292. tenacious

In the last post I mentioned the recent end of a community of which I’ve been part for the past five years or so. Apparently it’s been a while since I last mentioned it, which I suppose is telling.

Our local Sunday Assembly chapter was founded in mid-2014 by a group of former Christians and secular folks who were excited about the mission of the organization and had been looking for a sense of community and belonging that was missing from our lives.

We first met in May of that year and in the beginning there was a lot of interest and excitement in what we were doing. People looked forward to seeing each other each month, and many even met outside of monthly assemblies. We had an active board that was excited to build something meaningful and important to people’s lives.

The beginning of the end probably came in early 2017 when a schism occurred amongst the board that had partly to do with my being physically assaulted in 2016. What exactly happened is a long story, but about half of the board sided with the couple that owned the house where I was attacked and when they left they took their friends with them.

From that point on we lost more board members who felt increasingly burned out or who simply lost interest. Attendance never recovered after the split and by late last year we had events where no one besides the volunteers showed up. After another no-show assembly last month, we decided the writing on the wall had been there long enough and that it was time to pull the plug.

On the one hand, for me it’s kind of a relief to have the time and energy that went into planning those events and making them happen. And over the last year and a half or so, I felt more and more like Leslie Knope trying to rally everyone’s enthusiasm, or (and this is probably more accurate) like someone who refuses to accept the reality that a dying family member is beyond help and that it’s time to let them go.

On the other hand, I’ve put an incredible amount of time and energy over the years into making this thing happen and keeping it going so it’s hard not to feel like that investment was a total waste. To admit defeat and that my efforts to revive this group failed also meant this was another community that I’ve lost.

And one of the most difficult things to deal with is the sense that I have been the only person who has really cared about its survival.

Much of this ties back to the longing I’ve had for belonging, community, and family, in part since leaving church in 2011 and losing that network but also throughout my life. Home was never a place where I felt truly accepted, and even church wasn’t an environment where it was safe to let down my guard.

Of course, many people (especially the non-religious) never really find a community like this one. Many never find a group of close friends, or feel the need for such a group.

This makes the loss even more keen.

Frankly, what I most enjoyed about church, aside from social stability, was the musical outlet it offered. That was probably my favorite thing about Sunday Assembly, and it was my favorite thing about college—collaborating with a small group of people who enjoy creating music or simply being creative together. There are few opportunities like this outside of community choirs and ensembles (like bands or orchestras), but frankly don’t fancy being part of a faceless mass.

And if I’m being brutally honest, I don’t care for not being the one who calls the shots.

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This is one thing that especially torments me about the demise of our Sunday Assembly chapter. Now that we’ve accepted the inevitable and pulled that lever, I’ve been post mortem-ing everything that’s happened over the last five years to identify any steps we could have taken to change the outcome.

The answer is: probably not much. Our chapter had a lot of competition in terms of there being a number of established groups with a similar purpose (and more resources). And it was difficult to really distinguish ourselves from those other groups or articulate what we had to offer that someone couldn’t find somewhere else.

Also: secular people (especially those who left religion) tend to be wary of church-like organizations, and that was our chief demographic.

There were a lot of mistakes that I made though that I worry contributed to our group’s unravelling. My leadership style as music director tended towards the unyielding rather than the collaborative, because while I was rarely outright dismissive of others’ ideas or input, I often ignored suggestions in favor of my own vision or agenda.

I was also reluctant to delegate or let others do things since no one else would deliver to my standards.

Because, you know, I was 100% right.

In hindsight, this had the hallmarks of insecurity and growing up in an environment where I had little control. It had the hallmarks of fearing that others would discover I wasn’t that talented–or worse, that someone else was a better and more fun leader.

It also had the hallmarks of being raised in a culture where everything was black and white, and where we were the ones who had it all figured out. I hate that all of that drove (and sometimes still drives) so much of my decisions and behavior.

Was any of this solely responsible for the chapter’s demise? Probably not. But it didn’t make being involved any easier, rewarding—or enjoyable.

These are some of my least attractive qualities; ones I fear will scare off potential boyfriends or partners.

There’s also the fear I couldn’t make Sunday Assembly work and won’t be able to make it work with a guy either.

… and why is vulnerability so damn hard?

237. emblem

Last week was the sixth of my first semester as a graduate library school student, and it feels like I’ve been running a marathon since February. Yes, it’s a trope to gripe about the busyness of academic life, how much reading there always is, and how there’s never enough time to complete project work.

However, for the first time in a long while, I’ve actually felt good. A friend commented recently that it’s been weeks since he’s seen me depressed.

“I haven’t had time!” I said, which is true. Between school and Sunday Assembly, I haven’t had the bandwidth to think about much of anything else.

Another part is that I actually enjoy what I’m doing right now. Both of my classes are delightful, even in their moments of tedium and pell-mell insanity. My cohort is made up of people who are passionate about what they want to do and can’t wait to be librarians themselves. For the first time, I’m on an actual path towards a career that I can see myself in (and loving) long term. Turns out, librarianship is an ideal fit for my seemingly disparate skills and interests.

The downside of all this busyness is that I haven’t had much time to write or blog, as evidenced by the gaps between this and my last post. It’s certainly not for lack of things to write about. I mentioned this a few days ago to my therapist, that this has been frustrating because I process most effectively through writing. My headspace is often a hurricane of thoughts and emotions, too chaotic and busy a place for reflection or making breakthroughs.

In some of our recent sessions, I’ve brought up the fact that right now I hate my body. I’ll write more about this next time, but it’s something I remember feeling from an early age. I’ve always disliked being naked or unclothed in public as a child, even with my family, and even in warm weather. The curious thing is that (particularly in the summer) my dad would go shirtless, as would most of the guys I was around. But even as a child, I already had a sense of Otherness about myself. And when one is acutely aware of that, they are also often hyper aware of the boundaries between themselves and other people.

Some of it was the intense and pervasive fear of being judged, or people noticing imperfections with my body. I was pretty scrawny growing up, and being a late bloomer when other boys were filling out didn’t help matters. I hated everything about my body, because it didn’t meet the exacting standards I assumed were expected of me.

This is something I’ve theorized is at the root of my sense of dissociation, both from myself and from other people, and why I tend to be more of a loner. I’ve written here about my tendency to keep other people at a safe distance from me. Of course, this is in keeping with my upbringing in a religious fundamentalist community, where we were encouraged to “search our souls” and confess any and all sin that might be lurking in our hearts. In hindsight, it’s not that different from Scientology, except that instead of disembodied parasitic Thetans, we believed in sin.

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A few months ago, I quoted Lawrence Heller: “When people experience trauma, they feel bad; children, in particular, think they are bad when they feel bad. Chronic bottom-up dysregulation and distress lead to negative identifications, beliefs, and judgments about ourselves.”

Virtually everything about fundamentalist Christianity teaches that, because of the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, all human beings are broken, flawed, and sinful. This is why we need the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, to metaphysically purify us of those sins. For most people in that community, this belief fills them with a sense of awe and gratefulness. However, for many of us, an unintended consequence of growing up with that worldview was that we came to believe that we are broken, flawed, disgusting, unlovable, undesirable, etc. Many Bible verses even reinforce this notion:

“For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.” (Galatians 5:17)

This was a real brain teaser when I realized that I’m gay, but even beyond that, the predominant feeling I was left with from my theological upbringing was that anything I felt or wanted was fundamentally wrong—which meant that I was wrong. So I retreated to an inner world of books and writing, and developing characters and personas that I knew were “acceptable,” keeping everyone away lest they figured out what a horrible person I was.

As a teenager, my mom would sometimes say to me, “If people knew how you really are, they wouldn’t like you.” (In context, I was a pretty angry teenager, which makes sense in hindsight considering that Christianity had made me a self-loathing closet case.)

The hardest thing the last couple of years has been learning to be with people as myself. Realizations along the way have helped bring the “real me” into sharper focus, like figuring out that librarianship best describes my orientation to the world. But shaking the sense that I need to run away from people or pretend to be who I think will be accepted is quite difficult.

So it’s always a shock whenever people genuinely seem to like me. Last week, I walked into class and everyone exclaimed, “David’s here!” My housemates Matt and Jason have truly become the family I always wanted. Ditto the people at my yoga studio, and at Sunday Assembly. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, and an uncomfortable once because there’s still that voice in my head warning me that I could fuck up at any time and be cast out.

Not a terribly healthy/helpful voice.

But one fence at a time.