My Life as a Human Porta Potty

In 2005 one of my wildest dreams came true. The punk band that my friends and I had started in high school had gotten added to the entire run of the Vans Warped Tour.

(If you’re not old enough to know what Warped Tour was, find someone old to ask about it. It was glorious!)

It didn’t even seem real that in a few short months, we would be spending the entire summer on the road with some of the coolest bands on the planet, like The Offspring, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Thrice, Relient K, Underoath, and so many more.

But it was real. And soon we were on the road for all 48 dates of the Warped Tour.

That summer holds countless memories for me, and much could be said about the highs and lows of this intense festival tour. But recently an incredibly random, and very strange, account from that summer came to mind, leading to one of the most impacting and transformative revelations of my adult life.

Before I share this memory, I do want to warn you that it’s pretty gross. Actually, that’s not true. It’s super gross. So if you don’t want your appetite ruined, stop reading.

You’ve been warned, so anything past this point is on you.

Myriad logistics flow in and out of a 48-date festival tour that is attended by an average of 15,000 per date. Many of these are mundane facets that wouldn’t likely cross most people’s minds.

One of these details is bathroom facilities.

At every single stop of the tour, we would wake up in the morning and some wonderful hard-working people would have already filled the festival grounds with a legion of glorious blue waste-station boxes… AKA porta potties.

And we learned a vitally important lesson very early into the tour: There’s a world of difference between a fresh morning porta potty and one that’s been baking in 40°C (104°F) heat for eight hours, abused by thousands of punk rockers.

I doubt I need to work to convince you of the disgusting state of these miniature saunas that have been used far beyond their capacity.

As a result, we worked diligently to develop a rhythm of utilizing these facilities early in the morning before the hordes had invaded them so as to avoid experiencing this version of purgatory.

But nobody is perfect, including me. And rhythms are easy to mess up. And suddenly one afternoon, in the heat of the day, it hit. But this wasn’t supposed to happen. It’s not the morning. It’s not the right time. I guess nature has a mind of its own and it was, in fact, time.

I desperately searched for a lavatory miracle. Perhaps there was one sacred porta potty that had been missed all day. Sadly, this was not the case.

Hopeless and defeated, I ultimately resigned to the next available heat box… and it was bad.

So bad that after 20 years, I have not been able to wipe even a speck of this memory from my mind, however badly I wish I could.

The heat. The filth. The overflow. This porta potty was way beyond capacity and it was absolutely disgusting.

At this point, you might be wondering why you’re reading this sickening story (I’m kind of wondering why are too). What’s the point?

Here it is:

Almost 20 years after that scarring incident, I was out for a run in the beautiful nature of Squamish, BC. In the midst of a severely challenging season of life, I had taken my wife’s sage advice to get some real help. I took off to spend 4 weeks at a healing center to focus on healing and working on many personal struggles that I had put off and ignored for far too long.

I tried to run almost every day during my time there. It was a beautiful space for me to meditate, breathe, practice mindfulness, and much more. And on one early November morning, while I was running through the epic moss-infested forest of Squamish, this disturbing memory of a porta potty that I wished had been long-forgotten randomly came to mind.

I chuckled and shook it off—why was I thinking about this now? But as I kept running, the image wouldn’t leave me. And suddenly, in one of the clearest moments of hearing God speak, I realized:

I, Ryan Guerra, am that porta potty.

That porta potty was the perfect depiction of much of what had become of my life.

Talk about a hard truth. Talk about the last thing I would ever want to be true. Talk about being stopped dead in my tracks by a heavy serving of cold, hard reality.

This was a heavy moment, but one of the most important ones in my life.

You see, for the first 4 decades of my life, I foolishly and immaturely spent most of my emotional energy fleeing from hard emotions. Things like sadness, frustration, doubt, fear, loneliness. I viewed these as an enemy that I wanted nothing to do with and I did everything I could to repress these feelings rather than understand them as part of who I am—who God made me to be.

For 40 years, I ran from sorrow, covering it with what I thought was happiness—but now I see it was just a shallow veneer. When pain and anguish tried to fit into my experience, I pushed it aside and told myself I was being brave by putting on a strong face.

And in a lot of ways, it seemed to work. I don’t think most people would consciously say “I’m so glad you repress your emotions”, but as a pastor, a leader, a man… it’s sometimes easy for people to celebrate you as “strong”, “stable”, or even “pious” when you do.

I developed a false sense of security in not allowing hard emotions in.

This was foolish and hazardous, not only to myself, but also to those around me.

I had spent half of my expected life-span repressing emotions and validating myself in doing so. I seriously misunderstood what Jesus meant when he taught that I should “Love the Lord [my] God with all [my] heart and with all [my] soul and with all [my] mind”. I had embraced a faulty theology that led me to hide and escape from the experiences of my “heart” being rather than invite God into those. I had functionally sidelined God in of the three most pivotal facets of my life. And as the old adage goes, “more is caught than is taught”, I fear that I have likely led others to do the same in varying degrees.

Stuffing emotions down might feel like it “works” for some amount of time. It might feel good in the moment, but it’s not healthy, and it’s certainly not sustainable. Like a porta potty that has far exceeded its capacity  by the afternoon of a punk festival, at some point along the way, all the emotional repressing that seemed to serve me, began to overflow.

This was not only a damaging and reckless way to manage and care for my own being and experience, the impact this has had on those around me has been immense. In Emotionally Healthy Spirituality (a book that is specifically written for a person like me), Peter Scazzero says, “Christian spirituality, without an integration of emotional health, can be deadly—to yourself, your relationship with God, and the people around you”.

There’s likely a tendency for people to hear about an experience like this, perhaps read a blog post, and want to be affirming and treat it as a smaller deal than it is. But it’s a huge deal. For 40 years, I missed one of the most important developmental aspects of the life that God has given me and it’s caused great pain. And I need to be honest about this if I ever hope to move forward. Repressing and downplaying this would be the most antithetical move I could make right now.

Like an overflowing porta potty, my repression and “emotional infancy” (Peter Scazzero) have poured my unresolved crap all over others and have seriously damaged myself, my relationship with God, and certainly my relationships with many others.

And that sucks.

Like, really sucks.

Man, I sure wish it didn’t take me 40 years to figure out something that should have been so basic. Something that my wife, and others, have tried to point out. I wish I would have listened better to some of these warnings.

But I didn’t.

And I know I have hurt many people. My family, my wife, friends, and others. And perhaps the hardest part of that is that it’s actually impossible for me to go back and change that. Those people will always have been hurt as a result of my emotional immaturity. The sorrow I feel about this is excruciating, and I only hope that in the few years I have left on this planet, I can bring reconciliation and repentance to as man of these spaces as possible.

This is a hard blog to know how to wrap up. Old Ryan would tend to tie a nice bow on this and give it a super positive spin, but I don’t want to simply do that because it’s easier. It’s okay for things to be hard, for things to be bleak, and for sadness to exist. That’s okay!

But, because this blog has already run on for far too long, I will conclude with this:

While I’m shattered that it took me 40 years to open my eyes, I am grateful that God opened them. I’m thankful that he’s beginning to remove the scales from my eyes. I’m glad it didn’t take 50 years, or 60, or 70. Thank goodness it happened in this lifetime.

I am humbled by the opportunity and massive responsibility that I now have to carve a better path and to live out a better belief system and understanding of who I am as God’s child.

God is so good… even when I’m not. Even when I fall seriously short. What a relief that he loves me enough to confront me with hard truths and to show me what’s really going on inside of me even when I’ve deceived myself.

And a small note to anyone who has read this far and is perhaps living that same life of avoidance, emotional repression, detachment, etc. Friend, don’t let your crap build up and spill out all over the people that you love. You care about them. This is a sure-fire way to hurt others and show them the opposite of that care. It’s not too late to begin rewiring those faulty belief systems. I am on this journey with a long, long, long road ahead of me, and I hope you’ll join me.