293. circumspect

You didn’t see my valentine
I sent it via pantomime
While you were watchin’ someone else
I stared at you and cut myself
It’s all I’ll do ‘cause I’m not free
A fugitive too dull too flee
I’m amorous but out of reach
A still-life drawing of a peach

– Fiona Apple, “Valentine” from The Idler Wheel (2012)

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One of the depressing aspects of being single in your mid-30s is that virtually everyone else you know is probably in some manner of relationship by this point. You’ve become the token single friend.

And it sometimes goes like this:

You had a close group of friends. They’d make plans for Tuesday nights; go on outings to apple orchards or see a film; get together to play games or make dinner a few nights a month. You feel a sense of kinship and belonging here.

Then, gradually, everyone starts to pair off. Maybe a few people in the group start dating or find partners outside the group who then Yoko their way into the fold.

You progressively find yourself more on the outside. Activities become couples-oriented since you’re pretty much the only person who isn’t dating or married now.

They ask if you’re seeing or interested in anyone and you watch them exchange worried glances when you say “no.”

Eventually they start doing couples-only dinners and get-togethers.

You find out about plans after the fact because so-and-so forgot to include you on the group email/chat (but they “totally didn’t mean to leave you out”), but you feel increasingly out of place and othered when they do invite you to do things.

Wedding follows wedding like supernovas going off in a star cluster. You get invited to some, always RSVP’ing for one; are part of the wedding party in some and a musician in others. At receptions, you get seated with random family members or the other misfits who don’t know anyone else there.

People start having children and soon their lives have room for only other parents and families. Talk involves school, vacation plans, sickness, and other familial things. You “wouldn’t understand until you have children of your own.”

When you do get together with someone from the old group, you both feel like such different people, with little in common. It’s like being on an awkward first date.

You didn’t really know how to say anything to prevent it, but somewhere in there you fell through the cracks.

Of course, none of this was intentional. People change as life circumstances change.

Their personal life choices are shaped by the considerations of another’s. Yours are not.

Their sleep is interrupted by their bed partner snoring or a child crying. Yours is not.

They have to coordinate multiple family schedules over the holidays. You have just one family to deal with, yet even those feel lonelier as your siblings and cousins get married.

Le temps passe.

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This is the world in which I increasingly find myself. I had such a group of friends after college that gradually dissolved as people started dating and getting married. Our ties, too, dissolved.

In some ways, I feel like a human talisman who brings romantic fortune into the lives of people I’m close to. Every flatmate I’ve had started dating their current partner shortly after we moved in together.

A new friend group forms and the cycle repeats.

This matchmaking power seems to work for everyone else but me.

However, I don’t know if it’s they who change towards me or me towards them. Maybe a bit of both, with my anxiety backseat driving.

And one truth I’d rather not admit to is my inferiority complex around those who are in relationships. I feel I’m somehow not as mature or put together in their presence, like I should have achieved the same things and haven’t, and am therefore not as worthy.

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One way this manifests is with guys I’ve long held a torch for, despite all evidence to the contrary that anything would ever come of it.

My response when they inevitably start dating someone is to withdraw and tacitly cut them out of my life, or limit contact to occasionally commenting on or liking a social media post that isn’t of him and the new girlfriend (and hiding those that do).

This just happened with a guy who I’ve known for a couple years—and on whom I’ve been crushing for some time. I’ve never said anything since he’s insisted that he’s 100% heterosexual, and didn’t want to jeopardize the friendship by having that conversation, make everything totally awkward, and in all likelihood lose the friendship.

The crazy thing is I always know this will be the outcome; disappointment is inevitable. It happens over and over because it seems I have zero control over who I’m attracted to. It’s always hetero or bi guys who aren’t interested in me that way.

This is unfortunately how demisexuality works. My brain and conscious mind are in separate departments and never consult each other. So it’s a perennial hazard that, despite ourselves, we tend to fall for friends or people with whom we’re close.

He posted the relationship status last week so I’m faced again with the choice of whether to protect myself and preemptively distance myself before he, too, drifts away; or break the cycle and find an emotionally healthy, mature way to proceed?

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In light of all this, I have been asking myself two questions:

1. Why do I care so much about this?
2. What exactly do I want/expect from a relationship?

The second question is probably the more important one, but the answer to the first is, again, the intense desire and need for the permanent, secure home I lacked as a child. The emotionally violent reactions I experience to rejection or disappointment is the raw, unregulated response of that child to pain and the fear of abandonment.

We learn how to deal with stress and disappointment from watching how our parents react. As the first born, my mom especially treated scrapes and bruises as if I’d been shot. So instead of being shown how to calmly assess a situation and its actual seriousness, I learned to go into fight mode to protect myself.

In other words, I developed anxious-resistant attachment.

Thus, the need for learning to reparent myself to become more secure.

290. circadian

“I don’t think I’m very good at gay… I used to sit there and watch [the Mardi Gras parade] and go, “Where are the quiet gays supposed to go?” I still do.

“… the pressure on my people to express our identity and pride through the metaphor of party is very intense. An afternoon of that … [and] I need to express my identity through the metaphor of a nap.”

– Hannah Gadsby. “Nanette.”

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What does it actually mean to be gay—aside from being attracted to other men (which I tend to think of as the defining criteria)?

It’s a question I’ve been asking myself the last couple of years, in part because my brain is incapable of not overanalyzing everything.

Thankfully, society seems to have firmly settled opinions on this for me.

According to mass media, in no particular order, gay men:

1. Are extroverted, gregarious, youthful, and always happy, and ironically witty. They especially love clubs. And dancing. (So much dancing.)
2. Go to the gym, are underwear-model fit, and are comfortable stripping to their Aussiebum briefs/jock strap in public. Especially at the club or pride.
3. Speak in a higher pitch, often reminiscent of speech patterns and inflections of teenage girls.
4. Love pop music, especially dance music (e.g., Madonna, Carly Rae Jepsen, Cher, Gaga, etc).
5. Have location-based dating (i.e., hookup) apps (e.g., Grindr, Hornet, Scruff, Jack’d, Recon, etc).
6. Are rapaciously flirtatious, unabashedly promiscuous, attracted to all [physically fit] men, and sort neatly into the categories of top and bottom.
7. Walk quickly and with excellent posture, are very tidy and smartly dressed, and are often more than a little eccentric (which is why they can’t sit properly in chairs).
8. Can plan your wedding, organize a brunch, and redecorate your apartment in a single afternoon.
9. Belong to at least one kink community. (Leather is a given since every gay man owns a harness, armbands, and tight black t-shirts.)
10. Primarily have open—or monogamish—relationships (because #6).

Of course, these are stereotypes.

As such, they do not accurately reflect individuals or an entire population.

That said, as with most stereotypes, they exist partly because there are gay men for whom many of these are true. (Also: gays make great supporting characters.) But many of them do have a basis in the history of gay communities, especially leather and bars.

They also present a wee brain teaser to those of us who are trying to figure out where we fit in all this, and who often wonder “where the quiet gays are supposed to go”.

For me, I’m largely incapable of flirting, partly because I’ve no patience for the subtle rituals men (especially gay men) perform when they’re interested in someone.

Mostly because my style is so distinctly German.

Ditto patience for clothing or grooming habits that take more than two minutes.

Mostly, I just don’t care.

Meaning that it’s difficult to find where—and with whom—I might fit.

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This past weekend, as recounted in the last post, I was surprised to find myself both attracted to and flirting with a guy at the gaming mini-con. Granted, we were both pretty inebriated due to a miscalculation of 1) the amount of food I’d had that evening and 2) the strength of an alcoholic beverage a friend of mine had made.

Also, the guy in question was married and avowedly monogamous, even as he was coming to terms with the possibility of being bisexual.

There were a number of reasons why I was surprised at suddenly being attracted to this person and experiencing over the next day or so what can be described as a crush. He wasn’t my usual “type” and was also, for all intents and purposes, unavailable.

In hindsight, that was perhaps what made acknowledging that attraction so easy—the low risk it ultimately presented.

Again, it wasn’t sexual; it was probably more aesthetic or emotional, and even a little romantic. Our deep conversation allowed for a space of vulnerability to open up, where it was safe to acknowledge that I was attracted to him. It’s a bit hazy who first admitted it, but it’s the first time I’d done that in a very long while.

It was kind of nice.

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There are moments when I miss sex, of being intimate with a guy. These are moments when I question if I’m truly on the asexual spectrum, but on further reflection, sex has always been secondary to connection, like a palpable extension of the emotional bond that exists between us. Of course, that’s only happened a handful of times, but it was always intense.

Those times also amounted to just a moment in the woods.

That’s part of what frightens me so much about attraction based on past experiences: their one-sidedness. What puzzles me about so many gay men is their casual attitudes towards sex, as if it were just another fun activity—one guy’s much like any other. To be fair, this is probably men in general, though exceptions (as usual) abound.

But, at least outwardly, there seems to be little ruminating or emotional fallout.

I get so caught up in what everything means, whether or not we mean something to each other now, the nature of the new context (if one exists), and if I’m ever going to even find someone with whom I’m compatible.

It’s all a bit of a mood and fun killer.

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A healthier, less tortured way of approaching last week’s flirtation may be as practice: just a simple step towards easing back into dating. Because if a partner and emotional connection is what I want, that won’t happen if I just complain about being lonely.

Learning to hear and acknowledge my inner voice’s worries and fears of disappointment would certainly help allay anxieties.

Approaching it in an experimental manner might also be healthier: setting aside biases, setting expectations low, and simply exploring what’s there rather than worrying about what might happen—not to mention trying to make something happen.

Plus, being less resistant to experiencing attraction sounds less tense. Simply noticing when it’s happening without judging it.

(It also makes me ponder whether I really need a boyfriend or if a small group of guys with whom I had an intensely close bond would be enough.)

There’s also knowledge of what didn’t work the first time around: that I was “trying” to be gay, following models set by others for how gay men were supposed to behave rather than following my intuition.

I can find my own way of “being gay.”

286. oppugn

Holy ****, kids, how did it already get to be September 1?

Recently, I have been getting a number of singles ads geared towards… mature adults, which is a special feeling. I’m not sure whether this is due to fact that my internet search history reads like a Stephen Ambrose text, or the fact that I am in my mid-30s.

Do all librarians experience this type of thing? Is Google trying to tell me I ought to be dating older guys?

… on the subject of dating older guys…

Yesterday I learned that one of my ex-boyfriends is now dating a guy I went on a date with several years ago, which is a weird feeling. It’s weird because virtually everyone I used to date is now with a long-term partner of some sort, and I’m the only single denominator left.

As of today, September 1:

• I came out 9 years and 8 days ago.
• My longest serious relationship to date is roughly 8 months and 20 days.
• I have now been single for 4 years, 5 months, and 8 days.
• It has been 3 years, 2 months, and 17 days since I last went on a formal date.
• The last time I had sex was 1 year, 10 months, and 16 days ago.

There’s a lot of emotional baggage wrapped up in those abstract dates. They’re like mini tombstones, with start and end dates neatly defined for each instance.

Possibly the most sobering is that, as of next year, I will have been out as gay for ten years.

That’s a huge fucking milestone.

I’ll also be turning 35 years old.

It means something to be months away from having a master’s degree, having finished my undergraduate degree roughly thirteen years ago, yet having not held a significant job, not having formally entered a career, or not having had a significant romantic relationship that lasted longer than nine months.

I have my theories as to why I still place so much stock in the institution of the traditional, committed, long-term dyad relationship. Perhaps it’s just the longing for a family unit of my own, something I have never really known or felt safe around.

Yet most of my attempts at finding a partner have either been abortive or disastrous. My relationship with Jay lasted a mere eight months and 20 days. Since then I haven’t met anyone who I was remotely interested in who was even remotely interested in me.

(Alas, note the careful wording in the last sentence.)

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A few weeks ago, I went to see one of my favorite musicals, Sondheim’s Pulitzer award-winning Sunday in the Park with George.

There are a several reasons why it’s my favorite.

As Joss Whedon once observed, the first half is about the struggle of living with the weight of genius; the second is about living in the shadow of it. Through most of my life, I have lived in fear of the shadow of expectation, whether of greatness or genius I’m not sure.

There’s another reason, though.

The Georges of both acts struggle to connect with people around them, and that is something I have never been fully able to do thus far. To an extent, I have been able to connect with people through my writing, to affect them and effect some small changes.

“Connect, George, connect!”

While I am good at a number of things, I have always felt acutely separated from those around me. While other children began learning how to negotiate social relationships in kindergarten and preschool, my formative years were spent at home, largely alone.

Because of the repressive, restrictive religious nature of my upbringing, I learned to censor myself, what not to say, who not to be. To protect myself from judgment and censure, my formative years were spent perfecting the art of keeping people away.

While other children had to learn to externalize their thoughts and organize them for an audience, my formative years were spent in my head, with my own thoughts.

In my silences, it’s not that I don’t have anything to say. It’s that I don’t know how to contextualize for others the long, ongoing conversation I’ve been having with myself for those on the outside. I don’t know if this is a skill one can learn at my age.

When I write about the improbability of finding a romantic partner “at my age,” what I mean is that I am terrified it will never happen—that in spite of my desire to connect and to belong, I lack the requisite social and emotional skills to sustain a relationship.

When I worry about seeing an increasing number of grey hairs in my beard, I think of how long I’ve been working at all this, and being nearly 35 and finishing grad school, and still feeling hopelessly behind.

When I think about dating older guys, I worry about being 35 and how much less time I’m going to have with them before they inevitably die, or before I die prematurely due to stress or the effects of my lifestyle of drinking and, frankly, lack of nutrition.

I think about how I never got to experience the insouciance of dating as a young gay man, and the joys and sorrows that go along with that.

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I’ve also been asking myself recently  what I really need in a relationship. Do I need monogamy, or will emotional fidelity be sufficient? In the land of gay men, where kink and open relationships are widely the norm, can I afford to be picky? If he’s into leather, am I okay with being the vanilla partner?

Frankly, forming one stable intimate relationship sounds exhausting by itself. I can’t fathom the emotional energy required to establish a constellation of trusted relationships to meet my needs.

These are still uncharted waters, and we’re writing the rules for same-sex relationships as we go along.

260. overslaugh

Two days ago, this past Saturday, marked the two-year anniversary of the last time I went on an actual, non-hookup date with a guy.

Or, as it’s known on my Google calendar: “Last Fuckable Day” (à la the Amy Schumer short from last year). Because June 25, 2014 felt like the universe telling me that I am undateable.

“Why would you observe such a date?” you might ask. “I mean, what the actual hell is wrong with you?”

Well, for one thing, it’s so that I can answer myself when asking: “So how long has it been since I went on a date?”

For another, I’m an archivist at heart so preserving history is something of my hobby and expertise. At first I wasn’t 100% sure of the timeline, but thanks to stalkerish Google location history I was able to narrow down the date we first met. Weather Underground confirmed when our second date was because there was a thunderstorm that evening, and there are also SMS messages from that date saved in my email.

I don’t remember exactly when Matt the bisexual guy and I started messaging on OkCupid. It was about a week or so before we met, and we seemed to have a good connection so we decided to set a date to actually meet in person, at the Seward Pizza Lucé in Minneapolis on June 11th, 2014. It was particularly rainy that week, and I recall driving through a storm and it being particularly nerve wracking getting over there because the wipers on my car had stopped working and were frozen at about a 45 degree angle on my windshield.

The date itself went well. I don’t remember many details from the conversation, other than that he had moved to Minneapolis from New York to work on his PhD, and that he had most recently been dating a guy for several years who’d broken up with him a few months prior.

Big red flag, I know.

We ended up going for a walk across the Lake Street-Marshall Bridge after dinner, and had a really good time discussing wildlife and ecosystems (that was part of his field of study), and more about our backgrounds. It had been a little over a year since I’d broken up with Jay, my last boyfriend, who apparently met his current partner about three months after we split up. He certainly wasted no time, eh.

The evening came to an end with another torrential downpour that began just as we got back to his car. We kissed briefly as we said goodbye, and after over a year of being single I was starting to feel cautiously hopeful. We seemed to have good chemistry, and he was a really nice and intelligent guy.

The next day we decided to meet again, this time at his place that following Saturday on June 14, 2014.

Yes, I know. I know. Terrible decisions. Hindsight and all that.

It was another rainy evening, and though I was white knuckling it the whole way there as I drove through the storm, I managed to arrive safely.

I remember us talking for a long time that evening. We talked about music, about science, about his copy of Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale on his bookshelf. Eventually, we started making out and… well, you can imagine the rest if you like. We actually didn’t have sex until the next morning, but the whole evening felt good. Hopeful. Cautiously hopeful.

As I left that morning, I got a random text from Jay saying that he’d passed me with his boyfriend on the way to pick up his boyfriend’s kids from somewhere. (Jay had talked about kids on more than one occasion, which had been one of many sources of tension between us, because I was not crazy about the idea of parenting. And, of course, with the guy after me he got exactly what he wanted.) I don’t remember what was said, but I recall writing back something about leaving “my boyfriend’s” place, not wanting to seem pathetic and single after over a year. He wrote back something about being happy for me, and that was it.

Haven’t heard from him since.

Matt and I exchanged a few more texts that day, but after that, I didn’t hear from him again for a while, which I didn’t take as a good sign. I didn’t want to seem desperate or clingy though, and waited until Thursday to try him again.

He didn’t respond until Wednesday.

Turns out he’d been avoiding having a conversation with me. A few days after we slept together he’d been contacted by his ex again, and he confessed that he was still in love with the guy but was feeling conflicted because he’d actually liked me.

But he was going to pursue getting back together with his ex.

And that was that. I didn’t hear from him again either. No idea if they got back together.

That triggered the beginning of a major depressive episode that lasted over six months. I felt utterly defeated by being turned down by yet another guy I’d been interested in. This had happened so many times before, but I’d gotten my hopes up only to see them dashed again, and it was hard to ignore signals the universe seemed to be proverbially sending me—that no guy who I was interested in was ever going to be interested in me.

It happened with Chris. With Seth. With Matt. With several others whose names and faces I can’t recall anymore, “unremembered lads that not again will turn to me at midnight with a cry” (Edna St. Vincent Millay).

Of course I’m writing this with the recent image of Miss Havisham in mind, knowing that I need to resist allowing regret and heartbreak to poison me.

My therapist asked me last week to envision what it might feel like to actually be loved and accepted by a partner, without fear or reservation.

I can’t even fathom what that would look like.

258. somaticize

It is June 7. How did it get to be June 7 already? This year is moving way too fast, although not fast enough for the American electoral season to be done. That nonsense seems to be inhabiting its own putrid timestream.

School is finally over. It wrapped up just eighteen days ago, though as a group of us agreed last night, it’s seemed longer than that.

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to figure out why this semester felt so much more difficult than others. Objectively, this was actually one of the easier terms I’ve had as a master’s student. A final paper for one class was literally a 4-5 page narrative reflection on an internship, which felt almost obscenely light. In the other class, we spent the first month trying to overcome technical glitches to get the platform we were using for a digital library to work.

In retrospect, this was a difficult semester due to several things:

1. It really didn’t feel like that much was actually demanded of me (as per the 5-page final paper in the one class).
2. There was a marked lack of structure and clear expectations in both classes.

Now, to the latter, I get that this whole graduate experience is, in some ways, the antithesis of the undergraduate degree. There’s a lot less hand-holding, and especially in a career-focused program like mine, one is expected to start thinking and behaving like a professional. I like this about graduate study because it’s less about the grade and more about proving that you know what you’re doing.

Of course, professors still need to lay out clear expectations for their students and communicate things like due dates, and changes to due dates and course content. Still, a major aspect of graduate-level study is directing one’s self and becoming more of a stakeholder in your education and career. In essence, graduate study asks students to set their own schedules based on what is demanded of them.

As Millennials would say, this is “adulting.”

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The day after classes ended, I submitted my final paper and hopped in a car with a friend of mine to embark on a five-day camping trip. This is something I’d been looking forward to for weeks leading up to it, and to finally get away from the city and my job and school, and just be in nature, was lovely.

I did encounter one brief meltdown on the trip, which was followed by a rare breakthrough moment—rare in that it occurred in close proximity to the emotional event, which is a new thing for me.

It happened over the course of one hike that involved several river and stream crossings. I’ll say in advance that I experience serious anxiety over cleanliness and hygiene issues, so just going into the hike knowing about the crossings was hackles-raising enough. My friend went first each time as he wasn’t as bothered by either getting wet or muddy, but even he was a bit surprised by some of the stream crossings.

In brief, after getting stuck briefly during the third stream crossing, I was in the grips of a full-blown anxiety attack. It might not have been so bad had the water been clear, but it was muddy and somewhat deep, and I got stuck in the muck several times.

Here are a few symptoms from AnxietyCentre.com that I experienced that afternoon:

• A feeling of overwhelming fear
• Feeling you are in grave danger
• An urgency to escape
• Shortness of breath
• Chest pressure or pain
• Inability to calm yourself down
• Nausea
• Pounding, racing heart

For the next forty minutes or so, as we continued the hike, I just focused on breathing and bringing my heart rate down. Eventually, the calmer parts of my mind were able to start deconstructing that reaction, and the realization I had is that that anxiety attack was a concentrated version of how I feel all the time.

The view on one part of the hike.

Basically, I’m afraid all the time. Not consciously, in a phobic sense. More an undercurrent of constant anxiety and fear. I’m afraid I’m a complete failure, that I’m never going to amount to anything, that I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life, that I’m a mediocrity, that I’m fundamentally worthless and unlovable…

The usual.

What I was gradually able to unpack was that this feeling stems from early childhood, where my fundamentalist Christian parents over-reacted to what otherwise normal child behavior as if it were signs of moral depravity (which, in hindsight, is likely exactly what they thought).

A few months after I became an atheist, I was having lunch with my family, including my nephew who was less than a year old and kept dropping food from his high chair onto the floor. My sister (his mother), exasperated, commented: “There’s his sin nature showing.”

That was essentially how my sisters and I were raised.

Along with this was a reluctance on my parents’ part to allow me to fail. If I struggled or faltered in a pursuit, they generally stepped in to help. Since we were homeschooled, I never developed the coping mechanisms most children do for handling failure or dealing with normal challenges. So I panic, have an anxiety attack, feel like the world’s ending.

Being cognizant of this, however, I also feel stupid for feeling so out of control, for being so irrational. I also felt like a bad friend for ruining an otherwise pleasant hike.

I also realized that this fear and anxiety was holding me back—from my career, from dating, from achieving goals, etc.

About an hour into the hike, during all of this emotional unpacking, I had a moment of clarity. An inner voice said: You have a choice. You don’t have to let this fear control you.

And for a moment, I had a vision of myself crossing the river and actually enjoying the experience without freaking out.

That’s the direction I need to head.

254. probity

A few weeks ago I decided to check out the Netflix show everyone in my social media circles had been talking about.

Jessica Jones.

The Wikipedia article on the show offers a good summary: “Following a tragic end to her brief superhero career, Jessica Jones tries to rebuild her life as a private investigator, dealing with cases involving people with remarkable abilities in New York City.”

It’s an adaptation of a Marvel comic character of the same name. Based on the reviews of social media posts, blogs, and reviews, I thought it worth checking out, especially with its themes of dealing with trauma, recovering personal agency, and rebuilding one’s identity.

Without giving away any spoilers, the show certainly lived up to the hype. The main villain, Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, was alarmingly creepy and sympathetic at the same time. In a Guardian interview, Tennant described Kilgrave as having the power to compel people “to do whatever he says.”

Of his character, he added, “How can you tell if people are doing things because they want to or because you’re asking them to? How can you have any sense of what the world is or how the world should be if your world is so particularly unique?”

The show affected me in ways that were unexpected, particularly in the relationship between Jessica Jones and Kilgrave. At one point early on, Jessica rescues a young college girl who’s been under Kilgrave’s thrall. Once they’re back at Jessica’s office, she makes the girl say, “None of it is my fault.”

As the series progresses, Kilgrave compels people to do darker and increasingly destructive things, things that suddenly seem to them perfectly reasonable and rational once he asks.

The show asks some fundamentally unsettling questions about human behavior: namely, is Kilgrave planting desires in people’s minds, or is he just accessing something that was already there?

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Jessica Jones triggered some pretty powerful memories and feelings, having been a willing prisoner of sorts myself for twenty-eight years. That’s something one hears a lot in circles of survivors of Christian fundamentalism. You can’t know that you’ve been programmed virtually from birth to accept:

• everything in the Bible as inerrant and immutable;
• anything a pastor or divinely-appointed leader (essentially, every adult male studied in the Bible) says as absolute truth;
• that any natural human desire not sanctioned by your church as part of God’s design (and let’s face it, your church always gets it right and everyone else is headed down the road to perdition) is sinful and an abomination;
• that there’s only one way to heaven, and that’s the path your pastor and your church sets.

It’s not that fundamentalist Christians are mindless robots who can’t think for themselves. However, for those raised in sheltered communities where there were no other voices, no alternative perspectives to challenge the Bible-centric conservative Christian views, and especially in communities where insiders are taught to fear and mistrust outsiders, the question of agency becomes much fuzzier and difficult to unravel.

So when I see videos of children at Creationist seminars proclaiming that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that humans rode dinosaurs, and that evolution is a lie from Satan; or homophobic Christians at rallys with signs declaring that gay people are an abomination, I don’t see much difference between them and the people Kilgrave turns into murderous maniacs with just the merest hint of suggestion.

As the Jesuit saying goes, “Give me a child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man.”

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I found myself identifying most with Kilgrave’s victims, individuals who wound up on the other side of what essentially comes down to rape, and are now unsure of where the line between before and after is. They didn’t want to do whatever it was Kilgrave compelled them to do, and yet the desire to follow his command was stronger. To violate someone’s agency and compel them to act against themselves and their own values is a deeply perverse act.

Right now, the word counter at the bottom of the page reads 666. The rational part of my brain says that it’s just a number. No special significance. Yet there’s another part of my brain that still sees that as a sign of the Antichrist, a being that is very real and will appear soon. I know that the latter thought is irrational, yet it sometimes still springs to mind first.

For me, and many others, the words “None of it is my fault” are nearly impossible to say, because they don’t seem true. All of those times that my mind and body were telling me I was attracted to men, but the part that was under the thrall of evangelical Christian teachings told me that was sinful and disordered… that was still me that believed it.

True: it was the fault of having been raised in that environment my entire life, of being exposed daily to that ideology, and of the people who were supposed to be my guardians, but it was still me that performed the action.

… it’s a deeply unsettling constellation of emotions.

For victims of Kilgrave, they can’t return to the person they were before. But for survivors of fundamentalist Christianity, there is no “before” to go back to. Only a past of lies.

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The question I raised most recently with my therapist is whether I can ever truly escape the influences of the brain I grew up with—if I’m building a new identity with old tools.

Of course, my perspective is different now. My beliefs are radically different. Yet I still view relationships through a lens of fear. I still see myself as unworthy, worthless, and broken.

It’s how to move forward that is the challenge. When you have nothing really to look back to as a frame of reference, it’s disorienting to try to find a workable path on your own. Others can help, but it’s usually just you, the ghosts, and the demons.

Happy New Year.

242. accouterments

To your reply, I/we (your family) don’t expect you to be static. We are not static either. The reason to spend time is to keep up with those changes. It sounds like you think we don’t change, but in small ways we do, all the time. We just want to know who you are regardless of who that is. Sure, we wish things and you were different, but they’re not. But you’re missing out on your nephews and niece and the rest of us in who we’re becoming.

To me and us it’s not a matter of commonalities. It’s just relationship. For me/us there does not have to be a shared future. We just want a future with you. From my vantage point, it looks like you’re the one who does not want to be part of our lives. If that’s the way you want it, we’ll accept that. But I/we want you to know we want you—always have, always will. We don’t understand why you feel so intense a need to erase the past or put it behind you. We are all made up, like trees, of who we were, who we are and who we’re becoming. Seems to me that gutting the tree leaves you less a tree and a weak one at that.

Our door is always open to you. We love you.

Dad

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Dad,

You wrote: “From my vantage point, it looks like you’re the one who does not want to be part of our lives.” Again, it’s not that I don’t want to. Rather, I’m struggling to see how it’s feasible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I’m curious how you think we can all be together, meaningfully, when there are so many issues we have to avoid and dance around—religion, ethics, politics. Your faith is a significant part of your lives, and it makes sense you’d want to talk about that together as a family. However, you know my views on religion and Christianity, and that I can’t participate in those discussions in a way that is authentic and affirming for everyone.

The fact is that I do recognize you’re not static, and that you are changing. But that’s the central issue here: where you seem to be becoming more conservative, I’m becoming more liberal in the same areas. For example, from our last conversation, it sounds like you’re disturbed and saddened by growing secularism, by what you see as increasing godlessness in society, and by the sense of alienation and displacement you’re experiencing from that as a person of faith. You expressed a sense of there not being a place for you and other evangelical Christians in this brave new world of equality and secularism—at least not in a way that wouldn’t force you to compromise your beliefs. I suspect that the others share your concerns.

I, on the other hand, see all of this as a positive development. And that’s just one example.

But the need to, as you wrote, distance myself from the past is less a desire for erasure as it is a struggle to find context for it. For me, it truly feels as if the person who I was four-and-a-half years ago died the night I became an atheist. It was a life-changing and traumatizing event, on top of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian community. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but from our conversations you and mom don’t seem to think it’s quite as serious. Your experience with Christianity has been a beneficial one, so why would you? There may be elements of your faith you struggle with, but your lifestyle integrates overall with (and is affirmed by) your beliefs.

Why would I want to erase the past and put it behind me? Because it was horrific. My memories and experiences are colored by the intense pain and sadness of believing I was broken, sinful, perverted, and would be a disappointment to everyone if they’d ever learned I was gay. Yes, it manifested in often unhealthy ways, but the risk of sharing the reason I was so angry back then was too high. Living that way for fifteen years created the sense of alienation and isolation that made fear a fundamental part of how I relate to other people. I need to move beyond that because the ghosts of those beliefs are making it near impossible to function as an emotionally healthy human being.

So it’s difficult for me to be with the family when no one has acknowledged that any substantive harm was done, and when I’m in the process of trying to heal from that damage. Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but you likely see the underlying problem as a spiritual and not a psychological one: specifically, rebellion against God and his plan is what caused the distress of my adolescent and young adult years. You even said on numerous occasions that many of my troubles would be eased if only I’d give myself to God, so it’s plain you don’t see the brand of fundamentalist theology I was raised with as being a cause for my suffering.

But frankly, I do feel that a significant, pervasive wrong was done, one that you and the family cannot acknowledge or address because of your religious beliefs. That is, you can’t do that and leave your Christian faith and worldview intact. This is what makes it difficult for me to want to be around the family, or to believe that there’s a safe and welcome place for me at your table.

To be clear, I don’t think anyone intended harm, but this is the roadblock that I can’t see any way around. It wouldn’t be fair to ask you to revise your beliefs unless you were genuinely motivated to do so. But I can’t keep holding out hope that you will someday, nor is it healthy for me to keep going as if nothing happened.

David

236. alight

I had something of a breakthrough yesterday and am trying today to hold on to this sense of clarity.

Yesterday, I started listening to an NPR podcast called Invisibilia.

“Launching in January 2015, Invisibilia (Latin for “all the invisible things”) explores the intangible forces that shape human behavior – things like ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions.”

The premier episode is titled “The Secret History of Thoughts.” It focused on disturbing thoughts and how we deal with them via the stories of two individuals who’ve had profound experiences in this area.

I was recently told by a friend that he occasionally has thoughts of harming or murdering people, especially those who have behaved ruthlessly or selfishly. He said that most people have these flashes of violent intention, itself an artifact of our evolutionary past that follows us around like cans tied to the rear of a car with a “Just Married” sign in the window.

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During adolescence, my sister’s therapist would describe me as a “toxic volcano.” For various reasons, around age 13 or 14, I went from being a quiet and bookish boy to an angry and turbulent young man. In hindsight, my emerging sexuality and how it brought me into direct conflict with my religion was at the root of much of that. In evangelical Christianity, however, we weren’t encouraged to think much about mental health.

In late spring of 2008, I began experiencing suicidal thoughts. I’d just moved from my first apartment and was driving all of my belongings in my SUV to my new place. I was feeling alone and more than a little sorry for myself. As I pulled up to an intersection of a busy highway, I had the thought of just pulling forward into the path of an oncoming truck. The thought came out of nowhere, and it was frightening how calm and rational the thought sounded.

In the years that followed, even up to today, I’d have these random suicidal thoughts pop up. I’ll be working in the kitchen with a knife and think about slitting my wrists. If I turn on the garbage disposal, I’m afraid I’ll somehow lose control and stick my hand in. (Frankly, I blame M. Night Shyamalan’s dreadful 2008 film The Happening for that deep dark fear.) If I’m up high, say in an office building, I’ll think about falling—not so much considering it, but more what if I did.

Thankfully, I don’t dwell on these thoughts much. Perhaps because I spend so much time in my head, and because of my early interest in psychology, I learned to interact with these thoughts and deconstruct them.

In her 2013 Ted Talk, Eleanor Longden describes her journey with schizophrenia, saying that eventually she learned “to separate out a metaphorical meaning from what I’d previously interpreted to be a literal truth.”

“What I would ultimately realize was that each voice was closely related to aspects of myself, and that each of them carried overwhelming emotions that I’d never had an opportunity to process or resolve, memories of sexual trauma and abuse, of anger, shame, guilt, low self-worth. The voices took the place of this pain and gave words to it, and possibly one of the greatest revelations was when I realized that the most hostile and aggressive voices actually represented the parts of me that had been hurt most profoundly, and as such, it was these voices that needed to be shown the greatest compassion and care.”

While I’ve never heard voices, many thoughts I’ve experienced have seemed to have a mind of their own. I’d obsess over wrongs, worry over finding a job, whether or not my music or writing was good enough, personal failures (real or imagined), how I don’t meet the subjective—and arguably fickle—physical standards established by a seemingly monolithic gay community in order to be “desirable.”

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Which bring me to the breakthrough I had last night.

Part of the Invisibilia episode on thoughts focused on Martin Pistorius, who contracted Cryptococcal meningitis around age 12 and spent thirteen years literally trapped in his body.

To cope with the sense of isolation and powerlessness, he says he learned to detach from his thoughts, almost engaging with them as another person in his mind. Eventually, he did regain some motor control, and now communicates much like Stephen Hawking.

And, at age 33, he got married.

This led to reflecting on my darkest thought: that I’m going to be single and alone for the rest of my life. I broke up with my last boyfriend in March of 2013, and been on one date since—and not for lack of trying or looking. Frankly, I’ve found gay guys in Minnesota wholly uninteresting. And if they are interesting, they’re taken or uninterested in me.

(My current fantasy is that I’ll somehow land a British guy, leave the United States and find a job as a librarian in England or Ireland somewhere, like the Bodleian or Trinity.)

So being surrounded by people who are dating, married, building lives together, talking about kids and vacations and so on triggers the thoughts and fears of being alone, that I’m unlovable, that I’m incompatible with everyone, that there’s something fundamentally broken about me, that I’m always going to be alone.

Thing is, I know that being in a relationship won’t complete me or solve any problems. The current theory is that, because I was taught growing up that gay people don’t have relationships and that it’s a lonely “lifestyle,” my fixation on finding a boyfriend/husband is based in the fear that they were right.

But hearing Martin’s story and how he managed to detach himself from thoughts that would’ve dragged him down into despair highlighted for me that reality that I can do the same with mine, that I can detach and deconstruct my own.

I had the thought last night that, if Martin found a wife at age 33 while confined to a wheelchair and communicating via computer, maybe it’s not impossible for me.

I don’t really believe it yet, but it’s a step.

235. astir

I found out about a week and a half ago that my uncle died.

Out of respect for my family, let’s call him Nick.

Nick is my mom’s younger (and only) brother. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that his death was a surprise to any of us, including my mom. When my parents were last out in California, he’d gone missing. Again. This wasn’t the first time he’d disappeared or dropped off the radar for a while. Unfortunately, my uncle led something of a troubled life. That’s not how I’d like to remember him, but it’s how I do remember him.

Growing up, Uncle Nick was something of a byword in my family’s home. That may not be how my parents intended for us to hear it, but the ongoing saga of his life was basically presented to my sisters and me as a cautionary tale.

There but for the grace of God go any of us…

And that’s not to say that my parents weren’t constantly worried about him. Uncle Nick was an alcoholic, a drug user, and a host of other things, so he was in our prayers a lot. The main story that I remember was when he ended up going through the window of the Porsche that hit him after he got out of a taxi on the wrong side of the street while drunk and/or high one night. That trip landed him in the hospital, and also in a heap of trouble.

There was a time when he was going to church and seemed to be turning his life around, but apparently that didn’t last very long. The last my parents heard when they were in California last year was that he was living with some woman, and probably using drugs and alcohol again. It got to the point where they were calling county jails and even morgues to see if he’d turned up.

So when my mom got a call from a number she didn’t recognize about a week and a half ago, she called back and was asked by the woman who answered the phone who the name of the deceased was after identifying herself as calling from the coroner’s office.

This is the story from my mom, as we know it:

Apparently he had been drinking on January 1st, fell and broke his hand. Someone found him on January 2nd, face down (not sure if it was in the street or on the sidewalk), and sleeping. It had been below freezing, and he was just in street clothes—no blanket or sleeping bag. He was able to squeeze the paramedic’s hand when they asked him if he could hear them, but he couldn’t speak. When they moved him he became unresponsive, and died about an hour after he got to the hospital—10:12 am, January 2nd.

It was weird talking to my mom about this, mainly because it felt like talking to someone else about their family member dying. I mentioned this to my therapist in my last session: that as I get further along in identity building and more secure in a sense of authentic self, the less connected I feel to my biological family. And I feel bad about not feeling bad about this. While we share memories, and even a warped sense of humor, since reconnecting with them in the spring of 2013, I’ve struggled to find a sense of belonging with them.

Sadly, it probably comes down to my lack of religious belief. Some may think that a minor thing, but evangelical, fundamentalist Christianity is at the core of my parents’ and sisters’ identities. It’s not for me, and it probably never was.

This discussion led to something else in my last therapy session.

For a while, I’ve been trying to put a finger on why my being single bothers me so much. And as my therapist and I hashed out my feelings about my uncle dying, I hit on this:

I don’t really have any long-term relationships of any kind.

I’m still in touch with a handful of people from college and even from the church I grew up in, but these are largely online friendships. I don’t actually see most of these people anymore.

What bothers me is that for the last 10-15 years, I’ve been watching the people around my put down roots and grow in their relationships and marriages. I know very few people now who are single. But it’s not really just that that bothers me.

It’s the fact that I’m less than a month away from turning 32, and I don’t have any kind of long-term or enduring relationships in my life—including friendships. Some of that can be attributed to changing priorities and life circumstances. Some friends moved away. Others got married and had kids. Neither parties made much effort to keep up the friendship, though it’s probably more accurate to say that many friends gave up trying to make a friendship work with me.

It doesn’t feel great to admit that, but I’ve a sense that it’s true.

So the business of me griping about feeling old, and how now that I’m over 30 no guys are going to want me is less about age. It’s about realizing how old I am and how little I have in the way of relationships compared to others around me.

My housemate Matt is in almost constant contact with his parents and sister who have become like a second family to me. So many friends of mine spend holidays with their families. Their families love their significant others, and vice versa. Et al.

The image that came to mind the other day was of being on a raft, sailing down a river, and passing friends who’ve made homes along the shore.

My fear is that I’ll keep on drifting, sailing on and on without making real connections; that I’ll end up like my uncle, alone, having burned his bridges behind him.

Let’s sponge away the writing on that possible future.

234. consanguinity

“When people experience trauma, they feel bad; children, in particular, think they are bad when they feel bad. Chronic bottom-up dysregulation and distress lead to negative identifications, beliefs, and judgments about ourselves.”
—L. Heller and A. LaPierre, “Healing Developmental Trauma.”

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Unlike previous years, at least since I became an atheist, Christmas this year wasn’t the depressive shit show that it has is. Usually, I lock myself away, alone, hating the entire world for being so festive. I did decide against being with my family for the holidays, choosing instead to spend it with friends and family of friends.

One of my early anxieties about therapy was the fear that it would dislodge all of the toxic dark matter packed into my subconscious. Worse, that I’d end up in a psychiatric hospital. Thankfully, that hasn’t happened. Yet these anxieties have been present even when working with my current therapist, although I’m finding that it doesn’t need to be that way.

The past few days I’ve been getting back into Healing Developmental Trauma, the book I referenced in a blog post a few weeks ago, taking it in slowly and thinking. A lot of what I’ve been reading has triggered various memories and feelings—good, but unsettling.

“To regulate the nervous system, it is more effective to work consistently with the organized “adult” aspects of the self in order to integrate the disorganized, regressed “child” aspects.” (22)

So I’m learning to live more in the present instead of the past, and to listen more to my body through things like yoga and mindfulness. I’m currently in the chapter on the Connection Survival Style. Right away I was hit with this opening paragraph:

“As a result of the earliest trauma, individuals with the Connection Survival Style have disconnected from their bodies, from themselves, and from relationship… To manage the pain of early trauma, some individuals disconnect from their bodies and live in their minds… when asked what they are feeling in their body, [they] find the question challenging, anxiety producing, and often impossible to answer.” (37)

I ran into the latter part of this description a month or two ago at yoga when my teacher asked at the beginning of class what we’re feeling in our physical and emotional bodies. Admittedly, this was before I’d had any coffee so it was already hard enough to think, but so often I turn up a complete blank when asking myself this question: “What are you feeling?”

According to Heller, the compromised core expression for this survival style is: “I am… I have a right to be.” He also lists some of the associated “shame-based identifications”:

• Terrified and inadequate
• Shame at existing
• Feeling like they never fit in
• Feeling like they are always on the outside looking in
• Burden on others

A real-world example of this was two Sundays ago when my car broke down. The average quote from a few shops within the free AAA towing range was $350. Aside from borrowing a car to get to band practice, I’ve been mostly homebound for the last two weeks.

You could insert a joke about men never asking for help, but in my case there is a great deal of anxiety in doing so, or in feeling needy. When I was subsisting largely on unemployment last year while job searching, I felt incredibly embarrassed and humiliated. I didn’t want to see anyone for fear that they’d ask what I did for a living.

This also meant that for the past two weeks I haven’t been to yoga, which has been a huge stress-reliever for me, both in the exercise and in the community. I didn’t want to ask anyone for a ride there as I live about twenty-five minutes south of the studio, didn’t want to be a burden on anyone (I almost wrote “unnecessary burden” just now), and didn’t want anyone looking at me as a failure because I couldn’t afford to fix my car.

But the truth is, I don’t feel worthy of help, that it’s selfish to ask, that there are others more deserving, that I’m less if I require assistance. It was a shock when people actually showed up to help me move in May, or to my birthday party… hell, whenever people are excited to see me! These feelings run deep into the core of how I see myself as a person.

Heller goes on in this chapter to describe some of the behavioral characteristics of this type (I’ll list just a few that particularly describe me):

• Use interpersonal distancing as a substitute for adequate boundaries.
• Withdraw in emotionally disturbing situations.
• Tend to relate in an intellectual rather than a feeling manner.
• Seldom aware that they are out of touch with their bodies.
• Feel like a frightened child in an adult world; do not know how to deal with or appropriately manipulate their environment.
• Strong need to control self, environment, and other people.

I have a distinct memory from around age eleven or twelve of being in the car with my family, and for whatever reason feeling disappointed and angry with my dad, and deciding that from that moment on I would renounce love entirely; that it was intellectually inferior; that it was inconvenient and messy; that enlightened persons shouldn’t need any form of love.

[Insert Nibelung steel strikes here.]

Not sure why I had that reaction, but it’s defined my relationship style: my tendency to withdraw when feeling overwhelmed or stressed, to avoid people, to live in my head, and to feel overwhelmed in social situations.

“Because of their inadequate sense of self, they often try to anchor themselves in their roles as scientist, judge, doctor, father, mother, etc. When functioning in a role, they feel comfortable and they know what the rules are; being outside a specific role can feel frightening… They tend to withdraw or break contact in emotionally disturbing or stressful situations.” (39)