172. leeward

Several weeks ago I discovered that a friend of mine had never seen the 1964 film version of Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. It was rather shocking because A) I grew up with it and can’t imagine anyone else not having seen it; and B) he’s gay… and, well, musicals seem the particular purview of the gays. Hell, it’s one of the qualities that all but gave me away back in the day. (My friend Emily said, “You got way too excited about Sondheim to be straight.”)

My friend and I were talking about the moment that language goes from being merely parroting to true acquisition, when words go from sounds to meaning, and I brought up this iconic scene:

He had a percipient observation about the show: namely, that it’s a picture of imperialism. Eliza Doolittle is taken from the gutter by the chauvinistic Henry Higgins, dressed in the garb of the upper class, and taught how to speak and behave “properly.” In the same way, Native American children were taken from their homes by Christian missionaries and taught how to speak, behave and dress like proper Christians (i.e., Western Caucasian culture).

The reason we were talking about this scene, and this song in particular, is that it illustrates that “light bulb” moment. My college French teacher told my class that her’s took place one semester while studying abroad. She was reading in a tree one day, she said, and all of a sudden everything just snapped into place. She didn’t have to translate from French into English anymore. The words carries meaning.

Writer David Sedaris describes a similar moment in Me Talk Pretty One Day, from the essay collection of the same name:

It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult. . .

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.”

These moments came to mind because several weeks ago I finally stopped believing in God. That’s not to say that I haven’t been an atheist these past two years. I still see no evidence or reason now to continue believing in God. The difference is that, a couple of weeks ago, I finally stopped missing God. It’s like that moment when you finally get over someone you’ve held a torch for, and one day, for whatever reason, those feelings stop. The memory of the love and the feeling is still there, but the gravitational pull doesn’t yank you out of your own orbit every time it wheels around.

Walking to work one morning a couple of weeks ago, the part of me that missed having a God to believe in went away. I’m not sure why it happened just then, but it was as if a balloon had popped, or a string were, and I wasn’t tethered to those feelings anymore. I didn’t feel the need to get angry or mean when someone talked about God or faith. I still get upset when hearing about someone being hurt by Christians, but then I get upset when anyone is hurt by anybody, for any reason.

I’m still passionate about the separation of church and state, about promoting secular and humanist values in society and throughout the world, and encouraging people to think for themselves instead of letting their thinking be done for them by those who want to fetter everyone in the world to a 2,000-year-old book. But I’m not doing it out of some revenge fixation, like a jilted lover railing against an ex.

None of us had a choice about being born in the proverbial Christian missionary school and taught the clean, holy Christian ways of the White Man. Neither did any of us have a choice about being attracted to members of the same sex. Eliza Doolittle chose to become the pupil of Henry Higgins, and accept his narrative of being a “proper lady.” But in the process she maintained her sense of self, and at the end of George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, she does indeed go off to marry Freddy and become a teacher of phonetics. Her final words to Higgins in the play show her to be a truly emancipated woman, unlike the chauvinistic ending of Lerner and Lowe’s musical: “Buy them yourself.”

I didn’t have a choice about being raised a Christian and saddled with all the negativity. But I’ll be damned if my parents’ choices are going to steer the course of the rest of my life.

You dear friend who talk so well: you can go to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire.

168. shattered

Apologies for the delay, all five of you who actually read this. I’ve been working a lot and writing for other sites lately, but really haven’t much felt like talking about myself.

I’ve meant to write about the holidays and the experience of getting through Thanksgiving and Christmas with a boyfriend and his family for the first time. Because while it’s certainly been an experience, it wasn’t as crazy or stressful as I expected it would be. Perhaps it was other people’s descriptions of their family holidays that put me off to the whole thing, or had my hackles raised, but there were no big meltdowns, no plate throwing, no huge blowups or fights, or anything else that ends up in movies about the holidays.

Basically, it wasn’t National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Or Home Alone. No neighbors were harmed during the month of December.

It was curious though to see how both Jay and I dealt with holiday stress. He tends to externalize more and withdraw, like most guys. If things get to be too much, he retreats to a quiet place to read or hide out. When he was forced to sit through gift opening on Christmas Eve, he sat in the corner with a book, mostly reading while people opened presents.

I sometimes deal with stress the same way, especially if I’m going through a bout of depression or am tired. But mostly I deal with stress by simply becoming someone else — or rather, I become a version of myself that can deal with that particular stressor. It’s an automatic defense mechanism, like being a personality chameleon.

This is something I’ve been exploring some in therapy the past few months. For a long time I’ve known that there are multiple versions of “me,” personas that I employ to cope with different social situations and people. My mom was one of the first people to point this out when I was a teenager, and she accused me of essentially being a hypocrite; of showing different faces to people instead of just “being myself.”

Of course, what she didn’t know then was that I was already in deep cover as a gay man; that I was desperately trying to hide who I really was from everyone for fear of being found out and things going very bad for me. In case you haven’t heard, gay teens don’t fare very well in fundamentalist Christian circles.

So during the time when most people are forming their adult identities and selves, and figuring out who they are as individuals, I was developing different masks to hide who I really was.

In one of his stories, David Sedaris recounts how his sister Amy had a penchant from an early age for adopting different characters and imitating the adults around her. She would come in for breakfast and her mother would ask, “And who are we today?” To which Amy would respond: “Who don’t you want me to be?”

Sharing that story with my therapist was rather a light bulb moment for both of us, as it brought to light the reality that this is how most of my relationships have operated for most of my life. I figure out who not to be for someone, and then become that person. The majority of my teen and adult life has been spent playing different characters, different versions of myself, for others. Like the sci-fi show Sliders, they’re slight variations of “me,” with different tastes, likes, dislikes, ways of speaking, acting, extroversion and introversion, and so forth.

So the reality is that I’ve never really developed a personality of my own. I’ve invested so much time and energy into developing characters that are socially acceptable, but haven’t put any of that into personal development. Consequently, it’s difficult to share genuine pieces of myself with others. There is a lot here on this blog that I divulge — stuff from my past, painful memories, frustrations. But doing that in writing, on the page, removed from other people is much easier. I don’t have to risk personal rejection necessarily in writing things down.

Everything really fell apart two years ago when I lost Seth and finally owned up to my total lack of belief in God, two huge things that formed the gravitational mass of the comfortable illusion that everything was okay. I’d come out gay two and a half months earlier, and was still adjusting to the notion of being out to my very conservative family. But God, my Christian faith and the church was still grounding me to the identity I’d been carefully cultivating and maintaining over the years. And I’d been painfully and pathetically pining for Seth for over a year, which provided another neat distraction from the fact that the air was quickly escaping from my spiritual life.

I didn’t realize then how deeply my world shattered the night of my birthday. I’d been running a carefully organized circus for 20 years, and all of a sudden the neat solar system I’d built to manage everything quite literally imploded. To cope with the pain I divvied up all the feelings into the different shards of my personality — parts of me that were already managing those different areas of thought and emotion. It was as though I truly became a different person after that night.

Apparently this is common amongst people who grew up in highly stressful and repressive environments as children. In order to survive we break apart to manage the stress and “pass” for acceptable to authority figures. For our child selves, it was life or death. We don’t have a choice.

So now I’m left as an almost-30-year-old with the personality equivalent of a broken mirror. I still revert to my chameleon state when things get stressful. And I still feel removed from various feelings and emotions. Memories are there, but the feelings are strangely absent. It’s an interesting place to be, going into my third decade.

More to come.

 

134. apotropaic

“I had just moved to New York and was wondering if I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. Part of the problem was that, according to several reliable sources, I tend to exhaust people.”
— David Sedaris. “See You Again Yesterday.” Me Talk Pretty One Day

It’s weird thinking that at this time last year I was passed out on my friend Emily’s couch. We were both spending Easter as single adults, me still freshly emotionally raw from the ghastly episode with Seth on my birthday and her having recently separated from her husband. Life was not going particularly well for either of us at that point (one could justifiably say that conditions haven’t changed that much, at least for me, since then), and that ended with us getting fashionably drunk and passing out.

I’m getting sick of referencing my birthday. Doubtless anyone who reads this with any degree of frequency is thinking the same thing.

Tonight I watched What About Bob? with my roommate Mark. It’d been a while since I’d seen it, having grown up with that movie. We were actually introduced to it as a family by an individual who closely resembled Bob in many ways. She claimed to be a survivor of a Satanic cult in Shakopee, and at the time we knew her was going through treatment for dissociative identity disorder, although we later came to find out that this was not true. Most of the things she told us were not true, and yet like Bob she drew us in and convinced us to let her into our family.

As it’s been a while since I’d seen the film, there were several new takeaways in the story, especially relating to Bob.

Bob has, according to Doctor Marvin, a “multi-phobic personality characterized by acute separation anxiety and extreme need for family connections.” He’s like a big neurotic golden retriever, whose need for attention and acceptance is so profound that he pulls everyone around him into his orbit; and because he’s so well-intentioned (like a child, really) nobody can really hate him, even for making demands on his hosts, such as asking about a salt substitute at dinner or rushing in calling for a bowl of water for his fish (who is about to explode from rage over being locked up in a mason jar all day). If anything, they love him for his lovable craziness.

In coming under Dr Marvin’s psychiatric care, Bob begins to radically warp his doctor’s world. Everyone from the ladies at his building’s service to his family comes under Bob’s spell. He’s essentially evicted from his own life by a “textbook narcissist” (though a therapist like Dr Marvin should really know better than to throw around terms like that).

In some ways I can be just as destructive as Bob within my own relationships. Not to pull the victim card, but I did have a pretty toxic childhood and young adulthood in my fundamentalist Christian home. Ask anyone who grew up in a family like that and they’ll tell you that you basically become a master at pretending just to survive. Add the “figuring out that you’re gay mid-way through your teen years” element and on top of trying to be a good Christian kid, attempting to prevent your parents from finding out that you’re gay and possibly going ape-shit, throwing you out of the house and/or shipping you off to an ex-gay camp to “cure” you. Sure, I didn’t have a physically abusive parent. I wasn’t sexually abused. There wasn’t drug use in the house. Lots of people had it worse. But my home life essentially left me unable to truly experience any positive emotions, to form close bonds with other human beings (since my sixteen-year-old self is trying to keep everyone at arm’s length so they don’t find out I’m gay), and to give and receive love.

There’s a whole slough of other issues, but I have been somewhat of an emotional terrorist lately. What most people don’t realize is that bullying isn’t always of the active, playground variety. Sometimes it can run more insidious. I’ve functionally reduced the people closest to me to walking on egg shells lest they set off my trigger-happy anger that lately has been riding close to the surface. Part of it’s revisiting the Seth wounds through new acquaintances, and learning that he started pursuing a new no-strings-attached sexual relationship with another guy not three weeks after my birthday. It was beat-for-beat how our relationship began; and then just a few days ago I found out that he’s now dating someone (some closeted pastor here in the Cities whose music plays on the conservative Christian station KTIS now and again apparently).

And I’m still single. And the most important thing you need to know about me is that I’m highly competitive, so it’d be understatement to say that I’m feeling a tad lapped. Emily tells me that a relationship isn’t a race, but my limbic brain says differently. Part of it is just wanting to replace him with someone who I care about and who cares about me in return, but the louder part wants him to hear about how well I’m doing and that in spite of what he did to me that I succeeded. (In my world, the height of success is finding a boyfriend.)

What infuriates me is that, like Bob, all of this comes so easily to him. He just waltzes in and everything falls neatly in place for him, while I (like Dr Marvin) watch helpless as everyone unwittingly conspires to take it all away from me, evicting me from my world. And the awful thing is that I can’t beat him. He’s too charming, too sexy, and too lucky. Some people just have all those qualities. And some people, like me, are fucked before they even leave the starting gate.

I’m nearly 30. Only in movies does the protagonist find love late in life.