Excerpts From a Stream of Consciousness

  Rooms full of people I’m acquainted with or that sorta know me - those are the ones that scare me the most. As someone who has battled with anxiety that affects several aspects of my life, the social anxiety is one that, while I’ve come measurably far in, I still face on a very regular basis and continues to cause that literal stomach knot to drop on in for those all-to-frequent visits.  - “Why Michael, you’re a crazy extrovert with enough crackhead energy to power a small house for a not insignificant amount of time! Aren’t rooms full of people where you come away from most alive?”, you might ask. Theoretically, yes, we extroverts are the ones that get together in groups, seduce the introverts into joining, and then bleed them of their energy so that we leave full and overflowing and the introverts leave drained and in desperate need of their “me time”. (Inspiration for whatever that is that I just wrote is credited to Lani Fahnestock, although after what I did to butcher her commen

               Several weeks ago, I was getting into Sunday morning Praise & Worship at church, when the band started playing a song I hadn’t heard before - Too Good to Not Believe by Bethel. Yeah, some of you probably have heard this song, but I’ll be honest with you - I don’t make a personal habit of listening to 10-minute-long, “let’s-repeat-the-bridge-1700-times” Praise and Worship music if given the choice. Not to completely besmirch that type of music, because I do actually enjoy playing/singing it myself; I just shorten my versions of it significantly. Anyways, it was the lyrics “I’ve seen cancer disappear, I’ve seen metal plates dissolve… ...I’ve seen real life resurrection, I’ve seen mental health restored, Don’t you tell me He can’t do it, don’t you tell me He can’t do it…” that popped out at me. - Now, I’ll also interject here with another observation from the past week that got me thinking even more. A few days ago, a social media post was passed around that, while not