215. mélange

Blërg. I hate moving. I hate the nuisance of packing up the contents of one’s life and transporting them to a new place. On the one hand, it’s a good exercise in taking stock of what one owns and how much one actually needs. On the other, it’s just annoying.

This past weekend was CONsole Room, the long-awaited (at least for some) return of a Doctor Who convention to Minneapolis. The last dedicated Doctor Who convention in Minnesota was over twenty years ago. There were over 500 attendees, which is a fantastic turnout for a first convention!

As an introvert, I struggle with large events like these. While I enjoy being around members of my Whovian tribe, it’s also exhausting. Three consecutive days of other human beings left me drained of energy. Last night, after a brief stop by my apartment to check mail and box up a few books, I headed home, crawled into bed, and promptly passed out.

Something I wasn’t expecting to deal with at the convention was the number of gay couples that I saw there. On Saturday night, a friend of mine pointed out the karaoke DJ, a cute guy in one of those checkered shirts often seen on gay boys and metrosexuals.

Naturally, he was there with his boyfriend.

Needless to say, this activated all of my insecurities about being thirty-one and single, so I spent most of the evening feeling like a crazy person.

Lately, I’ve been working on analyzing my emotional responses when in the presence of couples. As anyone who has read this blog in the past couple months will know this is a frequent subject. Being around couples makes me more keenly aware of my own singleness, my past relationship failures, and all of the qualities about myself that I consider lacking or downright undesirable.

On Saturday, my housemates had another couple, Mark and Nick, over for dinner in celebration of their recent marriage (seeing as it’s now legal in Minnesota). Before I left for the convention that morning, I was asked to proofread the menu for the evening. As expected, it was perfect. But in reading it over, I had to swallow feelings of jealousy and overwhelming otherness that rose up. I wondered—would they ever have occasion to throw such a celebration for me, at what feels like my late stage in life (at least, late for a gay man)?

I got home around midnight, my emotional energy already drained after a day of being around people, and being surrounded by couples at karaoke—or at least, being hyper aware of the presence of couples in the room… the DJ and his boyfriend, Jason and Chaz, and others whose names I didn’t know. The house was dark, and Mark and Nick’s shiny car was in the driveway, where I usually park, clearly crashing at the house for the night. In my mind, that became a metaphor for how invisible and peripheral I often view myself as being. I still joke that when my now brother-in-law started dating my sister, my parents found the son they never had.

Mark and Nick have a fairly new car. Mark is a doctor. I’m not totally sure what Nick does, but he also does well for himself. Pulling up behind their car, in my own car, with a side mirror held on with duck tape and non-functioning wipers, it felt like another metaphor for how shabby and barely-held-together my own life seems to be. Every area of my life looked like an abject failure.

Earlier this month, there was an entry posted to a blog that I follow that started me thinking about the negative (and toxic) way that I view my own life, and relate to others. He wrote:

Having grown up in a very patriarchal environment, I internalized the notion that being gay meant being other. In turn, “other” was translated to mean being “less than.” Oddly enough the effects were two-fold. I set off on a quest to mentally justify my being less than by using every situation I encountered to validate and reinforce those beliefs. Conversely, and this was my saving grace, I took the compensatory route in an effort to correct the (my own) perceived imbalance of worth. In practice, this meant I had an overwhelming (not to say borderline psycho) urge to compete and succeed.

The combination of the two meant intense turmoil, an inclination to depression every time something didn’t go to plan and emotional loss no matter what the result was. If I succeeded I was incapable of internally accepting credit (no matter how much I outwardly announced my credit). If I failed to achieve the standard I was aiming for, that simply reinforced my negative outlook. Lose, lose, lose.

These paragraphs really resonated with me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve compared myself to others, rating my own self-worth against my perception of theirs. I almost always come up short. Even in success, someone else is always just ahead of me. Consequently, I’ve always viewed myself as in direct competition with virtually everyone. It probably goes without saying how exhausting this is.

My rational brain knows how irrational this is, how silly and wasteful. I know my perceptions of others are fairly warped, that my assumptions about their social status are probably overblown. Yet my lizard brain is wrapped up in anxiety over someone having advantages over me, that people are looking down on me, finding me wanting. Everyone else has more financial success, more emotional stability, more sex, more intimacy, more happiness.

I have nothing.

The horrible thing is that part of me hates everyone who I perceive as having the things that I don’t. I’m driven by jealousy of the people around me, obsessed with my inadequacies. And this keeps me isolated from other people, holds me back from connecting, from being accepted.

What bothers me most is that I’m aware of all this, but feel unable to do anything about it…

137. fugitive

It’s a cold, wet day in Minneapolis. I was greeted upon leaving the house today by a disgusting, freezing mixture of rain and snow. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to turn around, call in sick and go back to bed.

This morning I was going through my email inbox and decided to clean out some subscriptions that have been cluttering things up. At some point I signed up for the Google and Amazon offers, but for some time I’ve just been deleting them as they tend to be things that most of us never end up using.

The cruelest offers for me are the ones for “couple weekends” or “____ for two.” It’s egocentric, of course, to assume that the universe would conspire against me in this way. It’s my subjective experience superimposing a narrative over arbitrary events and happenstances that causes the bile to rise in my stomach at the thought that Google is mocking my continued and miserable single existence. But I have a hard time not taking it somewhat personally.

A few months ago I cleaned out my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house, shortly after the events of Christmas day when I cut ties with them completely. They were going to be out of town for a few days and asked me to come by and finish moving all of my stuff out while they were gone. The results were about eight full paper shopping bags of recycling, four large trash bags, several bins that I took to the local Goodwill, and a large box of Christian fundamentalist books I’d amassed over the years. It made me realize just how much stuff we hold on to for purely sentimental, irrational reasons. There were magazines I still have memories reading and enjoying; notebooks of math homework and past assignments; papers I wanted to store for future reference that I hadn’t looked at in years. These were things I had no reason to keep and was just taking up unnecessary space, but felt uneasy and even defensive about getting rid of. It’s anal-retentive, yes, but it still felt comforting to know that a record of my past was in a box somewhere. Needless to say, feeling the weight of nearly twenty-five years-worth of paper and finally putting those bags in the recycling bin was surreal. But it felt good to be free of it at the same time.

The same could be said of my religious beliefs. This past weekend we had a bi-monthly former fundamentalists gathering at a coffee shop near Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis, where part of the gathering is going around and telling our stories of how we left religion. Part of the reason for that is because we generally have someone new at the meeting every time, so we want to give them an opportunity to tell their own story and have their own experience affirmed, as well as to hear our stories. It helps to hear these stories as it reminds us that we’re not alone, even though it often feels like that in a culture where one of the most-often-asked questions is, “Where do you go to church?” and where references to god or to prayer are too common.

For years I held on to my religious beliefs for largely the same reason as I held on to all that stuff. It was comforting and familiar, and I had strong emotional attachments to it. It was my past and my present; my family and my community. But they were gathering dust, and I hadn’t really looked at them in years, and if I had to be totally honest with myself it wasn’t likely that I was going to look at them again any time soon. I hadn’t truly believed in years, even when doing all the research to prove that the bible wasn’t really incompatible with homosexuality—that it was the religious leaders and translators who were prejudiced and bigoted. In reality I was just trying to find reasons to continue pretending that I was a Christian after all. In retrospect, I’m not sure if I ever believed at all, even as a child.

After a couple of moves, my attitude towards “stuff” has changed radically. Whereas ten years ago I couldn’t imagine being able to let go of anything, now I look at all of my possessions with the knowledge that someday I’m going to have to pack all of this stuff up into boxes—and do I really want to lug this downstairs to the truck, haul it across country and then lug it all the way up into my new apartment? It’s just not worth it.

As an atheist now, I view my beliefs largely the same. Knowing that we are finite beings, with an afterlife highly unlikely and this life being all there is, I now treat my beliefs with the same economical thriftiness as I do my belongings. Belief in god and all of the suppositions that go along with that when there is little to no evidence for belief in such a being now feels like lugging a heavy box around.

One of the tenets of Buddhism is renunciation of possessions and the hold that they have on the self. While I don’t believe in any sort of universal consciousness or spirituality, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It takes work and energy to hold on to things, and they inevitably weigh us down through upkeep and the effort it takes to retain them. One website I looked at said this about Buddhist philosophy: “The quest for comfort is also futile as it is the nature of our mind that the feeling of happiness when our desire is satisfied is only temporary… Thus we spend our lives in the vain and futile quest for possessions, experiences, relationships and more and we are never satisfied. We are forever projecting outward.”

If we’re ever going to be free, our perception towards “stuff” needs to change.