Gravedigger: Poverty, Disability, Vanity, and a Ministry Billboard Wardrobe

I wore wide legged pants for years to hide my legs and most of my clothes in college were ministry conference swag shirts. The college student living off of nothing is a bit of a trope, but I hardly bought any tops for four years. I think I bought a Rolling Stones T-shirt and that's about it. I had so many free shirts with forgettable ministry brands, I can't tell you what most of the brands were. I was volunteering in youth ministry all throughout college to prepare for professional ministry after college so it fit the bill. Poverty was a bigger driver of my t-shirt wardrobe than anything else at the time. 

When I look back at photos and videos from that time, I notice certain things that were just kind of in the background. The countless free T-shirts with a ministry brand on them, the free computer I used for most of college that had been decommissioned and refurbished, the fact that most of my monthly budget went to food, and that most of my college adventures were financially supported by other means. 

I've always been a rockstar in my own mind but I also knew I was doing the best with what I had. Guitars were my primary possessions in college. When I transferred out for my senior year of college, I had the dorm furniture and nothing else. Someone actually gave me a lamp and a TV because I didn't have things to furnish the dorm apartment. A couple of favorite music videos of mine from that era are lit only by the light from outside. 

My song “Outside Your Story” has me completely in the shadows and all the lighting is from the window behind me. I like how it works with the lyrics but it happened that way because I didn't have enough lighting in my apartment. The same goes for my cover of Dave Matthews’ “Gravedigger,” which I did at night and the streetlight behind the building adds to the vibe of the song. The lighting that stemmed from my poverty is one of the things I enjoy about both of those recordings. 

These are hard habits to break, even when I can buy myself clothes. It was never a priority for me because I knew I didn't have the money to regularly update my wardrobe. I prioritized going to Baker Street, A Pizza House, and the Irishman with my peers so I could eat, drink, and socialize. Even though I live a different life today, I still have a hard time justifying the cost of clothing. 

As I've written about before, selecting clothes that comfortably fit my body is difficult because my gait doesn't favor standard cuts for pants. It's part of the reason that I wore loose fitting pants for so many years. Few people outside of close friends and relatives have seen me in a pair of shorts since before high school. 

I knew I didn't have the coolest clothes or even name brand baggy jeans. I knew half my wardrobe was swag and not cool. In poverty and vanity, I lived like neither my Cerebral Palsy and poverty existed. “Gravedigger, when you dig my grave, could you make it shallow, so that I can feel the rain” (Dave Matthews, Gravedigger)? The way I sang that line so many years ago reminded me just how familiar I'd already become with the weight of death. 

By the time I'd covered Gravedigger in college, I had already lost at least five relatives, including my mom the year prior. While I might have been a bit vain about my disability and my poverty at the time, I was in full gear diving into the waters of the deep. I was wrestling with God and grief, and the implications of the two. I was living the duality of youth ministry and a then unrevealed lifetime of complex trauma. However, baggy jeans were one of my biggest masks at the time. I did plenty of fawning in the way of putting the interests of others ahead of my own. I'm not sure I could have written something like this then. 

There was baggage with acknowledging my poverty that was directly tied to my disability and the breakdown of my parents that I was incredibly defensive about for a very long time. Distance from my origins and a lot of healing work is what has allowed me to feel comfortable reflecting and trying to articulate how I function as a disabled trauma survivor in the everyday world.