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.”

006b. story part iii

So apparently a few people were concerned about my state of mind after reading the McDonagh story. Rest assured, I am not depressed or suicidal or anything. I chose to begin with that because of the overall theme of The Pillowman—if, knowing what pain and heartache we will go through in the journey to growing into adults, we would choose that path anyway; if the pain now is part of the happiness then.

If I shared with my happy seven-year-old self that one day he would grow up to be a gay man and all that means; experience the confusion and anguish of disappointing your parents, your friends, your church and G-d; and spend many dark years feeling like a freak, not knowing who or where you are as an individual—would he still go through with it? Is the pain now part of the happiness to come?

Picking up where I left off—college. This’ll go a bit faster.

Going to a conservative Christian college poses its own unique challenges. It has its own culture, just like any place. At a secular university, I probably would have been spotted right away by the GLBT crowd, thrown out of the closet and begun my college life as a gay student. And gotten into a lot of trouble that would have probably led to me losing my faith entirely through essentially sinful living.

Instead, though unsaid, the pressure is to hook up with someone of the opposite sex as quickly as possible. “Ring by spring” as the saying goes. I discovered a bevy of distractions though—working as an accompanist and piano teacher; taking as many credits as possible each semestre; and joining too many music ensembles (which made for some interesting Christmas concerts logistically).

The hardest thing about that college was how many attractive guys there were. In fact, most of them were. Walk into a classroom and there’s eye candy everywhere. Not that there weren’t plenty of attractive women as well, and that should have been a dead give-away—that it was the guys that my eyes were drawn to instantly. One summer I took tennis and spent most of it outside with several very muscular (and incredibly sexy) guys who, naturally, had to lose their shirts. I won’t tell you how I managed to deal with all that pent up sexual frustration.

By my sophomore year, I had a clue what was going on. I wanted desperately to tell someone, to find out if this was normal, if I could be “fixed.” But I also knew that I rant he risk of being kicked out if they found out that I was gay. So I did what any conscientious Christian guy with same-sex feelings would do. I hid. I tried hard to be attracted to women; tried fantasising about girls in an attempt to force myself straight. But invariably a guy would enter the mental picture and it was all over.

The next two years were a blur of activity and productivity. I wrote two full-length operas in that time span, and scores of other pieces for my musical friends. Self-medicating with busyness works well until you have to stop. By the end of my college career I was so burnt out that I couldn’t stand music any more and had resolved that my educational stint was done.

In 2005 I visited a friend in England who I had a bit of a crush on as an undergrad. She was doing post-grad work there, and of anyone I could see myself possibly marrying her and white-knuckling it. However, upon spending time with her I realised that it was the idea of her that I loved—the intellectual artist-philosopher that I idealised. But I wasn’t attracted to her.

By this time most of my friends were married or on their way. I lost my job in April of 2005 and about the same time was involved in a major accident (that wasn’t my fault), so much of my energies were directed toward survival and making ends meet. G-d provided both a job and a new car, and for a few months saw a shrink to deal with my anger. Surprise, surprise, my parents were at the centre of a lot of it, but there was also the issue of unvalidated feelings. You’d think that there, in the confidentiality of that setting, I could feel comfortable telling my therapist that I was having feelings for men. It wasn’t until journaling one day that I really grasped the idea that I could be gay. And that scared me so much that I quickly shut the door and never went back. Probably a big mistake, but I picked up a lot of valuable tools, such as cognitive therapy and metacognition.

Got back into theatre with a friend of mine who I’d done some work with in 2004. With a few of his friends we founded a theatre company and put up a couple of productions that weren’t the greatest, but it led to some more work with the same director. That all eventually led to the work that I’m doing now, writing for companies and theaters throughout the Twin Cities.

Fast forward a couple of years to February of 2008. I got laid off again due to budget cut-backs and was once again jobless. That previous summer I’d come out to a girl friend of mine who expressed her own feelings for me, and in that moment I knew that I couldn’t lead her on any more. It was hard because several weeks earlier I’d attended a session on spiritual healing with another friend of mine and was actually prayed over by a husband and wife. That was the first time I’d told anyone that I struggled with same-sex attraction, and I thought it was over. But the feelings were still there, and I was just as attracted to guys as ever. So, at 25, I told my friend that I was gay.

At that point I still held out hope that I might just be bisexual. I had feelings for another friend of mine, and one night after a rehearsal actually told her so. She confessed that she too had feelings for me, and like a complete dolt left it at that. So she was probably very confused—but then, so was I! I had a major crush on one of the guys in the cast. Then she started dating a mutual friend of ours, and I was super busy stage managing so again I let it go.

So back to the summer of 2008. I’d just moved into the apartment I’m at now, and had been job searching and applying anywhere there were openings. A lot of friends were kind enough to help financially and I never would have survived without that. I’d come out to a few more friends, at least telling them that I was 99.9% sure that I was gay. But it wasn’t until working overnight at Target, when I had scads of time alone, to think, and surrounded by some very attractive males, that it really sank in—I’m gay.

It wasn’t until that point that I even considered some of the theological ramifications of this realisation. The Bible condemned homosexuality. I’d been taught that my entire life, so therefore the Bible was now condemning me and my feelings. I didn’t choose to be gay. I’d fought it for years, and couldn’t anymore. The Bible condemns sin, and I am definitely a sinner; but there was no way out of this. Was G-d testing me to see how much He actually mattered to me—whether I could be willing to live a celibate life to His glory, alone? But then why allow me to have these desires in the first place? From the first post, I think I’ve made it clear that it wasn’t like I woke up one day and said, “I think I’ll try being gay.” I’ve always had feelings for men. It wasn’t until adolescence that they became sexual.

So I set out to try and figure it out. I knew that I didn’t fit the stereotype of a gay male, and had no desire to either. Culturally, I identified as a straight man. (From my very first post, I now identify as “mainstream gay,” practically indistinguishable from straights.) I wasn’t promiscuous and had no desire to be. But I wanted to be with men, physically.

That’s been the past few months. I’ve been having a conversation with a now good friend from another blogging site. His insights have been invaluable in accepting and learning to love myself again, and gaining right perspective on my own orientation. I made the decision early on that I wasn’t going to let the gay culture define me. It was the subculture-orientated gays who ran contrary to the Bible—sex addictions, multiple partners, drugs, alcohol, cross-dressing.

G-d made me a man (and not a woman) was my reasoning. I’m male, and am going to embrace everything about that. So apart from the Biblical condemnation of homosexuality there seemed to be no reason why I couldn’t be attracted to other men and still be masculine, provided that I follow the same guidelines that straight Christian guys do—don’t lust after another man, treat guys with respect as brothers in Christ. The only difference is that the Bible advises men and women to marry rather than “burn with passion” (1 Cor 7:9). There is no such provision outlined in Scripture for gays.

When it came to getting a handle on this theologically though, there was absolutely no consensus among scholars. The conservative Christians sounded too dogmatic, and the liberals seemed too open-minded. There had to be a balance somewhere because I was stuck in the middle wanting to not be condemned to hell for liking guys and also not wanting to live the life of a celibate monk. Because let’s face it: I was not granted that gift.

One of things I addressed was my frustration with masculinity as it is currently expressed by most western males. It seemed equally fragmented and distorted as the campy subculture-oriented drag queens; so I started researching the history of masculinity as traced by sociologists and anthropologists. That will be another post.

One final thing I’ll add is that it’s incredibly lonely being a Christian who is gay, and that’s one of the most crippling things of all—not being able to tell your Christian straight friends that you’re not like them after all. So several weeks ago I joined what is known as the Gay Christian Network. Its mission is to “serve Christians who happen to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender and those who care about them.” I’ve found that a lot of guys have a similar story to mine in terms of a conservative religious upbringing and then coming later to realise their same-sex feelings and the confusion that arises from that. So it’s been incredibly helpful. Still haven’t found much in the way of off-line community here though.

One guy on there pointed me to a ministry called Inclusive Orthodoxy, founded by a fellow by the name of Justin Cannon. There’s a booklet on there titled The Bible, Christianity, and Homosexuality. It’s an in-depth study of all the famous references to homosexuality in the Bible, going back to the original texts and looking at them in the context of word usage and the culture in which the documents were written. It helped me come closer to terms with who I am right now and the possibility of being in a committed relationship with a Christian guy.

I haven’t looked, but I’d be curious to read a response to Cannon’s study from the reformed theological community: D.A. Carson, Os Guinness, R.C. Sproul, John Piper and the like—all theologians I admire and respect.

If you have questions about any of this, please feel free to ask. There are probably many holes in this story, things I’ve left out or unaddressed.

One more thing. Unlike many gay Christians, this issue does not define me. I’m not looking to identify with the gay community, even the LGBT Christian community. This is a very private thing for me, so don’t expect to see me in gay documentaries or publishing gay literature. It doesn’t interest me and there are more important things to spend time on or campaign for.

Shalom aleichem,
Muirnin

006a. story part ii

In case you didn’t get to read the first part of this, it was a story from Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman. In it, a man made of pillows has the job of helping the people whose horrible, awful lives lead them to commit suicide. He goes back in time to when that man or woman was a child, tells them how terrible their life is going to be and helps them commit suicide in a way that looks like an accident, the reason being that parents have an easier time dealing with the tragic accidental death of a five-year-old as supposed to a five-year-old “who has seen how shitty life is and taken action to avoid it.”

So after one last job, the Pillowman decides to go back and visit himself as a little boy. He tells his whole life story, about his job and how awful it is that he has to do this, and the little Pillowboy just wants to help and make people happy, so he pours the can of petrol (gasoline for you state-side folks) the Pillowman brought over himself and lights himself on fire. And as he burns the Pillowman starts to fade away, but as he does so he hears the screams of all the hundreds of thousands of children who came back to life and lead cold, wretched lives because he wasn’t there to prevent it; and the screams of their self-inflicted deaths “which this time, of course, would be conducted entirely alone.”

Apart from being horribly disturbing, it’s a fitting beginning for telling my story. Not that I’ve led a cold, wretched life. In fact, my life has been quite happy. But it’s hard looking back on myself as a happy six-year-old, before I stopped smiling in photos, knowing that that little boy would grow up to be gay, fall in love with a man and most likely have sex with him. Little boys don’t do things like that, not at that age anyway—and especially not when it’s you. In the same way (though not quite as personal) it’s weird looking at my younger sister from when we were kids, and knowing that she would one day fall in love with a man, marry and have sex with him. This thought occurred to me the other day, as slightly twisted as it is. Even looking at pictures of people at weddings as they grow up, looking at who they were and seeing the adults they’ve become who are starting a family of their own.

So here’s the issue that it raises (and why I started out with The Pillowman). By the gauge of society and my faith, my sister and her husband have a conventional and “normal” relationship. My parents love her husband, like the son they never had. (They probably see him more than they do me—and let’s face it, I wasn’t exactly a “normal” son. Apart from being the first-born male, I don’t “do” family very well.) They will probably have kids someday. Then I’ll really be an uncle. (Shit.)

Me, on the other hand—I will probably find a guy and fall in love with him; have to tell my parents that I’m gay (still haven’t done that) and risk either being disowned by them or face enormous pressure to go into an ex-gay ministry and turn straight or basically renounce my faith because a true Christian doesn’t persist in a “life of sin”; probably leave my church (because I honestly can’t see going to service on Sunday with my boyfriend and not hold hands with him); and face stares and whispers for a while, at least until homosexuality becomes more mainstream.

Maybe I’m over-reacting, but this is how it looks in my head.

As I stated in my first post, my family could best be described as non-affiliated evangelical fundamentalist—mainstream Christian, in other words. Was raised with the Bible, went to church every Sunday, and was taught right from wrong. The final word was the Word of G-d, and my father. We never really talked about homosexuality as a family apart from seeing images of hateful Christians on TV and the flamboyant gays they were screaming at with those awful signs. I recall driving past some protesters with signs bearing “FAGS BURN IN HELL” as a kid and not really understanding what any of that meant. I don’t think my parents ever gave me a real answer on that. But gays couldn’t be Christian so that wasn’t even an option in my mind. My dad taught at a Christian community college in a small town in the Midwest where there were no gays that we knew of. This was in the mid- to early 1990s.

Okay. So, happy child.

For the most part I was happy, but I was also very angry. I blamed my firey temper on my red hair and Irish ancestry. Much of the focus of that anger was often at my dad with whom I still have a hit-and-miss relationship. We didn’t get along very well. Maybe I resented him for working so much. He tried to spend as much time as possible with us, but he was away a lot and when he was home he was grading or practising (he’s a professional trumpeter too). I have memories of going to the park with him and family vacations, but the two of us never really connected. Maybe it’s because we’re so similar, something I hate to admit because it’s getting truer every day. I have a degree in music composition, and it’s one of the few areas that my dad and I can connect with. We can look at music scores together that we’ve written, and I still value and seek out his opinion on anything that I write. There isn’t as much much tension between us now. I’m learning to see the things that he does for me as expressions of his love for me, but I think I still resent him for not being more of a “father” to me when I was a kid.

Though they made a lot of mistakes, my parents really did the best that they knew how with the knowledge that they had. In fact, my mom and dad are the first generation in their families to not have pre-marital sex or get divorced. Their family backgrounds aren’t so fortunate. My mom’s dad left my grandmother, my mom and her brother to be with another woman. I refuse to have anything to do with him, though my mom has reached out to him and his second wife.

My dad has the strangest story of all. He’s a middle child of three siblings. His own upbringing was pretty chaotic and painful as a farm kid in rural Pennsylvania, with an emotionally distant and by today’s standards a physically abusive father, and a mother who killed herself when he was six. He was never able to grieve her properly, and actually has a lot of repressed memories from that period. It’s only in the past decade that he’s really been able to go back and put her to rest properly. I’m not sure of the whole story, but his dad remarried and his stepmom had a son who did some cruel things to my father. It’s a miracle that he came out of that as well-adjusted as he is, but that’s a testament to the mercy and grace of G-d.

What that meant for me is that I got shortchanged in the years that most sons bond with their fathers and getting that male imprint. That may be a large reason why I’m gay now, and to be fair, he didn’t know what to do with me since boys were more or less left to their own devices when he was growing up in the 1950s and that’s all he knew. But our relationship has always been strained. He never sought me out or attempted to have a relationship with me, leaving me to go off by myself to write or create or read. He asserts that I never seemed very interested, and I don’t doubt it. I was always an independent-minded child.

Looking back now, there were signs of things to come. For example, I identified more with the villains or the anti-heros in stories rather than with the one who gets the girl in the end. I played with Legos and would make up stories,  and the male characters were always doing things together (though at the time I didn’t think of it that way). I enjoyed looking at pictures of shirtless guys (but never drew attention to that). But no one showed me any of that. No pedophile uncle or stranger came along and molested me. I was into guys in the same way that boys are often secretly fascinated with girls. But my culture, family and church held a different standard and so I kept it hidden.

There were a lot of couples, weddings and babies. My dad played for many of them, and I went along. They were always telling me that I’d be up there one day, with the girl G-d had for me, but it wasn’t something I aspired to at all. In fact, quite the opposite. I swore I’d never get married. As my teen years drew on, the interest in girls that everyone talked about didn’t come. The first couple of years of puberty were pretty uneventful sexually.

Emotionally and spiritually it was a much darker time.

One night at an AWANA retreat a couple of the guys in my cabin decided to play a prank on me. It upset me a lot, and I’m still not even sure what inspired me but I waited until everyone was asleep and at midnight got up out of bed, stood in the centre of the room and proceeded to curse every guy who had offended me. It’s still a vivid memory for me, the feeling of power and the inviting of something dark into my life. I got into magick at this time, but thankfully G-d never let me get too far down that path.

The next couple of years were pretty tense, marked by frightening outbursts of rage directed at my sisters and my parents which were no doubt demonically driven because there were some terrifying dreams as well. My parents tried to get me under control but nothing worked. I hurt so many people who just tried to love and help me, but I couldn’t hear any of it. At one point my father tried exorcising demons out of me and I laughed in his face. Not one of my proudest moments.

If there were a few characteristic of my life then, it’s how unhappy, selfish and lonely I was. Outwardly, everything was fine. I was on the drama and music teams in youth group and played for church regularly. So many lessons I learned that have made me the crazy, creative guy I am today! Inwardly though, I was dead. Spiritual things were of little to no importance, and there was something vaugely different about me that I hid from everyone that alienated me from everyone else—including G-d.

It was about that time that two changes started working in my life. One was that being around other kids who seemed to have a passion for G-d ignited for the first time an interest in the spiritual. It seemed important, and I began to see that maybe it wasn’t just about avoiding hell; that it could actually impact everyday life! I began to study the scriptures with friends in small bible studies and groups; had church Sunday morning and youth group Wednesday night; got involved with a Precepts study and gained an understanding of ancient middle eastern customs that has transformed my view of the old and new covenants, as well as the Passover traditions that became communion.

About the same time that I was getting involved with youth group that adolescence began to set in. I noticed that my guy friends were going through kind of the same thing, but they were becoming more interested in girls. As long as I can remember, I’ve never been interested in women much beyond seeing them as people, and then once I started developing sexually it really became apparent that I was into guys. At the time there was no vocabulary for me to make sense of any of that. The word “gay” never even came to mind because it wasn’t even a possibility.

There was this one guy in youth group, Peter, who always made me lose my cool. If there’s one moment I can point back to of when I knew I was gay, it’s the first time I saw him with the new eyes that being a teenage guy affords. When he came around, my heart started racing, my palms sweat; it kind of made me dizzy, and it ached in that one part of my chest when you want something so badly. Thank G-d I’m practically blind because I could just take off my glasses when he was around. That made it rather interesting when I was at the piano helping lead music. I could be totally focused, and then he’d walk in.

Men and women got married. That’s what the Bible taught. Ephesians 5, Genesis 2, and Jesus were pretty clear on the subject. Guys were just friends, which honestly was pretty vague. Hanging out? Playing sports? Video games? I was an intellectual and an artist. None of that made any sense. Now I understand masculine psychology better, but still it’s not a part of me.

Regardless, even as a kid I felt it was something to hide, and then as a teenager I learned to dissociate those feelings and essentially lock them away, learning to blend in. Being involved in AP classes at school and seriously pursuing the piano and music study was a good mask. When other guys were starting to date, I was practising piano 3-4 hours a day and buckling down with hours of homework at night. Perhaps my friends knew something was up, but a high school friend told me recently that most people back then thought I was the ultimate band geek! Even now, it feels like someone else feeling something, and I’m not a part of it.

To be continued…

Next time: college in a nutshell, therapy, and last summer.

005. story part i

The Pillowman
by Martin McDonagh
(adapted from his play of the same title)

Once upon a time there was a man, who did not look like normal men. He was about nine feet tall and he was all made up of these fluffy pink pillows and his body was a pillow; his fingers were tiny little pillows, even his head was a pillow, a big round pillow. And on his head he had two button eyes and a big smiley mouth which was always smiling, so you could always see his teeth, which were also pillows. Little white pillows.

The Pillowman had to look like this, he had to look soft and safe, because of his job, because his job was a very sad and a very difficult one. Whenever a man or a lady was very very sad because they’d had a dreadful and hard life and they just wanted to end it all, they just wanted to take their own lives and take all the pain away, just as they were about to do it, by razor, or by bullet, or by gas, the Pillowman would go to them, and sit with them, and gently hold them, and he’d say, ‘Hold on a minute.’ And time would slow strangely, and as time slowed, the Pillowman would go back in time to when that man or that lady was just a little boy or a little girl, to when the life of horror they were to lead hadn’t quite yet begun. And the Pillowman’s job was very very sad, because the Pillowman’s job was to get that child to kill themselves, and so avoid the years of pain that would just end up in the same place for them anyway: facing an oven, facing a shotgun, facing a lake.

‘But I’ve never heard of a small child killing themselves,’ you might say. Well, the Pillowman would always suggest they to it in a way that would just look like a tragic accident: he’d show them the bottle of pills that looked just like sweeties; he’d show them the place on the river where the ice was too thin; he’d show them the parked cars that it was really dangerous to dart out between; he’d show them the plastic bag with no breathing holes, and exactly how to tighten it. Because mummies and daddies always find it easier to come to terms with a five-year-old lost in a tragic accident then they do with a five-year-old who has seen how shitty life is and taken action to avoid it.

Now, not all the children would go along with the Pillowman. There was one little girl, a happy little thing, who just wouldn’t believe the Pillowman when he told her that life could be awful and her life would be, and she sent him away, and he went away crying, crying big gloopy tears that made puddles this big, and the next night there was another knock on her bedroom door, and she said, ‘Go away, Pillowman. I’ve told you, I’m happy. I’ve always been happy and I’ll always be happy.’

But it wasn’t the Pillowman. It was another man. And her mummy wasn’t home, and this man would visit her every time her mummy wasn’t home, and she soon became very very sad, and as she sat in front of the oven when she was twenty-one she said to the Pillowman, ‘Why didn’t you try to convince me?’ And the Pillowman said, ‘I tried to convince you, but you were just too happy.’ And as she turned on the gas as high as it would go she said, ‘But I’ve never been happy. I’ve never been happy.’

See, when the Pillowman was successful in his work, a little child would die horrifically. And when the Pillowman was unsuccessful, a little child would have a horrific life, grow into an adult who’d also have a horrific life, and then die horrifically. The Pillowman, as big as he was and as fluffy as he was, he’d just go around crying all day long. His house’d be just puddles everywhere, so he decided to do just one final job and that’d be it.  So he went to this place beside this pretty stream that he remembered from a time before. And he brought a little can of petrol with him, and there was this old weeping willow tree there, and he went under it and he sat and he waited there a while, and there were all these little toys under there.

There was a little caravan nearby, and the Pillowman heard the door open and little footsteps come out, and he heard a boy’s voice say, ‘I’m just going out to play, Mum,’ and the Mum said, ‘Well don’t be late for your tea, son.’ ‘I won’t be, Mum.’ A the Pillowman heard the little footsteps get closer and the branches of the willow tree parted and it wasn’t a little boy at all. It was a little Pillowboy. And the Pillowboy said, “Hello,’ to the Pillowman, and the Pillowman said, ‘Hello,’ to the Pillowboy, and they both played with the toys for a while. And the Pillowman told him all about his sad job and the dead kids and all of that type of stuff, and the little Pillowboy understood instantly ‘cos he was such a happy little fella and all he ever wanted to do was to be able to help people, and he poured the can of petrol all over himself and his smiley mouth was still smiling. And the Pillowman, through his gloopy tears, said, ‘Thank you,’ to the Pillowboy, And the Pillowboy said, ‘That’s alright. Will you tell my mummy I won’t be having my tea tonight,’ and the Pillowman said, ‘Yes, I will,’ lying. And the Pillowboy struck a match, and the Pillowman sat there watching him burn, and as the Pillowman started to fade away, the last thing he was was the Pillowboy’s happy smiley mouth as it slowly melted away, sinking into nothingness. That was the last thing he saw.

The last thing he heard was something he hadn’t even contemplated. The last thing he heard was the screams of the hundred thousand children he’d helped to commit suicide coming back to life and going on to lead the cold, wretched lives that were destined to them because he hadn’t been around to prevent them, right on up to the screams of their sad self-inflicted deaths, which this time, of course, would be conducted entirely alone.

McDonagh, Martin. The Pillowman. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2003.