I HAVE LISTENED TO THE FIRST ALBUM. THANK YOU FOR OPENING A NEW WORLD FOR ME. GONNA DO VESSEL SOON.
also, happen to have any breakdown posts/stuff you really like about the first album or any songs? :) I would say Oh Ms Believer, Addict With a Pen, and March to the Sea are my favorites <3
I am so happy right now!
Addict With a Pen is my all time favorite twenty one pilots song. I just don’t know why people say it’s their favorite but I never see anybody talking about why. The concept captures that feeling, that headspace, perfectly. And it resolves the way that headspace always should.
The verses alone make me want to cry, but again, they’re the Romans 7 Cycle. He’s saying, “hello, we haven’t talked in quite some time, I know I haven’t been the best of sons,” and you get the feeling that even though they haven’t talked in a while, this state of things, this trying and failing to be “a good son,” has been ever-present in the back of his mind.
When I’m living my day-to-day life, even when it’s full of religious things and responsibilities, but I’m not in the habit of…stopping and talking to God, and living according to the fact that He’s right there, and just generally searching for what He thinks about what I’m doing moment-to-moment, and finding out what He wants and even more importantly, asking Him to help me do it because I can’t, and focusing on the fact that He calls me “beloved” the whole time…this is how it feels.
It feels like He’s a homework assignment I’ve been putting off. It feels like He’s the grandfather I’ve been avoiding checking in with. It feels like He’s the dad I’m always conscious of desiring closeness and approval from, but forever unable to make it happen, so I avoid him, too. But however much I avoid and put off, He’s hanging over me, and so’s the failure that’s making me avoid a one-on-one with Him in the first place. That’s the way it feels. And that first line says it perfectly.
And then it goes deeper. Because while I’m avoiding a one-on-one with just me and God, where I actually listen to Him, what else is my inner world occupied with? What am I doing instead?
“Hello, I’ve been traveling in the desert of my mind.”
Me. I’m just circling around inside of myself. It doesn’t matter how much God is the topic revolving around my brain. Whatever. I can write a seventeen-page essay analyzing Walter Elias Disney and his life and his works and his legacy—doesn’t mean I know the man. Just because I think a lot about God doesn’t mean He’s the one talking, in my brain. It’s just an echo chamber. It’s just me, because that’s all I’m focused on.
When I’m spending endless nights rehearsing all the experiences I’ve had that could be proof of His existence, and weighing them against other possible explanations to try and see if I can deduce whether or not any of this is real? That’s not me spending time with God. That’s me, spending time with me, and God happens to be the topic, the bone I’m letting my mind gnaw into splinters.
When I’m thinking through everything I’ve done during the day, during the last few years, during that last interaction, during my life, and polarizing the good from the bad, sorting out my motives, testing to see if I’m doing it all right so I can root out the bad? That’s not me letting God show me what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s not me spending time with Him. That’s me, spending time with me, trying to figure me out.
And I end up whatever church words you want to use. “Burnt out, empty, in a dry season,” or whatever psycho-babble you want to use, “depressed, anxious, overthinking.” All it really is is self-focus. But I get so deep into it, even when “God is the topic,” that I can’t even see straight anymore. I realize I don’t know myself, and what little of me that I think might be real is despicable. I realize I can’t know much of anything in a way that satisfies my craving for complete understanding and control. I realize that I can question anything—even things that are beyond question. I can deconstruct anything—which is to say, nothing. That’s how insane I can get.
I can keep rephrasing this dark sort of headspace any way you want. But the point is, it’s a headspace that begins and ends with me, and I convince myself it has something to do with God while actually submitting no part of it to Him. And the secondary point is: I don’t need to rephrase it, because “I’ve been traveling in the desert of my mind, and I haven’t found a drop of You.” is the perfect way to sum it up.
No Him. No life. No water.
So it’s simultaneously a cry of doubt—he’s examining the inside of himself to see if that “saved,” sparkly, dramatic, all-important feeling is there to push aside his suspicion that none of this Christian stuff is real—and at the same time, the song is not just a cry of doubt. It’s a description of what’s wrong, how you get into the doubt, and how to get out of it.
Because:
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”
“As it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
There isn’t anything good in here! (Imagine me pointing inward.) There’s nothing in this 3-pound gray-and-white-matter thing between my ears, and nothing in my soul, the eternal part of me, that is good—the only good comes from what is not me. The only good, the only sanity, the only life, comes from Jesus. The Way, The Truth, The Life. The Living Water.
And the more I try to figure it out on my own, with no trust, no childlike, “I can’t do it, if You don’t do it it won’t get done,” with no, “I don’t get this, but I’m going to do it anyway purely because You told me to, and doing it is trusting You,” the drier and more maddening the inside of my own head becomes.
That’s why “the sand will slow me down and the water will drain.” The whole concept is that even the idea of God that he’s mulling over can’t save him. Because again, he’s not relying on God and trusting God. He’s just analyzing God, as an idea, and calling it “all that I need.” Well, that’s not reliance on God. That’s reliance on your own reasoning, to figure God out, as if your ability to understand God will bring you life.
No. It’s God who brings life, not because you thought it all through and jumped through His hoops exactly right, and got all your answers about how He works—but just because you threw yourself at His mercy and said, “I can’t figure any of it out, I can’t make myself believe more or have more faith. If You don’t give it to me, I don’t have it.”
He’s an addict with a pen who is constantly trying to figure himself and life and God out. And writing helps him to do that. But at the end of the day, writing out your feelings of doubt is no better than puzzling those feelings out in a never-ending loop in your own mind. It all leads to the same place: “I don’t know anything, except how helpless I am to get any of this right. If there’s a good, I can’t measure up to it.”
“My trial was filed as a crazy suicidal head case.”
But then—oh my word, if only everyone would not stop there. If only everyone would quit parking on the tragedy and misery of “suicidal headcase.” If only everyone would move on from “we’re broken.” The whole point of realizing that you’re broken is that that’s when you finally look outside yourself and ask for help.
“But You specialize in dying. You hear me screaming, ‘Father!’ And I’m lying here just crying, so wash me with Your water.”
See the change? It’s not “the water.” It’s not “what’s left in my hand.” It’s not abstract; it doesn’t come from himself, either. It’s God’s water. And he is calling God his Father, whether he has felt like it or not. He’s not even focusing on his half of the relationship—the ‘son’ part from the first verse. He’s focusing on God’s half of the relationship—‘Father.’ He wasn’t even focusing on God enough to address Him or introduce their relationship as “Father-and-Son” during the first verse—just isolated to his own part in everything.
But then at the end, it’s an abandonment of self. It’s just saying, “I don’t know what I don’t know, I can’t fix any of it, I can’t even think or see straight—all that’s left is to beg You to help me.”
And He will! And He does! That’s what’s so wonderful. That He’s there the whole time, waiting for Tyler to stop running around his own head and look at/for God. Instead of looking for his own understanding of God. If that means Tyler has to reach the point of exhaustion and just be facedown, crying for help, and that’s the only way he’ll stop, then that’s where God will help him. That’s the grace in darkness and pain.
It’s like Peter, seeing the waves, starting to sink, being in a moment of terror, and doubt, specifically doubt, and crying out anyway, “Lord, save me!” and then the Bible says, “immediately,” Jesus reached out and grabbed him and saved him. Immediately. No delay. No long pause while you squirm and fear. Immediately, as soon as you actually abandon yourself to ask for His help.
And speaking of waves, I forgot to mention it because I think it’s the most obvious part of the song and I’ve mentioned it elsewhere: he’s quoting James when he explains that he’s addicted to the wind, getting blown back and forth in an endless cycle of doubt. A “double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”
Anyway, I think this song sums up almost the whole band. Or at least, the problem. The problem is getting hung up on feelings of doubt and insecurity and worthlessness, but also getting hung up on self-focus and leaning on your own understanding. And the only solution is to find out how empty it all is, and how unable you are to escape it on your own. So in that way, acknowledging the darkness is good. Because it leads you to that conclusion: I need God. Not just to get me out of Hell. But to get me out of me.
I don’t know how to communicate how impactful this song has been on me, particularly. I admired and leaned on all of the twenty one pilots songs I heard before this (Clear, Save, the non-Addict Self-Titled songs.) But this was the one where I felt like I could’ve written it. Not like I could’ve picked the perfect words or the melody or anything so perfectly like Tyler Joseph did—but I mean, I knew this concept inside and out because I’ve experienced it. If experiencing this headspace we’re all that was needed to write this song, I could’ve written it. But this screaming guy from Ohio wrote it, and something about that, the ironic fact that this song, the experience of doubt and brokenness leading to self-abandon and faith, was suddenly not just in my head anymore, but outside of it, helped bolster my faith. It didn’t make the Bible more true. The Bible already said all of this perfectly. But this was like a signpost, pointing me back to the Bible every time I wandered.
You know, a sign in the middle of a wasteland is important for more than one reason. It points you in the right direction, but if you’ve been lost and alone for a long time, a sign reminds you that other humans once stood where you now stand, and got out. They don’t make the water. They just point you back to it. That’s what this song was for me.
That’s all I can do for tonight. Thank you for asking! What do you like about Oh Ms. Believer?
