Okay, I admit it 2009 has been a shitty year for me. After my last bout with this moral coil, it was suggested (and by suggested it I mean my doctor made it mandatory for me to see a therapist in order for him to keep prescribing my anti-anxiety and anti-depression medication, one of which I’m sure I can’t do without, the other is foreshadowing another blog entry I’m sure). After much thought, I agreed that seeing someone professionally would certainly not hurt me in any ways. It was speculated that in some way these three accidents, all major, all life threatening, and all in a very short period of time were in some ways a cry for help; a silent cry which only my doctor seemed to be aware of as he was shifting through the six inch records of my numerous falls, explosions, and machine related dismemberments. So yeah, the writing has fallen off, and the blog entries have been almost nonexistence, and I’m not the better for it. You see, and I dare anyone to deny this, but I am writer even when I don’t write, so here I am back at starring at a screen at 11:54 pm, in the dark, with 54% of my battery still in tack. A screen who is my friend when no one is; a screen that hears me in ways no one could. A screen I have never asked for help … until now.
So I walk into the pre-assigned therapy session with pre-assigned thoughts. I have been in this movie before, and truth be told, I know how it ends. It ends in five months with a big hug, and the notion that I have been cured of whatever ailed me, and (this is the most important part) a therapist who likes me … I’ve described 2009 as being my year between dreams, but come on, isn’t that just a marketing ploy that my subconscious thought up so that I can sit around my house and not interact with the many wonders of my condition? I had clarity of purpose a couple years ago. I wanted to be a short story writer; the first one to make a difference in the world. Five years prior I had been turned down for the writer’s conference I ended up getting into last year. I used to write long boring diatribes about my life in the second person, and then one day I woke up and decided not to be too involved with my own life anymore and started to write about other people’s lives. I mean I really did write about other people’s lives. I don’t write veiled memoirs about myself crying for help, I write about the most outlandish people I can think of. I write about death and life and fat and skinny … I write about the extremes that my vanilla life has no first hand knowledge of. And it seemed to work.
I went to a writer’s conference in 2008 filled with douche bags and arrogant rants about nothing, and I realized that somewhere inside of me was someone else. Somewhere inside of me was this guy I only remembered, and although people have tried and tried to kill him with suggestions of being less blunt, or being less … well me. In the end I still look to that person for help when I need him, and although no one seemed to like him, he still makes me laugh, and he still is the person I want to become. I realized, however, at this writer’s conference, that these douche bags were my audience. My audience wasn’t normal people who like to verbalize, think, and talk. My audience wasn’t people who were of like mind, who reveled in the normal, or the oddities of nuances. My audience were these guys, who all pretty much, in unison, and in kind hated my work. And they hated it not because they didn’t think it was funny, or they didn’t like it, they hated it because they did like it, and it made them pedestrian. Laughing at my jokes, or knowing who Superman was, or knowing the characters of the Facts Of Life, made them just like everyone else, when in the backs of their minds, they were special.
So they killed me … again. And they killed me on levels that I can’t possibly explain to an audience, even one who thinks they know me as well as this one does. They didn’t kill my writing, but as sure as I’m sitting here, they killed that dream, and it was a special kind of pain that it so personal because more than anyone else, these people did know me. They knew the struggles of creating for yourself and not for anyone else. They knew what it felt like to be personal and committed a group of words for no other reason than you could be. And they supplied the ample microcosm of my life and as I sat there in therapy all I could think about, but not articulate of course, was how much this was like my life, and how much this was just another string in a long line of disappointments of faith that began long ago, but started one day that I’ll never forget.
When I was younger I never held much faith in friendship or anything of that nature. I got that people only tolerated me. I got that people thought I was gay even before I did, and I got that people don’t like gay people. I got that I let kids hit me, or call me names because I thought they were right about me. I got that the people I called my friends only like to pick on me and make fun of me because I was an easy target. I got all of this, even before I knew I got it. When I thought of my future, I never envisioned anyone in it. Sounds very sad, but it’s not. There is no sad, there only what is, and what you make of it. I just said earlier in this rant that I wanted to find that person again, and that THIS person is the guy I liked, and not because I like to be picked on, but because he was real, and didn’t have to be funny to be invited to a party, or had to be upbeat to be okay. I didn’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on dialect coaches to sound less gay, or get plastic surgery to look like someone else. One day, however, this all changed.
I was in the 7th grade, and I met this guy named Arik … I had just started a new school, and he was one of the popular kids. He had all kinds of friends who were athletic and already had girlfriends and the like. We swam together, and he liked me. It was a new concept for me. He laughed at my jokes, and he thought I was cool, and I felt cool when I was around him. He ate lunch with me, he looked for me in the halls, and he generally looked happy to see me when we met. On the fifth day of school he asked me to come over to his house to hang out. He lived miles away from me, but I decided to anyways. On the way home, walking in completely the opposite direction from my house, a couple of boys drove past us and started to point and laugh out the window. They were yelling things like “hey Arik, why you hanging out with that faggot?” It went on longer than I could have imagined, and I was humiliated. About five minutes after the incident, Arik told me that he had stuff to do that afternoon and that he couldn’t hang out. I didn’t say a word; I turned in the direction of my house and walked home. When I got out of sight of him, I started to cry my first real tears. We never hung out in school again, and I was alone.
It was then when I realized that no one could hurt someone who wasn’t real. I lost the guy I was and proceeded to become someone else. At first it wasn’t easy. It’s hard to reinvent yourself, especially when you don’t know what you’re supposed to look like in the end. I was like a cake that had bad frosting. You start to try and fix it, add stuff to it, and in the end it just looks worse … and you’re left in the end with a possibility that the cake might have tasted good to begin with.
And that’s where I was … well that’s where I am. I’m left with this raw flesh exposed to the world when I thought that the tears had facilitated scar. I’m left with this constant nail biting that is designed to induce exoskeleton, and I’m left with an incomplete wall that only acts as an annoyance. And my words … no matter how much I yell them, are only whispers because I have no one to listen.
I’m right about one thing though … You can not get hurt if no one knows how to hurt you. If no one had ever heard of kryptonite, then Superman would have been truly indestructible. And if you’re wondering where I am, what the therapy has allowed me to figure out, and what will become of me. I realized that I’m finding the kinks in my own armor. I’m finding out that kryptonite defines Superman, and because I have none, I am indefinite.
So I don’t trust anyone, and this may seem counterintuitive since I seem to say so much to a group of virtual strangers, and this may be true. Maybe these revelations are my first steps down a longer road. What it comes right down to though, perhaps those second person rants about my life were my breakfast of champions because they tried to capture that part of myself that I had long forgotten. They isolated thoughts and ideas that I had long since forgotten, and having the foresight to write them down just might perhaps put me back in touch with them … by the way, the therapy didn’t help me at all. Finding out you’re doing something as important as your life wrong doesn’t help you get up in the morning. Finding out you are incapable of feeling the energy that comes from being next to someone else, isn’t something you revel in. Finding out that you can only fake warmth, and the real you is cold and relatively uncaring isn’t something they put on Christmas cards.
Someone once told me that trust is a decision, and sometime soon I’ll have to decide to trust, until then I’ll have to continue to deal with life without it.
