231. nostomania

This’ll be a quick download on Thanksgiving and how things ended up not going with my family.

In short, I told my mom that while I appreciated her invitation, it’s not a good idea for me to spend major holidays with them right now.

But first, a video.

Like many things YouTube, I discovered Sexplanations through the Green brothers’ creative and informative YouTube channel.

“Field of eligibles” was a new term for me, but it put a name to something I’ve been struggling to define for a while. Because while there are a good number of gay men in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area, eligible, as she notes, doesn’t aways translate to desirable.

And we’re not talking about a huge population to choose from here. If statistics are true and only 5% of the U.S. population is predominantly gay, of the 1.86 million males in Twin Cities metro area (the current estimate is that 49.7% of the population here is male), probably around only 93,000 of those are in my field of eligibles.

Then factor in my personal preferences—well-educated, cultured, geeky, secular-minded (ideally, atheist/agnostic), self-reliant, mentally and emotionally stable, physically attractive (to me), and reasonably hirsute (that’s more of a nice-to-have than a must-have), to name a few of the qualities that I look for in potential partners.

Even just using a couple of those filters rules out a huge percentage of the gay men around me.

The reason that I was thinking about this in these terms today is because yesterday found me single yet again at Thanksgiving. It’s been almost two years since I’ve been in a relationship. And I realized the other day while cooking for the Sunday Assembly Thanksgiving that the last time I really cooked for a holiday was when I was with Jay, and that brought up a whole lot of sad memories and feelings.

One of the things I’ve been exploring in therapy lately is why I’m obsessed with being in a relationship. From what I’ve been able to parse out, for most of my life I’ve had all of these external measures of self-worth. Even though I grew up hearing about unconditional love, the kind of love I actually experienced as a child was anything but that. The standards for being an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian were pretty steep. In short, we were expected to live up to the model of Jesus’ life on Earth, although that was only the minimum requirement (the rest I’ll get into another time).

Basically, I was unwittingly trained from a young age to compare myself to others and base my self-worth on how I was or wasn’t up to par. That paradigm transferred over into other areas, too, from basing my self-worth on how good a pianist, to how good a composer, to how good a writer I was, and so on. It was all performance centered.

I attended an evangelical Christian liberal arts college where the saying “ring by spring” was only partly a joke. The expectation was that by the time you’d graduated, you’d have a degree and your opposite-sex life partner. On the drive into campus, there’s a large rock that students would paint in the way of an engagement announcement. Usually it was just the couples’ initials or names, but often it was quite artistic. By the time I graduated, virtually everyone I knew was engaged or married.

Soon, I was often the only (or one of the few) single person at a gathering. In the years before I came out gay, the reason for my singleness was difficult to explain to anyone. Working all the time was a convenient excuse, but even that started to wear thin after a while.

After I came out, finding a long-term boyfriend became even more of a measure of success. Especially for someone like me, it would signal having overcome decades of oppression and religious abuse to deliver the ultimate “fuck you” to an institution that had told me for years that my limited choices were to change my sexual orientation, embrace a lifestyle of total celibacy and be alone for the rest of my life, or burn eternally in the fires of hell.

A real brain teaser.

So all that to say, holidays can be a real downer for me.

The only time I’ve been with a partner for Thanksgiving and Christmas was when I was with Jay. To be honest, I more enjoyed being with his family than I did with him, and they’re the only thing I miss about dating him. Because those times were the first I can really remember feeling welcome and accepted at a family gathering. While I know that my biological family loves me, there’s so much tiptoeing that I’ve had to do around them, always worrying about what not to say or do. That feeling intensified once I became an atheist.

And forget about bringing home a boyfriend or husband to meet them. While I’m sure they’d try to be tolerant and civil, I doubt they’ll ever be truly accepting and welcoming.

Yesterday, I spent Thanksgiving with my housemates’ family. And it was lovely. The only time religion or politics came up was when explaining to Matt’s mom why I wasn’t with my own family. The rest of the time we just enjoyed being with each other. I could be myself. And it was terrific!

While I was the only single person at the table, looking around, I could see myself bringing a boyfriend home to meet those people. Of course, there’s tons of work to ahead before I’ll be capable of dating anyone. Establishing stable friendships is difficult enough. I have to scrape away decades of internalize self-loathing and self-hate, and the fundamental beliefs that I’m not valuable, not worthy, not lovable, that I have to have achieved something or look a certain way for anyone to accept me, let alone think I’m worth dating.

But regardless of how long that takes, I’ve at least found a place to call home.

95. cornucopia

Here’s a little Thanksgiving story I wrote last year and recorded today. It’ll be new to most people, but the first people to hear it were Joe, Jenny and Seth.

The title to this blog is rather ironic since I feel anything but enough right now. Quite the opposite. This time last year, I was spending Thanksgiving with my family, shortly after being outed to them by my ex. Then I joined friends of mine with another family where I wasn’t worrying about feeling judged or rejected by anyone. And Seth was there (which is why I was there). That was probably one of the last happy times I can remember.

I realized today that I’ve been depressed ever since the night of my birthday. There have been happier times and moments when I’ve been able to escape into a happier persona, but every day since then has been tempered by some sort of sadness. And today, when most of America is gathered with their families, making happy memories together, I’m home, by myself, not really wanting to be around anyone. And I’m not anticipating it getting any better for Christmas either.

Happy holidays.

91. yen

Brief update this evening.

Spent most of the day in bed with a fever. Started feeling not-so-great yesterday afternoon and by the time I got home all I really wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep.

Which is precisely what I did.

All I wanted (besides to not feel like the second coming of Hades, who, by the way, is a character in my novel – and no, HE DOESN’T SPEAK IN SMALL CAPS) was for someone to bring me potato soup and maybe read to me or something.

But, alas, that was not to be. I wasn’t even hungry, so all I could do was curl up in bed in the fetal position.

And, naturally, that set off a whole chain of depressing thoughts that led to feeling more and more depressed, augmented by the fact that I was feeling like the second coming of Hades. Thoughts that I’m almost twenty-nine and still single, and this is likely what the whole rest of my life is going to look like: Lying in bed in the fetal position, feeling dreadfull (sic), and wishing that some cute guy would bring me soup.

The holidays are also fast approaching, and this will be the first year ever that I do not celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas with my family. It’ll also be the first year that I observe both as an atheist. That part isn’t so bad since I never really believed in any of it anyway; but it’s losing my family, and not having another family to be a part of, that’s the hard part. I’ve always more or less been on the periphery when it comes to holidays as the non-plus 1 – always the single guy at the table. Now I don’t even have a table, or a family. Or a God. It’s a lot to take in at once.

Most of today looked very much the same, aside from checking work email occasionally (and got an email back from a co-worker saying, “What are you doing!? Stop checking your email and worrying about what’s going on here! Get better!!”) and then going through some old keyboard music and realising how full of shit I used to be. Some of the organ music was cool but so pedantic. Oh god, enough with the twelve-tone! I kept thinking. It was 2001-2003, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, I guess.

Makes me wonder now how I’m going to look back on the work that I’m doing now. That’s the beauty of being in the business of creating, is that you’re always a work-in-progress. Unfortunately, that means producing a lot of shit in the process. But there is always some good that comes of it. It’s like mental alchemy – with the gold comes a lot of dross.

In the meantime, is it too much to ask for a great, cute guy to come and bring me soup, and maybe read to me from the New York Times?

Perhaps.

34. eucatastrophe

It’s hard to keep all the thoughts in your head from wandering off and getting lost. Most of the time it’s like they come crashing in, stomp around for a while, and then while I’m looking at something else galumph away, never to be heard from again.

That’s another way of saying that there are a lot of things that I’ve wanted to write about over here, but often lose track of.

Thanksgiving came and went without much hurrah. It was a small crew that assembled last Thursday at my sister’s house—my parents, both my sisters, the husband of the one, his two kids and his dad. My sister and I did the cooking, so it was fun. And there was no drama, except for an impromptu bout of chair throwing when my sister’s father-in-law brought up some politics.

He’s a delightful fellow—naturalised Italian immigrant. He came from socialist Italy, and is very worried for this country because he sees our leaders throwing away a largely good thing in favour of an experiment that failed in Europe decades ago. “I want to tell them all,” he keeps saying, “but nobody knows history.”

This Thanksgiving was probably the most stressful for me, though for completely different reasons.

I was stressed out because about two weeks ago I was ignobly outed to my entire family.

On 16 November, after getting home from orchestra rehearsal, I got an email from my mom at 10:14pm saying that they’d received an anonymous email from someone with the subject, “It concerns your son.” What followed was a string of insane emails sent from my end and, looking back, a string of surprisingly sane replies from my parents. They just wanted to get the story from my end, dialogue, discuss, and love me.

At first I couldn’t believe that my parents could be anything but furious, upset, or disappointed, convinced that they were going to try to ship me off to Exodus (or something like that) or blackmail me into “getting help.” But so far they haven’t done any of that, and have been unexpectedly open to dialoguing about their son being a homosexual. I’ve assured them that I’m not into “the scene” or the “lifestyle,” and while they’re not accepting this with open arms, they’ve at least made every effort to show that they’ve accepted their son.

I guess I’ve been rehearsing for this moment for so long, afraid that they would somehow find out, that my reaction went completely according to plan. And so I behaved exactly as I’d expected them to react that I couldn’t hear or see that they weren’t. In my mind they were the crazy, fundamentalist parents that every gay child fears—the ones who throw the Bible in their face, call them all sorts of awful names, accuse them of rejecting God, scream that they’re going to hell, etc. Fortunately my family is pretty used to my insane mood swings though, and it’s not like they didn’t wonder or have an idea.

At Thanksgiving my family was just happy that I hadn’t rejected them. How’s that for a reversal of fortune.

So who knows where this will go with them. I still don’t know if they’ll ever accept someone that I bring home into their family like they accepted my sister’s husband. They don’t agree with my “choice” and both my parents think that I’m “confusing my pre-adolescent mind with the adult mind.” I don’t have much time right now to elaborate on that, but I’m at least familiar with the theory from my psychology days—that being that I didn’t bond properly with the same sex as a child, so I’m now trying to fill that need as an adult. It’s all very Freudian.

At the end of the day, I’m glad that I don’t have to choose between family and being happy. I’m still not entirely happy since I’m a firstborn and therefore almost pathetically chase after their approval, and will forever be my parent’s experiment child. There is still a lingering doubt that God doesn’t entirely approve of me either, so I’m trying to distinguish that feeling from my parents disapproval of my “lifestyle choice.”

Sigh. There’s that word again.