young. Most of her videos are about working out and being fit, with a smattering of “body image” advice thrown in. Out of self-preservation, I decided not to click the one called “when you step on a scale and feel defeated.”

adrianatblanc

A post shared by @adrianatblanc

Here’s the original tweet that caught my attention, if you want to go watch it—I transcribed her deep thought here. With peppy and cheerful music applied over many images of happiness and health, Adriana explains:

So I recently started feeling "the pressure" everyone talks about. You know the whole "find a life partner, settle down...cause your time can run out" one. I really didn't think I would but I do. But I also decided that unless I find someone that's my absolute best friend, who amplifies my already existing joy, and matches my enthusiasm for life, I really don't mind how long it takes to find. The thing is I worked hard to love my own company and to make my brain a nice place to be in. Because you know what? It's important to become the love of your own life too. At the end of the day, you're the only person who you'll spend every second of every day with for the rest of your existence. So don't rush anything :) And every time I get an intrusive thought, I just say to myself: "I know the love I want & deserve exists, because I am full of it." And I don't know, I feel like maybe someone else needed to hear that too.

The person who posted this in the first place—I have no idea why anything shows up in my feed, it is a great mystery to me—astutely observed this:

women today are able to fight natural urges in ways no one could’ve ever imagined—with profound distractions, games that simply never end, & junk void of any real meaning to fill the gaps. see my previous tweets on why long term relationships are a thing of the past, precisely because it’s completely normal for most women to believe in whatever they want regardless of any merit or truth & it’s easy to convince yourself of anything you want with the intense amount of information that exists on the internet. in america most women are now taught only to love themselves above everyone else & that likely comes with consequences of never being able to love anything else even remotely equally. if anything triggers any remote shifts in this it’ll cause a natural flight/fight response & the answer will almost always be flight. with enough of these, it’ll simply be avoidance of it altogether at scale which is exactly what is happening.

This, of course, made me feel guilty, because I was literally scrolling, and should have been doing more interesting things, like pulling Trumpet Vine out of the garden or catching up the laundry. But the algorithm, plus the heat, was too much for me and I just sat there.

I would just like to point out the most heartbreaking thing in Adriana’s peppy reel. It’s this bit, which just isn’t the least bit true:

The thing is I worked hard to love my own company and to make my brain a nice place to be in. Because you know what? It's important to become the love of your own life too. At the end of the day, you're the only person who you'll spend every second of every day with for the rest of your existence.

It’s not true for so many reasons. First, it’s not possible to make your brain a “nice place” to be in, at least not all the time. Given that you are a sinner, and do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, though you will sometimes enjoy happy and good thoughts, even with years of therapy and self-care, you will sometimes find your own mind a cavern of desolation and ruin. Witness that many of Adriana’s reels are about eliminating bad thoughts about her looks. You can work at this all the live long day, but the darkness, much like the neighbor’s Satan Flag, will always reemerge when you least desire it, when you are tired and worn down. The only way your brain can go on being “nice” is if you just keep distracting yourself, as the original tweeter pointed out.

Second, it’s not true because eternity is a long long time. “The rest of your existence” is not until you turn 90 and then just die. The rest of your existence is forever. In the loneliness of hell, at least Satan will be dancing around, pointing out the failures of your logic. Spending “every second of every day” with yourself, though, is pretty much already hell. That’s why you’ve got to put an Insta-filter on it, and also distract yourself from it all the time, because it’s not that great.

I was trying to say this to myself yesterday, apropos both of the newly washed Satan Flag down the block, and something I saw somewhere else but lost. Self-knowledge that is worth anything comes from the outside, not from within. One reason, I think, young people are growing up so unhappily is because they only have parents—sometimes very emotionally absent ones—to show them who they are. They don’t have brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. When you’re a little person, your sense of yourself is given to you by a whole network of people who were given that knowledge by the people who loved them. This isn’t a linear path of organized self-knowledge. It’s called being human. We look into the eyes of other people and what we see there gives us feedback about the universe and ourselves.

But modern people think self-knowledge is something we must each do for ourselves, through carefully curated technology and life experience, because of “self-love.”

This is before, of course, you bring in the question of God. God has the power to inhabit the human person—mind, heart, body, and soul. And that is very good, because being alone is the worst. When you put yourself into the hands of Jesus, he comes, through the Spirit, to live in you. When he says that he will never leave you nor forsake you, he isn’t kidding. It isn’t an idle promise. Though you may feel alone, you are not alone. You have the God who created everything and also you living in your, truth be told, not very “nice” brain, reorganizing it, of course, to make it nicer until the trumpet sounds and then it will be very nice indeed.

Of course, in some sense Adriana is right. Looking for someone else to satisfy your longings is a fool’s errand. But that’s not because you don’t need someone to satisfy your soul’s desires, it’s just because only God can do it. God does it for the person surrounded by children and a husband, and also the person who is single and hunted by loneliness. He loves both and has the power to care for both.

The scale doesn’t show the weight of that care and love. Indeed, by looking down, or in, you miss it altogether. It is only by going somewhere like church and painfully admitting to other people how lonely you are that the truth can be seen—not only in the expressions of other Christians but also by listening to the scriptures, by walking forward and prying open your hands to receive the bread and wine, the body and blood of the Lord Jesus.

Ok so, have a nice day!