*tap tap tap* Is this thing still on? Anyone out there?
I am currently stuck in the Tampa International airport, the clock just turned 3am, and I have been up for nearly 21 hours, with another two hours or so until anything opens here, so now seems a good a time as any to get back into the habit of updating this site… if only to keep myself awake.
Not that I don’t miss putting my thoughts out into the void for you.
A lot has changed in the 139 days since I last posted—on September 1. Probably the biggest development is that I am finally, finally done with graduate school… which means that I finally, finally have a master’s degree! 139 days ago, I was just beginning the final semester of my library science degree.
All things considered, it went splendidly. Even though I was taking only one class, there were quite a few stressful moments and meltdowns, part of which had to do with the statistics and technical nature of the course content. But I got to the end in one piece.
And I graduated.
I actually received one of my program’s outstanding student awards this year, along with another good friend of mine, which was a great feeling, especially when I sometimes felt that I wasn’t as accomplished or as remarkable as some of my other classmates.
I was also nominated by one of my professors and selected by a university committee to be the graduate student commencement speaker for the December graduation ceremony. It was amazing and intense, and deeply humbling to address my peers with a charge for what I feel our world needs from graduate students and graduate education. I didn’t want to give some pat talk about following dreams or living up to full potential.
My talk centered around the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or the restoration of the world.
Three of the key values of my university that are woven throughout all the programs and courses are social justice, diversity, and integrity. Essentially, I encouraged my fellow graduates to view their chosen careers through the lens of those values and look for opportunities in seemingly everyday moments to help heal the brokenness of the world.
That was nearly a month ago now.
While it was certainly a good feeling to be done with school after almost three years, the months leading up to it were tinged with a growing sense of anxiety and worry.
Sure, I was worried about finding a full-time job and how the actual fuck I was going to eventually pay off the tens of thousands of dollars worth of loans I had to take out to pursue a degree that is a basic requirement for virtually all librarian jobs. I worry that the number of MLIS graduates is increasing but that the number of new jobs is not growing at the same pace.
On a more fundamental level, I was worried about losing the close sense of community that I have been a part of for three years. For the most part, my social circle tends to be built around the activities that I am involved with or the people with whom I live. When those activities end or I move house, those social ties tend to dry up for me.
It’s not that I am necessarily edged out or excluded. It’s that I don’t really know how to connect with people. The ironic thing is that human community is something I do want and am often desperate for, but the mechanisms for doing that are unknown to me.
I did not grow up around many people. With the exception of church, Sunday school, and AWANAS, until age ten or eleven, my world consisted largely of my parents and my sisters. Since my family homeschooled, and we lived in a rural area, we never learned to interact with our peers. We weren’t forced to figure out the rules of the playground or the nuances of the school hallway, navigate friendships or weather rivalries.
While not every childhood experience is the same, some of those fundamental lessons about human nature take place during those early middle school years.
For instance, I never learned properly how to play. Play is important for the development of self-regulation, creative problem solving, along with the cerebral cortex. In our family though, play often took the form of psychological warfare. There were moments of fun, but through this, my sisters and I first learned to view human relationships through the paradigm of a threat. Our parents unwittingly taught us that we weren’t worthy of love and acceptance and that these commodities were conditional.
I find myself with a graduate degree and nearly 35, but that I have no idea who I really am apart from external measures of my self-worth—what other people tell me about myself. But I will always have those early voices and memories of my childhood in the catacombs of my subconscious.
My mom turning to me when I was about 15 or 16 during a verbal clash to actually say: “If people knew who you really are, they wouldn’t like you.”
I learned to fear other people, to keep them at a safe and comfortable distance, popping in and out of their reality when needed. While I noted that people liked me and wanted to be around me, I was suspicious and wary, like a wounded animal.
What were their true motives? When would they figure out I was hollow? When would they discover I was Frankenstein’s monster?
The intersection of all this lies in the fear that I will never have a family and a partner of my own—someone who accepts me in spite of my craziness and insecurity, and who is willing to fight the demons with me, but not treat me as the enemy.
I fear I’ll unconsciously push everyone good for me away—that my parents were too good of teachers in the art of toxic, fearful relationships.
a hard and a rock place 
What an amazing past few months! It is good for me to hear of your connectedness and your scholastic community. What an honor and what a privilege to be the commencement speaker as well. I’m genuinely thrilled for you!
I can relate to your experiences of feeling fearful of others, keeping them at a safe distance and mostly being unaware of myself outside of external achievements. While your experience has been exacerbated by crazy-making parenting/ fundagelical relgion, I do think think growing up in a relentlessly heteronormative world have made these common phenomena for most of us gay males. I had pretty good parenting and was not raised in fundagelicalism, and I’ve been there with you.
I think a key to healing (besides lots of therapy!) is practiced risk-taking. I’m taking adult swimming lessons now to correct inefficient habits I learned decades ago when I started swimming. We do short drills of broken-down segments of the stroke, the breath, the kick, etc, focusing on small points and then trying to put it all together into connected segments and eventually the whole. I often make mistakes in the new skills and body positions I’m learning because I feel like I’m sinking or desperately need some air. If my land-mammal brain feels threatened with a lack of oxygen, everything else goes out the window! So I splash, flail and get my head way too far out of the water and its a mess. That’s why we practice in the shallow end of the pool and why I have someone to instruct me. As my coach says, “What’s the risk? If you feel short of air, just stop and stand up”. I’m being taught to relax in the water, be aware of myself in the aqueous environment, and very deliberately and intentionally place my arms and my body in correct position to swim analogously to the movements of fish and dolphins. So I practice and I practice, and when I start making mistakes in my technique, or insecure in the water I simply roll over catch my breath, consider my position and resume when I’m ready. Little by little, I am learning to trust that my body can adapt this new way of being in the water and thrive, despite the fact that it initially has felt so dangerous, so foreign and so counterintuitive to my land-mammal brain.
As someone who has known you for close to half your life at this point, I’m going to give you some unsolicited advice for you to ignore until you’re ready to make some scary changes or finally hit rock bottom.
Stop replacing intimacy with achievement. Every time you start getting close to people, and I’m including friends in this category, you run to a new project to throw yourself into as if to reassure yourself that you can produce something at a high level and therefore have intrinsic worth. Rather than let people see all of you and affirm your value, you push them away and make newer, shallower relationships to feed your need for human contact while working harder to project an image of excellence.
I’ve listened to you here and elsewhere bemoan your singleness since the day you came out. But you’ve never had a single functional platonic relationship in your life, so exactly how do you imagine things would change if you found a romantic partner? And with this level of dysfunction in your personal life, what kind of person would that attract? I’m probably beating a dead horse at this point to tell you to get your shit together in regards to basic intimacy with friends before you try to add sex and commitment on top of it, but that’s really what needs to happen.
Despite your own self-loathing and all the childhood traumas you have, despite all your quirks and flakiness and mercurial moods, you have collected dozens upon dozens of loyal friends who love you as you are and are just waiting for you to allow them back into your life. You don’t have to start from scratch. You can pick up the phone and call any number of people who already know you. Which I realize is far more terrifying, but it would be good for you.
I’m happy for your achievements. There’s never been any doubt in my mind that you’re a brilliant, talented individual that can accomplish anything you put your mind to. But you’ll never truly enjoy your successes until they cease to be the measure of your self worth.
You had a poor foundation to develop self-love. But it’s time to re-parent yourself. No one else is going to do it for you. Let your childhood die and be a man who takes responsibility for your own choices, relationships and happiness. You deserve it.
You’re not wrong about any of that, especially the lack of functional platonic relationships. It is a bit like trying to run before one can even walk. My last therapist talked some about re-parenting myself, but what that means or what it’s supposed to look like is a mystery. Part of the throwing myself into projects has less to do with the deriving personal value from it as it is that I am genuinely uncomfortable around people most of the time. A project provides a focus and distraction for the anxiety. Most of the time I either have nothing to say, have nothing to say that’s related to the topic at hand, or it takes working ideas that are jumbled in my head out on paper before I can clearly articulate myself. It’s that feeling of being and stage and not knowing your lines, which is why it’s much easier to express myself through writing than talking to people. Some of that might be the depression fog, but who I am beneath that “image of excellence” is a deeply shy, uncomfortable, uncertain person who feels lost in social situations.
To be honest, part of the reason I’ve pulled away from so many friends is that virtually everyone I knew at Northwestern and Grace is now married, with children, and frankly, a lot of them have unwittingly made me feel like shit in the past. It’s natural that they would talk about their relationships, kids, house projects, family travel, etc, but I can’t contribute to those conversations. One reason I’ve tried to work on so many projects is so that I would have something to actually talk about, but inevitably I’ll get shunted by the “adults.” Maybe that’s the anxiety interpreting was going on, but I feel out of place with married/coupled people, and it’s unfair to ask them to avoid talking about a significant part of their life because it makes me ill at ease.
But you are definitely right about needing to make “scary” changes this year, especially now that I no longer have grad school as a distraction. Nothing is going to change until some of these patterns and cycles are broken.