259. iatrogenic

It’s Pride month again in Minneapolis, and another year finds me not feeling very proud… or particularly fabulous. Some of this does have to do with the attack in Orlando on last Sunday, that another bigot turned their hate into bullets, and how I don’t really feel like celebrating when so many people died and we have a majority in Congress who don’t give a shit that a bunch of dirty fags were killed in a gay nightclub.

Sorry—was that too harsh a paraphrase of Republican views on LGBTQ people, views they’ve obstinately held fast to ever since gay people started demanding to be treated like human beings instead of criminals?

Honestly, I’ve never felt like I belonged at pride events. Yes, the movement is founded on values of tolerance and inclusion, supposedly, but where is the young curmudgeon’s tent underneath the glittery rainbow umbrella? Everyone else is laughing and flirting and having a good time, while my inner Carl wants to yell at these damn kids to turn down that fucking EDM and put some clothes on!

I had a longish discussion with my therapist this afternoon about my ambivalence towards the LGBTQ community and my overall reluctance to participate in mass group events.

By nature, I am not a “joiner.” I’ll support from a distance, but unbridled commitment to a cause or movement makes me jittery.

The U. S. presidential campaign, for example. What ultimately turned me off to Sanders’ campaign was the seeming groupthink and aggressive enthusiasm of his supporters. (Feel the Bern? I thought that cleared up!) What makes me extremely uneasy about the Trump campaign is how it seems to be stoking a resurgence of racist American nationalism that comes dangerously close to what the rise of Italian fascism looked like in the 1930s.

So okay, I understand the historic and cultural importance of gay pride events, how they have built solidarity since the first Christopher Street Liberation Day on June 28, 1970. Though increasingly corporatized, with hetero executives—as usual—finding more ways to make money off us LGBTQ folks, as a friend of mine wrote today in the Star Tribune, pride events remind us that “despite our differences, we can only fight for our freedom together.”

I simply prefer to “fight for our freedom together” in the quiet of a library or coffee shop, not talking to anybody.

Yes, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes, so shut the f*** up.

My therapist observed that I’ve talked about two opposing desires—the desire to find belonging but also to withdraw and secure my individuality. A need for and a fear of connection and intimacy that creates a tension which both drives and paralyzes me. Super.

Part of my ambivalence about the gay community is rooted in unresolved trauma from having lived repressed and in the closet for over a decade and still not having integrated my sexuality into my personal identity. Just as many people are thrust, unprepared, into becoming sexually active adults, we gays are expected to burst from the closet as fully fabulous gay men the moment we come out. That’s a tall order after spending ten years violently pushing down your attractions to cute guys so you don’t out yourself.

This differs from internalized homophobia, I think, because I’m not ashamed of being gay. Rather, it feels like just another fact about me, like the color of my hair or my height. And unlike some of my peers, it isn’t something I ever had to fight to claim as my own, so it doesn’t feel that important to me… something I take for granted.

I think the fighting part is key because the fighting would’ve meant that I believed I was something valuable and worth fighting for. I exist, but that has nothing to do with loving or valuing myself.

That brought me to the image of Miss Havisham a few days ago.

For anyone who didn’t go through a Dickens obsession at some point, she is one of the strangest and most fascinating characters in Great Expectations—a wealthy spinster who shut herself away in her ruined mansion that is frozen in time at the exact moment she received the news her fiancé had abandoned her on her wedding day. When Pip meets her in chapter 8, she still wears her tattered wedding dress and one shoe (she was putting them on when she received the letter), and her wedding cake sits rotting in the dining room. Consumed with bitterness, she conditions her adopted daughter to hate all men and seeks vengeance on the world by making Estelle into a cruel, sadistic heartbreaker.

There are many aspects of this character I shudderingly relate to. There’s a deeply twisted part of me that enjoys holding on to past hurts—my parents, my college choir director, Seth, Matt the bisexual tree scientist. I recite my litany of their wrongs, like Orual in C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces, because hating them gives me purpose; and like Miss Havisham, I’ve locked myself away in an inner mansion of emotional distance where I can’t be hurt.

There I can feel sorry for myself, and over many years that dark blanket of self pity has become familiar, safe, even comforting.

There’s a sinister element of Estelle, too. At times, I’ve been the deliberately cruel heartbreaker in order to get revenge for how Seth used and then discarded me.

If I was used and hurt, then you deserve to be, too.

This fixation on the past—resenting the family I grew up with for not being the family I needed, ruminating on feelings I had for the first man who broke my heart and believing I’ll never feel that way again—it’s clearly counterproductive and unhealthy. It’s a story I’ve been telling myself every day for five years.

If the Orlando murders teach us anything, it’s that life is too short for bullshit like that.

191. hardihood

Last night I posted to Facebook about how yesterday evening I was mopping the floor of my apartment to music written about a thousand years ago, and imagining that someday, a guy is going to find this ridiculously nerdy trait (i.e., my interest in early music) incredibly endearing. A friend commented: That isn’t pretentious at all. 😛

My immediate reaction was to apologize all over myself, realizing how snobbish and pretentious such a statement might come across as. Instead, I replied: Perhaps… but it’s unique!

After doing a little more mopping, I came back and added: Actually, no—it isn’t pretentious at all. It would be pretentious if I’d posted this to appear more cultured or sophisticated. But the truth is, I am listening to medieval music at this very moment while mopping my apartment floor.

Merriam-Webster defines pretentious: “Having or showing the unpleasant quality of people who want to be regarded as more impressive, successful, or important than they really are.”

Here I’m reminded of a passage from C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Proposes a Toast, in which the Senior Tempter and Undersecretary of his department in Hell is remarking on the importance of reframing democracy “as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power” in order to produce in people the feeling that “prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.”

Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.”

The fact of the matter is that I’m a nerd—and a very specific type of nerd at that. Shortly after my family moved from Kansas to Minnesota, my father took me to a concert where the first of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos was on the program. By the end of the piece, I was madly in love with early music.

Some of the happiest moments of my teen years were when I was playing or studying Baroque music. I nearly majored in historical performance (which would’ve required going somewhere other than Northwestern).

I’m not even sure I can explain what it is about early music that so captivates me. As I’ve been musing on what it is that I love especially about medieval music, I figure it’s probably the same thing that attracts me to history—that though most of us live in a more sophisticated world than the vast majority of our ancestors; travel about in cars, airplanes, and even into space; and have access to technology and medicine that would have made us gods to earlier generations, we’re not that different from the people who lived ten thousand years ago.

Take the song I posted above. It was written sometime in the late 12th century by a woman known as the Comtessa de Dia (Die, a county in the High Middle Ages located in the southeastern part of France), or as just Beatritz. She was a trobairitz, a female troubadour. If you remember your music history, the troubadours were composers and performers of lyric poetry, usually about chivalry and courtly love. Compare this lyric from Ab joi et ab joven m’apais to any pop song written in the last hundred years:

I feed on joy and youthfulness
and joy and youthfulness content me;
since my friend is the most cheerful
I am cheered and charmed by him,
and because I’m true to him,
it’s well that he be true
to me; I never stray from loving him
nor do I have the heart to stray.

Sure, the sentiment is a little different, just as the clothes were different and people believed that demons were the cause of sickness and disasters, or that women were conceived because of weak male sperm or the direction of the wind at the time of intercourse. (No kidding on the last one. See Thomas Aquinas’ “On how a woman is to be born a woman” from the Summa Theologica. Crazy.) But it’s clear from the lyric that Beatritz is excited about being in love. It’s like a postcard from the 1100s.

In a way, I find in early music a link to humanity by composing my own music, the same as people have been composing music since the first humans joined their voices in song. I find a link to my humanity in housekeeping through images of excavated floors of Neolithic houses that show signs of having been regularly swept, or indentations in floors where someone knelt regularly enough while tending a fire to leave permanent marks.

I’m not interested in any of this because it’s “intellectual.” I’m interested because it fascinates me and captivates my imagination and my thoughts.

So it’s frustrating when I get labeled as “pretentious” for liking these things, for being a Classically trained musician, for not liking most of what’s on television or the radio or in theaters. Because I do have a love for music, for history, for good stories, for science (even though I don’t understand most of it), and for good literature.

And I’m hoping these qualities (e.g., mopping floors to mediaeval music) will be intriguing and endearing someday to the man I marry—whoever he is. That’s one of many reasons for leaving Minnesota for graduate school—wherever that is. Because having interests in obscure subjects is not a Midwestern virtue. It is something, however, encouraged in academia, where it’s becoming clearer that I belong.

As Alanis Morissette sings, “… what I wouldn’t give to meet a soul-mate—someone else to catch this drift.”

42. vexed

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him who I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England. I did not then see what is not the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape. The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
– C.S. Lewis, “Surprised By Joy”

---

I had a long-ish chat with a guy tonight from Texas from that same site. Another nice guy, this one Catholic, and again, not my type. Nor is he looking for romantic partnership at this point in his life. But it puts in me this fear that there aren’t any non-effeminate Christian guys out there who aren’t already taken; who value intellect as much as I do; who are comfortable with their sexuality and see it as compatible with their faith; and know where they’re going in life (i.e., have it mostly together) and are interested in someone to truly share a life with.

I’m just feeling like I’m never going to find what I’m looking for. I don’t want to be 35, single, dating, knocking on doors and either getting turned down or not finding what it is that I’m looking for, and I’m feeling so down and discouraged right now. I want to either not care and ditch my morals, or somehow develop fortitude and wait. Neither is making me happy at this point.

I want a Joy (C.S. Lewis’ wife), a man who understands me, and who I understand; who gets how I think, and doesn’t just tolerate me; someone who can make me, like he said of Joy, look like a fool, because he’s smart and calls me on the stupid shit that I say and do.

Here it is: I’m afraid there isn’t anyone good enough for me. That’s an incredibly haughty and arrogant thing to say because implicit in that statement is the idea that I’m all that great of a catch. But I’m afraid there isn’t anyone masculine enough, intelligent enough, or interesting enough. My date last night could barely hold a conversation about C.S. Lewis outside of the first three books of the Chronicles of Narnia, let alone his other books (including the non-fiction stuff).

I feel conflicted about that because I fear this image of l’homme idéal will get in the way of any future possible relationships. Is it so much to ask that he’s well-read, well-spoken, attractive, has a wide variety of interests, and most importantly loves God and can articulate his faith? I’m just afraid I’ll never find anyone like that before I’m thirty, and damn it, I can’t take another year of being alone. I just can’t. I’m going to end up an awful, alcoholic mess of a jaded bastard, and it seems unavoidable at this point. My standards are set so insanely high that there seems to be no one else. I’m trying so hard not to extrapolate the whole population of gay men from a single piece of fairy cake, but it just seems hopeless.

So why am I still single? Yes, I haven’t been dating all that long, but I seem to want that which does not exist. I want a Christian gay man who has not been beaten down by Christians or his own doubt and fear and has a faith that is thriving; doesn’t come with baggage that weighs him down or defines him; and basically appears as a normal guy to the outside world, like myself. Perhaps that comes back to the desire for someone to just understand and relate to me; because I feel like no one does.

Herein lies the paradox. John Donne would revel in it. I would revel in it, if he wrote a poem about it; of the seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against me finding anyone who is even remotely compatible for me.

Oh little self that walls itself within
This cage of thine own making and despair,
Resign thyself to vigor or forbear
For thou art not of ilk to bend to sin.
The bars of thy design hath been, yet bear
The imprint of Divine conspiracy
That deigns for good and ever seeks to spare
The heart from useless ill, and courtesy
Of that degree we seldom show or see
From fellow man, for he can only will
Our happiness or pleasure. Oh! to be
A beast that finds contentment in its fill!
By condescending mercy am I mired,
And standards unattainable conspired.

It’s not quite Donne, but it’ll do.

W.C. Fields observed that “comedy is tragedy happening to someone else.”

Happy Monday.

41. deschutes

For God, who said, “Light shall shine out of darkness,” is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the Light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. – 2 Corinthians 4:6-10 (NASB)

I went on my first, official, declared date as a gay man tonight. Met him, of all places (surprise, surprise) online, on OkCupid, one of the more reputable places for such sordid activities. The guys there seem less interested in just random hook-ups and more in finding something long-term. Of course there are always those trolls, but so far they’ve seemed of a better ilk there.

… so soon, so soon,
And the crows they swoon
At the two red holes
In his right side, oh…

So my date tonight was a 30-year-old guy from the southwestern suburbs. We’ve been emailing and texting for the last couple of days, and we both had free-time tonight and decided to meet up, mainly to imagine the possibility of dating together. I think we both went into it with few expectations other than to see if we were at all compatible, and that’s pretty much how it went. He was cute, and a nice guy, but it was clear from the beginning that he was just too effeminate for me. (The really creepy thing is that he reminds me a lot of my sister’s husband.) He has a lot of baggage from past relationships, doesn’t have a clear direction on where he wants to go in life; and an top of that, he didn’t know who Douglas Adams was, hadn’t read much C.S. Lewis, and in general wasn’t the intellectual or spiritual package I’m looking for in a guy. He was a music major and is into musical theatre, so we ended up talking for about five hours, but that’s probably as far as this is going to go. And then I ended up giving his car a jump because the battery was dead!

So we keep looking, try not to think about the fact that I’m terrified that every guy I date is going to be like this, and that he is out there. Somewhere.

Does anyone know how to make a Bat-Signal for masculine (i.e., “straight-acting”) Christian gay men?

… it’s gonna take a long, long time
But we’re gonna make something so fine…

Listening to Laura Viers new album right now and absolutely loving it. I actually got it a couple months back, way before the actual public release, when she opened for The Decemberists late last fall, and fell in love with her songs. Her lyrics are pretty great. Here’s one of my favourites:

July Flame
Sweet summer peach
High up in the branch
Just out of my reach

Can I call you mine?
Can I call you mine?

July Flame
I’m seeing fireworks
They’re so beautiful
Tell me why it hurts

027. bonding

From A Treatise on the Mustache by Brett & Kate McKay on 8 September 2009:

Unlike women, who bond primarily through face to face discussions, males bond best through shared activities, namely through those performed side by side. Two men embarking on the road to friendship do so with a mutual appreciation of one another’s machismo. Such activities include logging, hunting, war, etc. At a more primordial stage however, the process begins with the most fundamental element of human bonding: similarity.

I’ve read similar things before, such as C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves, but the above excerpt is fairly concise. It describes differences between male and female friendships of the same gender. Even from my own observations, I’ve noted that female relationships tend to be based on shared emotional connection, whereas male relationships tend to be forged through shared activity. It’s not that either is superior to the other (though feminists and contemporary psychology would stress that men need to express more of their “feminine,” emotional side). In a vacuum, where each is left to their own nature, men and women will bond with the members of the same sex in fairly consistent ways—women through talking, men through doing.

But with men, the guard is eventually lowered through similarity. A powerful bond can be forged between two men who share a passion for LINUX programming, Batman comics, or, yes, facial hair. It is almost ineffable. As C.S. Lewis writes on Friendship in The Four Loves,

Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had to. And to like doing what must be done is a characteristic that has survival value. We not only had to do the things, we had to talk about them. We had to plan the hunt and the battle. And when they were over as had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use. We liked this even better. We ridiculed or punished the cowards and bunglers, we praised the star performers. We revelled in technicalities . . . In fact, we talked shop. We enjoyed one another’s society greatly.

This pleasure in co-operation, in talking shop, in the mutual respect and understanding of men who daily see one another tested, is biologically valuable. You may, if you like, regard it as a product of the “gregarious instinct” . . . something which is going on at this moment in dozens of ward-rooms, bar-rooms, common-rooms, messes and golf-clubs. I prefer to call it Companionship—or Clubableness.

This Companionship is, however, only the matrix of Friendship. It is often called Friendship, and many people when they speak of their “friends” mean only their companions. Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believes to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision—it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

Lewis said it far better than I.

But he observes that there is now a distinct mistrust of male friendship—”that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual.” And as a homosexual, I find this to be flat out absurd, as does Lewis, as it stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of homosexuality (and even sexuality in general). If platonic friendship between the sexes can exist, why shouldn’t one between two men or two women?

That’s beside the point.

These days friendships between males seem so superficial, perhaps because the males themselves are so superficial and fearful of making really deep connections. They are even trivialised by giving them labels like Bromance, where homosocial intimacy is allowed, to an extent, but it is still something that men are expected to “grow out of,” like a phase or adolescence. But it speaks to something much deeper, it seems, that men are desiring to be more physically expressive with each other—something that up untill the early twentieth century was considered socially appropriate and in no way latently homosexual. “On a broad historical view it is,” Lewis writes, “not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.”

“Hence,” he postulates later,

we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead . . . The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends . . . Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travellers.

This is fundamentally the problem that I see with men these days and their relationships—they substitute noise for substance and expect it to fill the void. They surround themselves with things or with people, but aren’t going anywhere. They have their male friends as companions at first, then trade that in for a girlfriend and/or wife (or succession of girlfriends) to satisfy their sexual desires; but they are merely in a state of existence or surviving. Companions abound, but Friends (kindred spirits, if you will) are few and far between.

Men need the friendship and company of other men; someone to share a common goal or journey with. Because men bond by doing together: fishing, shingling a house, playing football (and yes, I mean European football), poker tourneys, or hunting to name a few traditional male bonding activities. But it’s a twentieth century phenomenon where masculine spaces have been abolished and deemed chauvinistic. It was the feminists who demanded that the boy’s clubs be opened up to women. But the boys have always found ways to stake out territory, though now on the outskirts of a heterosexualised society and always within reach of women (e.g., bowling night, for which men often have to get “permission” from their wives or significant others).

So what am I saying? That men need to stop being afraid of commitment and find something that they are truly passionate about. And if they are, they will eventually come in contact with other like-minded men who have the same passions they can pursue together. That is how empires were built.

You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these “unconcerning things, matters or fact” to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth? In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts . . . At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also beat a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among our Friends . . . Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

013. giving back

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
– Ambrose Redmoon

Last week I was invited by a friend to attend the final seminar of the Landmark Forum. For those of you who don’t know, this is a four-day intensive seminar that is designed to help people realise their life goals by helping them see the blind spots in the way that they view the world. The way that they explain it is that these blind spots unconsciously hinder us from realising those goals in the way a hundred pound weight strapped to the back of an Olympic runner might keep him (okay, or her) from realising the goal of winning the gold medal. Through a number of exercises and seminars, the Landmark Forum seeks to help people see what that hundred pound weight is and how they can take it off.

The trouble is in seeing what it is.

One of the big things that they stress is taking responsibility for your past and not making excuses for it. Now, you may have been molested as a child. That alters the way that you see the world. No one would argue with that, nor that it was your fault.

However, that doesn’t give you the right to see yourself as a victim, or use that event as an excuse for not moving forward in life. It doesn’t give you the right to define yourself by that event—not because it wasn’t an awful thing, but because your moving on and becoming the best version of you possible isn’t worth hanging on to that and not making something amazing of it.

I was talking with my guy tonight and we were having a conversation along these lines. I was sharing with him the things I’d learned in that evening, and I realised after we hung up that I’d been doing the very things I was talking about. That I’d been rehearsing the litany of negative events in my life over and over, like Orual in Till We Have Faces. It’s a vicious cycle, and unless someone comes along to say “Stop it,” we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over.

And we unconsciously put ourselves in situations in order to fulfil those prophesies we set for ourselves—to fail, or be victimised, so that we can say, “See!”—instead of taking responsibility and saying, “No, this is my life.”

An obvious parallel is Joseph from the book of Genesis. If ever there was a victim, it was him. He had so much going for him. He was the youngest son, the favourite of his father Isaac; and then his brothers sold him into slavery and told their father that Joseph had been killed by a lion.

Now, if you recall the story, Joseph kind of had it coming. He was cocky and full of himself. He had the gall to tell his brothers that he’d been shown in a dream that they’d one day be bowing down to him. Who wouldn’t want to get rid of a prick like that? (That’s not to excuse what his brothers did. Selling your brother into slavery is wrong. Wrong.)

So he’s sitting there, sold into slavery in Egypt. I think he figured out what he’d done and why his brothers hated him. So then he had a choice. He could either blame others for his situation, or take responsibility and make the most of what he’d been given. And he did. His master, Potiphar, “saw that the Lord was with Joseph and caused all that he did to prosper.” And Potiphar made him overseer of his whole house and all he owned.

Then Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph, who took the high ground and refused; but it was her word against his (a slave) and it was back to prison for him. Again, he could have whined and complained and recited his litany of woes. But he didn’t. He took responsibility for his situation, and the jailer “committed to Joseph’s charge all the prisoners who were in the jail; so that whatever was done there, he was responsible for it . . . because the LORD was with him; and whatever he did, the LORD made to prosper.”

I won’t tell you the whole story, but it ends up with Joseph as second command in Egypt, and in a twist of divine irony his brothers did indeed come before him to plead for grain for their family. Complete reversal of fortunes. Joseph does play with them a little, and he could have taken advantage of the situation and killed them for what they did to him in the past, but in the end he tells them who he is and he is restored, alive, to his father Isaac.

When Isaac dies, his brothers figure he’s going to take revenge on them all. But Joseph utters one of the most powerful statements in all of literature—”Do not be afraid, for am I in G-d’s place? As for you, you meant evil against me, but G-d meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people’s lives.” It’s incomplete to merely view Joseph as having taken responsibility for his life, as the Landmark Forum suggests people do. I strongly believe that G-d places us in situations to be his effective agents on earth; and regardless of what happens to us, if we take responsibility for our lives insomuch as we see ourselves as having a divine calling and open ourselves to the possibilities of being used in incredible ways, and that the things that happened to us are G-d’s way of equipping us to help someone else, we don’t have time for pity parties.

I’ve gone through so much of my life reading into what other people say, and with my expectations of what they should do instead of giving up that need and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Giving up the need for revenge, because the people who did me wrong back in the day are not going to control the course of my life or keep me in the prison of anger. Not letting the past define me and reciting the litany of my woes and using that as an excuse for not taking responsibility for my life. I am beginning to see how G-d has used the events in my life to bring me to this Now.

He asked me tonight, “Why were you even thinking about going to that when you’ve said all of this?” I don’t know why I was considering going to the Landmark Forum. A change? To take a step? Turns out the biggest step I’ve taken is pursuing him.

We really had some huge breakthroughs tonight. It was incredibly exciting (and frustrating for a while). I was feeling pretty smart, the guy with all the answers. I felt like a therapist who’d just seen his patient make a major breakthrough.

Then, driving home I realised that the things I’d been saying were the things my parents, friends and therapists had been saying for years, and had taken me up until quite recently to grasp. That I need to take responsibility for my life and not blame others. That everything in life happens for a reason and we can either choose to see ourselves as passive victims or as active participants who see life as the chisel that is making us into men out of blocks of stone (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis). That the blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.

I don’t have life figured out any more than anyone else. But I can share what few insights I have and hope that they’ll make some difference. I saw my guy make a huge step tonight, and I’m incredibly proud of him for taking ownership of his life and am deeply humbled to be a part of the process for him. I’m looking back now and seeing how every painful shouting match, every patient conversation my parents had with me, the hours spent with my psychologist, my psychology classes—everything—probably led up to this point.

It would be easy to puff out my chest and say that I did it all. But that would be an arrogant lie. I was positioned here by a much wiser hand. If all those years spent crawling around in the dark were to help him realise his full potential and drop the hundred-pound weight and the blinders from his eyes, it was worth the pain.

He asked what he can possibly do for me. Tonight I realised that so much has been given to me already, and I’m finally giving back. He helped me see that what I have has been given to me, and that he’s such an incredible gift. I really do love him. He taught me something tonight—that it was me lying on the therapist’s couch, not him. And I’m just beginning to realise that.

A happy, healthy little boy named Michal Katurian, on the eve of the night that his parents were to start torturing him for seven consecutive years, was visited by a man made of all fluffy pillows and a big smiley mouth, and the man sat with Michal and talked to him a while and told him about the horrific life he was to lead and where it was to end for him . . . and the man suggested to Michal that wouldn’t it be better if he did away with himself then and there are avoided all that horror?

And Michael said, “But if I do away with myself, my brother will never get to hear me being tortued, will he?”

“No,” said the Pillowman.

“But if my brother never gets to hear me being tortured, he may never write the stories he’s going to write, might he?”

“That’s true,” said the Pillowman.

And Michal thought about it a while and said, “Well, I think we should probably just keep things the way they are, then, with me being tortured and him hearing . . . ‘cos I think I’m going to really like hearing my brother’s stories.”
— Martin McDonagh, “The Pillowman.”

012. my wicked life

For the first time in my life I’m actually contemplating something truly long-term.

And it’s terrifying.

Well, not the long-term part. I can easily see spending the rest of my life with someone. It’s getting to that “rest of my life with someone” that’s frightening.

I’ve never been in any sort of relationship before. Never been emotionally intimate with anyone, not quite to this level. Not where I feel comfortable opening up to a guy, laying myself out there, flaws and all for him to either accept or categorically reject. And it’s frightening, but at the same time reassuring.

I’ve been revisiting Lewis’ The Four Loves lately, for obvious reasons. There are a couple of interesting passages.

We may say, and not quite untruly, that we have chosen our friends and the woman we love for their various excellences—for beauty, frankness, goodness of heart, with intelligence, or what not. But it had to be the particular kind of wit, the particular kind of beauty, the particular kind of goodness that we like, and we have our personal tastes in these matters. That is why friends and lovers feel that they were “made for one another.” The especial glory of Affection is that it can unite those who most emphatically, even comically, are not; people who, if they had not found themselves put down by fate in the same household or community, would have had nothing to do with each other. If affection grows out of this—of course it often does not–their eyes begin to open. (p36)

Last Friday I wrote him this:

I don’t think I’m wholly “in love” with you… yet. But I’m getting there. Falling slowly. And I think that’s good that it’s happening this way. I like you a lot, that’s for damn sure. You know that and what you do to me when you call or write. I’m definitely infatuated with you right now, and I’m waiting for that to fade into something deeper.

When I said that I’m not “in love” with you yet, I don’t mean that I don’t love you. I think right now what we have are eros (sexual love or desire for the Beloved), phileo (love between friends) and storge (affection). But what has yet to really cement is the sacrificial gift-love, agapeo. And that’s what I know I don’t have yet. But it will come.

If that doesn’t make the poor guy feel inadequate, I don’t know what will. Luckily he knew what I was talking about (he’d taken a philosophy class), and he’s trying to be realistic too. That’s the great thing about our relationship up to this point, the fact that we can be so open and honest with each other. It takes some couples months – years, sometimes, and thousands of dollars of therapy – to get there. But we’ve essentially just met, so there’s really no way that I can possibly know if he’s “The One.”

Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. (p61)

This is one area in which it’s pretty certain that we’re more than friends. We are constantly talking about each other. We’re talking about whether we’re really “in love.” Bizarrely, we’re also talking about our future, things we’d like to do together. We talked again last night, and are trying to take a step back and acknowledge the possibility that we might be just friends, though I think neither of us want that, but in the interest of being realistic we need to at least be open to that. He has said that he’d be “vocally supportive” of whatever I choose to do but I know he’d be miserable if I ended up with someone else.

Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had: to feel that not only are we two united by erotic love but we three or four or five are all travellers on the same quest, have all a common vision.

The co-existence of Friendship and Eros may also help some moderns to realise that Friendship is in reality a love, and even as great a love as Eros. Suppose you are fortunate enough to have “fallen in love with” and married your Friend. And now suppose it possible that you were offered the choice of two futures: “Either you two will cease to be lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same beauty, the same truth, or else, losing all that, you will retain as long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros.

And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers. But this, so far from obliterating the distinction between the two loves, puts it in a clearer light. If one who was first, in the deep and full sense, your Friend, is then gradually or suddenly revealed as also your lover you will certainly not want to share the Beloved’s erotic love with any third. But you will have no jealousy at all about sharing the Friendship. (p67)

This is probably what I hope for more than anything; that my friendship with him will turn into something much deeper. We sort of entered right away into the intermediary stage between Friends and Lovers, where it was clear from the start that we were definitely interested in each other. Fortunately, the distance prevented sex from entering into the equation, and nothing ruins a relationship quite like starting from there.

There are a lot of thoughts from this weekend, but this is a start.