Speaking Only For Myself

Speaking only for myself, the legal banning of conversion therapy always makes me personally think of the deeper issues that have pervaded my own life struggles. Like self-acceptance. I think that when people struggle with their homosexuality, for instance, what they’re really struggling with is their perception of what it means to “be homosexual,” what it means to “be gay.” This has certainly been the case for me. To be one’s self is the most natural thing in the world, but when we end up thinking (or have been culturally groomed to believe) that we are the projection of other people’s prejudices, that’s where it gets complicated. It’s like being trapped in a fun house of mirrors and all we can see are the distortions of who we are; we can never really see our true self.

I’m not so sure that social media actually helps in times like this because we end up being bombarded with varying opinions and distractions, and in the midst of so much chaos it’s next to impossible to find our own beliefs, to know our own true self. I know for myself that it feels as though social media constantly pulls me in too many directions and most have little to do with “me.” I think in many respects the struggle to find “my self” was easier before social media, before the internet, when all I had was my own broken heart. I’d like to think that the support I’ve received from others through social media somehow lifts me up, and of course many times it does; it has. But just as often it has pulled me down. More and more I find it harder and harder to hear my own thoughts, to be alone with myself, to discover what I, alone, believe, as opposed to which side or corner of the larger conversation I best belong. I’m not sure how to resolve this struggle for authenticity. I fear time is running out. Life will of course one day end, absolutely and forever, and what I most want to discover before it does is who I am. Most days I have no idea who I am. Each morning I rush to work and I do what others tell me, what’s expected of me, sometimes managing to assert my own individuality and make decisions but mostly ending up feeling like a cog in a wheel. All of it helps pay the rent and buys me food and so I hate to complain or seem ungrateful, but sometimes, at the end of my days, or even each morning, as I drink my four cups of bitter black coffee and set out on the roller coaster ride yet again, panic strikes my heart. I’m running out of time. What have I done with my life? Is this all there is?

I am a 55-year-old gay man and I am of a generation that remembers the beginning of AIDS, and even before it was named what it’s become, when there was only fear, and panic, threat of extinction in the midst of the Cold War. Something about those days, pre-1985, makes me still ache inside. I am bruised in my heart and the pain lingers on, like an echo that won’t quite die down toward complete and restful silence. I want it all to end, and I want to live. I want to accept what is, what and who I am, but am always on the search for what others believe, how they can validate me. If only I could validate myself, so I’d stop needing others to reaffirm my own existence. The life I’ve lived.