It’s easy to write when you have something on your mind to talk about – you dissociate a little, channel something, words flow freely, and there you go.
It seems almost deceptively simple. In 20-30 minutes you have a finished product and you feel really proud of yourself. You’re relieved, leaving only a trail of armpit sweat behind.
The hardest times to write are when the voice feels – distant. Like a friend who’s left. You’re alone without your thoughts – it’s empty, and you think “well, I’ll just take a nap”. And you do and wake up in a sweat of non-accomplishment, feeling slightly worse about yourself.
It’s the second one I want to lean into instead of the first. The first means I write once every three to four months and then go quiet again, enter a new season of life, and write again. Feels good at the time, but it’s inconsistent, and I need to push myself to do more.
Admitting all the above (and endless, unctuous throat-clearing aside) is a form of vulnerability, a topic I have a particular interest in by virtue of unchosen life experience and hitting a wall enough times until I either break through it or learn to go around it.
Vulnerability is one of the most, if not the most difficult human emotions because it usually comes after a struggle and is against everything we know. It might be a surprise, but we as people are really good at putting up walls. It’s a survival mechanism, it’s self-protection, and people at any stage of life or intelligence level are capable of and good at it.
As men of a certain orientation – we are *especially* skilled at this practice. We spent years, if not decades building up not just a wall, but a moat with barbed wire and backup trapdoors around our sexuality. “Did that just make me sound gay?” “Do I look like I’m into dudes?” “Do you think they can *tell*?!”
It’s unrelenting, typically self-inflicted psychological torture, and it’s completely understandable. Some of us were (and remain) in situations where the people around us just wouldn’t accept it for their own reasons. They have a fossilized version of who we are, or what we should be, and the revelation we were into dudes all along would cause the other person to feel fatally vulnerable.
That’s the struggle. Vulnerable people are scared of other vulnerable people, so others put up walls, we put up even bigger walls, and we all pretend to be good neighbors.
Meanwhile, the grass is overgrown on both sides and we think hiding that from the other person is how we preserve our relationship with the other person.
This does not mean you should grab a bullhorn and forcibly come out to your elderly relatives. Their life experiences are different in a measure beyond our understanding and capability. They were taught differently, struggled differently, and even though they come from a place of love, their default is from a place of protection: they lived through the AIDS era and saw thousands of deaths and they see your face in 1990 obituary pages. They deserve grace.
Everyone’s coming out story is different, I wrote mine in June on the 4th anniversary of my coming out: http://wyatttorosian.com/coming-out-the-other-side/
To be completely vulnerable (yes, I’m using it interchangeably with “honest”, stay with me now) I did it all absolutely wrong. I should’ve come out either at the end of high school or first year of college to everyone and let the chips fall where they may. Maybe I’d be happier, I’d have a longer relationship, I’d have had more authentic bonds with friends at the time, and I wouldn’t have had to go through a decade-long tango of getting close to coming out, going back in the closet, doubling down on being straight, dating girls but still going out to gay clubs, having crushes on gay friends that could’ve turned into something more if I was forthcoming, and enough vodka to sink the Soviet Union.
Those feel like lost years, and I don’t get an early-20s metabolism, energy levels, and unbridled optimism back. In a way I feel I’m shuffling towards a dim unknown trying really hard to do everything right this time because it really counts.
The above is a form of vulnerability, I’m telling you, semi-quarantined and fully-bored audience at home, extremely revealing details about myself, my decision-making, and so on you can probably use against me…I don’t know how actually. What would you do, print it out and go to Bank of America and say “he’s a big ol faggot, don’t give him a loan!” or something?
The below feels even more vulnerable to me even though it might not seem like it, but bear with me, if you’re tired of hearing my inside voice you aloud may want to step away from the screen, get some pretzels and a Dasani.
After the demise of my last relationship I threw myself into a completely new project: I was going to help other gay men (and assorted alphabet characters) not feel so alone. With help, I started up a new project called A Gay Tale – it was going to be a storytellers group where people shared their stories for others to hear so we could all learn. Maybe sell t-shirts or something down the line, who knows.
It seemed like a perfect idea at the time and like I was actually doing something other than wallowing in bed and carefully editing dating profiles: here’s a way to make a difference!
So I put out earnest pitches on social media – and guess what? a few people actually signed up, and they were happy to contribute and be a part of it!
Things were chugging along at breakneck speed: people were interested and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to give the people what they wanted!
So I shared some of my own stories.
The first was an elegy to my relationship that ended, you can read it here: http://agaytale.com/i-told-him-i-loved-him/
It felt like the right thing to say at the time, and I reread it now and it definitely feels spot-on with how I felt at the moment. It’s raw and real. Angry. Cathartic.
The second story was my first (gay) kiss, you can read it here: http://agaytale.com/not-myself-tonight/
This was a weird personal story I never thought I’d really tell anyone because it never seemed deeply interesting, but turned out to actually be kind of fun to write in retrospect.
At this point I was really catching some steam with the project, and I was getting more and more submissions for stories (others which are posted at the domain).
Then, almost a month in, I hit the largest, hardest, most unbreakable wall: I realized I still loved him, was irreparably despondent, and spiraling, and pretty much brought the whole project down with me.
I didn’t want to talk about gay love or straight love or any love. I didn’t even know what love was anymore. I just wanted to cuddle for fuck’s sake!
I became unglued in this description of a typical evening routine: http://agaytale.com/self-destructive-behaviors-volume-i/
You think I’d have pulled back a little, maybe handed the reins over to someone else, taken some time to work on myself, and all that other self-care horseshit.
But not me, goddammit! I was going to barrel right through this emotional breakdown with absolute gusto!
The last straw (heh) was this post documenting everything I drank since I was dumped: http://agaytale.com/self-destructive-behaviors-volume-ii/
I’d like to think it was an exhaustive list, I maybe missed something here or there, but not being able to drink at home for over a year really caught up in the matter of a month or so.
The project went off the rails right around the time I did, and I went through a phase where I just wanted physical affection and validation – an entirely human need, and one that I didn’t truly understand the importance of until the rug was pulled out from under me.
The worst part was not feeling like I’d let myself down, I felt like I let everyone else down – I really, really wanted this whole thing to work and was really bad at asking for help.
Maybe someday I’ll start it up again in a different form, maybe it’ll be based here, I don’t know.
That’s my vulnerability: it’s a real experience that I went through and hopefully learned something from.
What’s yours?