I’ve been thinking a lot about the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Night Terrors.” In it, the Enterprise travels to a binary star system – where two stars orbit around a common center. They find another ship adrift; its crew deceased, save one who is catatonic. The ship’s systems all appear normal, except it won’t function. The Enterprise discovers they, too, cannot leave the binary star system and what happened to the crew of the other ship appears to be happening to them. They are slowly going insane due to a lack of REM sleep.
Meanwhile, the ship’s counselor, Deanna Troi, a Betazoid, can sleep, but she only has a recurring nightmare. A voice calls to her again and again, saying,
“Two eyes in the night. One moon circles them.”
I started writing almost a year ago hoping to record how God would transform my relationship with money. The end of the summer brought with it a reminder that I have a food problem, too. I weigh more now than I did last year. Not a lot, but enough. My clothes fit more snugly. My energy is lower. I feel out of control. It is the natural consequence of saying yes to more too many times, and regularly ignoring my body’s messages of enough. It’s not helped by a busy schedule that often results in mindless eating and poor choices. I mean, who can say no to free food or food someone else prepared?
I have dreams of creating a Weight Watchers-like program for money. Food and money feel like addictions from which I can’t abstain. My world is saturated with messages about food and money, immersed in consumerism, capitalism, materialism, marketing – a culture of indulgence, a celebration of excess, a plethora of choices replete with shame for having fallen for any of it. My husband navigates these realities with ease. I don’t. I indulge until I over-indulge. I binge and then purge. I am permissive and then punitive. I have to work to keep these necessities working for good and uncorrupted. These are my two stars in a binary system. The problem isn’t food or money. It’s something else that keeps me trapped, orbiting these two stars.
In the “Night Terrors” episode, the crew discovers they are adrift, like the other ship, because they are caught in a Tyken’s Rift – a massive rupture in space into which energy is absorbed. Note: there’s no such thing as a Tyken’s Rift, but naming an invisible brokenness in the fabric of reality into which energy goes but no progress toward freedom feels…really familiar. They determine that a massive energy release could overload and dislocate the anomaly, but the Enterprise didn’t have enough materials or energy to create such an explosion. Y’all, same.
The Enterprise and Counselor Troi happily find their solution in time to avoid everyone going insane. I still can’t even name my Tyken’s Rift. It’s easy to blame culture or media or genetics. It’s tempting to feel shame because I never seem to “learn my lesson” and maintain control. This is my work. And I still trust God will transform me.