174. flashforward

So it’s been a rather eventful last couple of weeks for me personally since last I wrote regularly.

My creative nonfiction class is over, and my writing project is slowly starting to emerge from the star nursery of invention. I’m gradually starting to put bits and pieces of my history together as more memories emerge from my childhood and young adult years that I forgot about. So it’s been a useful process.

Many of those memories I buried because they were too unpleasant and turbulent to think about, but it’s good to revisit them now as an adult, with a broader and more knowing perspective. The ultimate goal is to develop about fourteen essays on the themes of survival, acceptance, all around the dual journeys of coming out gay and atheist. From various reactions so far it sounds like a marketable story, but who knows.

Hell, who knows if I’m even good enough of a writer to tackle it…

The other big piece of news is that, as of a month ago today, I’m a single man again. This last relationship lasted for just about eight months. I’m feeling good about the split overall. It was the right decision and call to make, but it was still hard, and I’ve still felt like shit over it.

There were a couple of challenges to the relationship to begin with. One, he lives about an hour north of the Twin Cities, and for most of our relationship he didn’t have a car so every weekend I drove up to see him. He did get a car a few months before we broke up, but there was something wrong with the brakes or something and he didn’t feel safe driving it.

Another challenge was fibromyalgia. In case you’re not familiar, fibromyalgia is widespread chronic pain that’s usually accompanied by fatigue, trouble sleeping, and joint stiffness. During the summer when he was able to spend time outside he was mostly fine, but when any kind of weather shift happened he’d be knocked out flat. So once winter came along he was in a rough state.

As Esther Perel says in the TED Talk below, “There is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is . . . a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shutdown.”

I enjoy how she summarized responses she got from people talking about their lovers: “I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio; when she is onstage; when he is in his element; when she’s doing something she’s passionate about; when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him; when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident, [it’s] probably the biggest turn-on across the board.”

With Jay, I so rarely got to see him in his element, or see him passionate about anything. When he was passionate, it was about sustainability or something that had to do with the outdoors or systems thinking. Which is great, but not something that got me excited.

Once we started getting serious, he started talking about marriage and moving in together. (Mind you, this is after about four months. Big red flag.) I was on the fence about whether or not I was ready to commit, but given my attachment issues, I wanted to give our relationship a chance and see if the feelings followed. (They didn’t.) My mistake was not being more honest about that.

When we talked about where we wanted to live, the primary factor he was considering was staying out of the urban circle of the Cities – as close to rural as possible. Since he was the one with fibromyalgia, his needs apparently outweighed mine. His argument was that since I plan to be a writer, I could work from anywhere.

A couple months later he was talking about moving to a dryer, warmer climate. I said that I wasn’t too keen on moving to the middle of nowhere, as it’s in the middle of nowhere and far from culture and resources. He dismissed that, saying that I need to be less reliant on stores and start growing my own food, and that I don’t need culture as much as I think I do.

Aheh.

So I was initially attracted to Jay because of his passion for the environment and the fact that he’s an unabashed nerd and a Whovian, like I am. And he’s an attractive guy. But the more our relationship progressed, the less we really seemed to have in common. There was also the fact that he never really wanted to do anything with my friends, or meet the people in my life who are important to me, even though I’d met most of his friends and family.

My biggest regret is letting it go on for as long as it did, and not listening to myself that it wasn’t the right relationship for either of us. Truth be told, I was afraid of being single again, because this time I’d be single, gay, and thirty. And I didn’t want to be alone.

What it comes down to for me is less about age, and more about the fact that I don’t feel desirable. I feel awkward, crippled by my fundamentalist Christian upbringing, mangled by my inability to flirt with guys I like, and hugely undermined by my brain, which usually makes me feel old and weird around the guys I’ve dated. In reality, they’re probably just not very interesting and consequently not right for me.

I also feel like a failure for still being single at my age. Most of my friends are paired off, and have been with their partners for years. So I wonder what’s wrong with me that I haven’t found someone.

Truth is, I’m just not good with uncertainty. Or being alone with myself.

143. levigate

Tonight I just feel like bitching, friends. Sorry for the break in usual programming. I’m just suddenly incredibly sad and discouraged. Time for anti-depressants and major therapy, because this isn’t working.

As many of you know, I’ve been following through on my resolve to end my single status this year because I’m tired of complaining about being single, and so is everyone else in my life. So I’ve been going on more dates, which has ended in my being crushed over and over again.

This past week I’ve been emailing with a guy from OkCupid who messaged me expressing interest. From what we were saying we seemed to have a lot in common and similar goals in what we were looking for. He had a busy week, as did I, and this weekend he had a wedding to go so we set a date for Tuesday evening to meet. We’ve been emailing back and forth in the meantime, sharing a more but not too much in the event that.

Tonight I got an email from him saying that he’d read through my blog (I’d shared the address with him yesterday) and didn’t think that we’d be a good match. I emailed back a little while ago asking if there was any particular reason, because I’m genuinely interested in what about me doesn’t work for people, or if there’s something that I do that makes getting to know me or seeing potential in us as a couple prohibitive. You can’t fix what you’re doing wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

He emailed back just now to say that from what he read he thinks that there’s too much still to work through about Seth, that I seem angry about it, and that it’s not fair to him to be dating him while that ghost is still hanging around. Which is a valid point, which is why I really need to go through therapy (only problem being that I’m fucking broke, uninsured, and can’t afford that kind of treatment).

He also accused me of being ageist, which is probably also valid. But why am I so terrified of being single at 29? Because I’m 29 and I’ve never been in a serious relationship. Period. Because I already don’t see myself as valuable. I’m already terrified that nobody wants me as a person, that there’s nothing intrinsically worthwhile about me, that I’m an oddity that no one knows what to do with, and that I’m damaged goods. And I’m terrified of the future, because experience has taught me thus far that everyone only sees me as a friend or a fuck buddy, and nobody wants me as a partner. I’m the fucking best friend who sees everyone else married off and happy. I’m a trope.

As I was driving home, I thought a little more about it. Why am I terrified of being single at 29? Because I’ve never felt loved in my entire life, and every day that goes by the hope that I’ll ever learn to love someone gets dimmer and dimmer. I never felt loved by my parents growing up, and there was really no one else in my early life who I had close relationships with besides my family. My younger sister and I were homeschooled until the 10th grade so our world was incredibly insular.

My parents have pointed out all of the things that they did that showed their love for me: things like coming to pick me up in sub-zero weather when my car died on 35W in the middle of the night, coming to all of my shows (even the ones they didn’t like), and not rejecting me when they found out I was gay. But those things don’t communicate love for me. They’re just nice things you do for each other because that’s how we evolved as a social primate species. Otherwise the world would go to hell pretty quickly.

People say that I need to let them love me. Truth is, I don’t know what love feels like. My personality is so fractured from the different people I have to be in different settings that I don’t even know who it is that they’re trying to love. Love for me is like the affection that you feel for a pet.

In the end, I can’t deny that his assessment is valid. He’s right. I’m a toxic mess, and it’s wrong to inflict that on someone. I don’t blame him for running for the hills, and it’s my own goddamned fault for over-sharing. I shouldn’t have shown him my blog right away, not until he got to know me better. Lesson learned. And maybe I do deal with things too publicly, which isn’t fair to people who don’t know that they’re being discussed out in the open like this. It’s one thing for me to do with that with my own life: it’s another to do it with someone else’s.

And he’s right about Seth. To quote the ever-prescient Fiona Apple, “I can’t help you out while she’s still around” (I know). I just don’t know how to get him out of my system 100%. I let him in on the fool’s hope that he could love me and he couldn’t. It was so easy falling in love, but how do you fall out of love? And that’s what always happens, I guess. Did I even truly love him, or was it just me wanting the idea of him?

It’s not that I’m disappointed that I was turned down, or that I was even attached since we’d never even met. It’s more that this possibility went to sod before it even had a chance to seed; that it always goes like this; that guys get interested and then decide that I’m a mess they don’t want to clean up (Paper Bag).

So what am I looking for? Someone to rescue me, I guess, because I haven’t a fucking clue how to save myself.

106. review

What’s a year, really? 12 months? 52 weeks? 525,600 minutes (or, when I asked Google, 525,948.766 minutes)? Does the earth wake up as it’s hurtling around the sun at a dizzying 67,000 miles per hour (that’s 107,000 kilometers per hour for my metric friends) and think, “I say! This looks awfully familiar. Haven’t I been here before?” After all, it doesn’t have much else to think about. It’s cleared its orbital zone, except for the occasional stray asteroid or comet that waltzes into its path that occasionally crashes into it.

This is nothing compared to how fast we’re hurtling around our home galaxy. The sun (and therefore the earth as well and all that’s on it) is moving at an incredible 483,000 miles per hour (792,000 km/hr). We orbit once every 225 million years.

225 million years ago (Mya), the earth was in the beginning stages of the Mesozoic Era, in the middle of the Triassic Period known as the Carnian stage; with the continents having just formed into one massive supercontinent known as Pangea. There were no ice caps as the continental mass was centered around the equator, and earth was hot and dry. Tiny dinosaurs called archosaurs were beginning to evolve, along with the ancestors of the first mammals—tiny shrew-like creatures called adelobasileus that appeared about 225 Mya.

That should give us some perspective on what has happened in the past galactic year.

The primates (our direct ancestors) appeared about 65 Mya. The genus Homo didn’t appear until around 2.5 Mya, and even then, Homo sapiens (modern humans) didn’t evolve until about 200,000 years ago. Putting that in terms of mean solar time, if we were to set a timer for 60 minutes…

5 minutes after we hit “start” (when the earth began its galactic “year”), the first mammals begin to appear;
15 and a half minutes later, North America separates from Africa;
42 minutes later a meteor crashes into Chicxulub, in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, resulting in the mass extinction of 80-90% of marine life and 85% of land species, including the dinosaurs;
43 minutes later, primates appear;
With a minute to go, at 58 seconds, upright walking hominins appear;
At 59.81 seconds, Human and Neanderthal lineages start to diverge genetically;
At 59.85 seconds, Heidelberg Man develops speech;
Modern man appears just milliseconds before the timer goes off.

We’ve barely been on this earth. We can trace our first modern male ancestor back to about 60,000 years ago, but in terms of the galactic “year,” all of recorded history is but a fraction of a millisecond.

If that though doesn’t fill you with awe, wonder and amazement — nothing will.

Then there’s an illustration on Wikipedia of the Earth’s location in the known universe, which is equally awe-inspiring. As Douglas Adams wrote, describing the horrific torture device known as the Total Perspective Vortex,

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

All that is to say that 2011 was a pretty awful year for many of us, and we weren’t sorry to see it go.

I did have hopes going into 2011:

By now I’d have at least gotten more established in musical theatre;
That I’d have found a day job that was enjoyable and would be more financially stable;
That I’d be in a serious relationship by now;
That come early summer I’d have a home church in SafeHouse, and possibly even a relationship with Seth;
That I’d have achieved more success with my compositions.

Looking back on it now, none of those hope and dreams came anywhere close to being met:

I started a temp job in February that I ended up loving; that seemed like it might lead to a career until it abruptly ended at the end of November;
I had a horrific experience music directing Sound of Music where I had little support from theater staff or production crew (including the director); was constantly undermined by a number of key auxiliary cast members (my principles and orchestra rocked though); and subsequently never wanted to direct another musical again;
I had my heart broken by Seth in the worst possible way on my birthday, which led to becoming an atheist and losing that community I was looking forward to being a part of in SafeHouse, along with my faith (although in a way, my coming out as an atheist was as inevitable as my coming out a gay man—that is to say, both should’ve happened much sooner);
I had a string of unsuccessful and very disappointing dates, flings and relationships, all of which left me feeling less desirable, more defective and unlovable, and less hopeful of ever finding a guy who wants to commit to me as much as I do to him;
My trumpet sonata was premiered in Tacoma in June, but sadly that performance hasn’t led to more opportunities like I thought it might. I’d sort of hoped that trumpet players might hear it and want to pick it up to learn it, and maybe even commission new works for trumpet from me, which would lead to more visibility, more musicians knowing my name and my work, and commissioning more and more work. But no.

Add to that that at the end of this year (on Christmas Day, to be precise), I gave my dad the last $225 dollars that I owed him for my car, whereupon he gave me the title to said car; and I told him and my mom and that I wanted nothing more to do with them again— at least so long as they hold their fundamentalist beliefs about homosexuality.

So, to close out 2011, I divorced the family that I’ve had for twenty-eight years.

That’s heavy stuff.

I feel even less sure of myself going into 2012 than I did going into 2011. That beginning was similar to this year’s: with not knowing what my job prospects are; waiting to hear from the temp agency about job possibilities while sending out resumes in the chance of striking gold; and generally feeling miserable, lonely and depressed.

Pathetic.

I’ve said this before, but I feel as though I seriously fucked up in college. Majoring in music composition seemed like the perfect idea, and the future seemed so certain. Everyone thought that I showed great potential and talent as a composer. I’d be a working composer by, well, twenty-eight.

What I didn’t factor was that I had no business sense or training. That I’d had my head in the clouds during high school and college, focusing so narrowly on the Arts, on music and writing. That I’d failed to develop any Real World skills. And the economy drying up.

Then I’d graduated with said degree in music composition and…

… now what was I going to do?

Most of the people I know who are successful figured out fairly early what they were good at and wanted to do, and started doing it. They got the education they needed or cultivated the skills and the experience. And I feel as though I realized too late that I started down the wrong career path, and it’s a dead end. I’m not even good enough at what I am trained at. I’ve worked a variety of office jobs. I do okay, but always seem to find myself in situations where opportunities to impress my supervisors arise, and I try, but quickly find myself in way over my head.

And I crash.

So I don’t know what to do. A few hundred years ago I could’ve found gainful employ with the Church directing a choir, or with the nobility as a court musician, or even as a writer. And I’m apparently barely passable as any of those. Today you have to be extremely good and extremely clever (or lucky) to make it like that. I’m detail oriented, yes; but I lack the organizational and strategic-thinking skills that are needed to be truly successful.

This is normally where a manager comes in: someone who recognizes that an individual possesses talent—but not necessarily savviness. Often that means just being in the right place at the right time. And I’ve no clue how to make that sort of thing happen. Ira Glass randomly discovered David Sedaris reading his diary in a Chicago club in the early ’90s—a discovery that led to the publication of the SantaLand Diaries, his account of working as a seasonal elf in Macy’s SantaLand during Christmastime in New York City.

He got lucky.

Artists have a somewhat symbiotic, commensalist relationship with society. We don’t really contribute anything tangible to society, aside from making it more aesthetically pleasing perhaps. Kind of like remora fish and sharks. We provide “valuable services,” but the shark could get by just fine without us.

So while hurtling through the universe at 483,000 miles per hour, circling a nuclear fireball at 67,000 miles per hour, at the bottom of a deep gravity well, I’m looking hard at myself and must conclude:

I feel like a failure.

96. reboot

Thoughts about NaNoWriMo 2011.

Tonight I finished my novel, “Relics.” Or rather, I passed the 50,000 word mark. 50,131 to be exact. That’s what we were supposed to do: write 50,000 words in 30 days. And I did that. Well, I didn’t really finish the novel itself. I looked down at the word count and realized I’d passed the 50K mark, stopped, hit Ctrl-A, then Ctrl-C, then Ctrl-V’d my novel into the validator form and hit enter. All manner of bells and whistles sounded.

It felt incredibly empty.

And I’m left feeling utterly drained and defeated at the end of all of this. Not only am I utterly unsatisfied with the final product, it’s absolute trash (in my opinion, and in this case mine is the only one that matters).

What’s worse is that everyone else seemed to pass the mark so effortlessly. Some people even finished weeks ahead of schedule. And I had to strive and churn, and basically shut myself away all weekend to get even 50,131 fucking awful words out; none of which made any sense plot-wise, and none of which I’m happy with. So, after submitting it tonight (or this morning, rather), I selected the last 18,489 words and without a single hesitation or thought hit the delete key. This is what comes of being a slightly bi-polar, depressed hyper-perfectionist: I’m my worst and most unforgiving critic.

Basically, I can’t forgive myself for not coming up with something decent, or even passable. None of it feels inspired. The concept that I came up with was way out of my league, at least for the given time frame. The deeper I got into the story the more I realized I didn’t know and didn’t have time to sketch or work out; and the more I didn’t know the steeper the curve became and the more daunting and formidable the shadow of my own incompetence grew. There’s a whole world other I haven’t worked out and just couldn’t get the voice for, that I’ve barely scratched the surface of, and I should have been able to. Other people seem to have been able to do it.

I was only able to produce absolute shit.

All I’ve wanted to do for the last three weeks is curl up in a ball, watch movies and just not have to deal with novels or the rest of the goddamn world. I feel creatively and emotionally drained and empty. I’m looking back on past work that I’ve done, even for the short fiction collection I finished in October, and that was much more inspired. Even this feels insipid.

Depression is a bitch, my friends, and it sucks being a creative artist afflicted with it.

I’m going to bed. After I make my bed, of course. I just took the laundry out of the dryer.