I’ve got to be honest, this just may be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. To tell the world that I am almost 40 and alone is a special kind of embarrassment almost akin to being naked in the train not that I’ve ever been naked in the train but my ability to imagine myself in this predicament affords me the luxury of utilizing this analogy. Anyway as you can probably tell by my written ramblings, I am stalling. Having to tell the world that I am almost 40 and alone fills me with great anxiety. I do not know how I got here but that will not stop me from trying to find the reasons.
Truth be told all my life I’ve been a loner. I’ve never really had any close friends. I mean how can you get close to people when you have so many demons that need protecting? Father an opiate addict who left when you were three. Mother on the bottle trying to raise you to the best of her ability. These are not the things you think will make you an object of popularity so you bury them deep. You smile, pretend neat, lose yourself in the life of everybody, temporarily leave your life as you are so used to doing this constantly- leaving yourself and disconnecting from your feelings, first as a measure of survival then as a respite from your less than desirable existence. You are used to denying your own feelings for the sake of other people so it becomes your comfort zone, a necessary habit, a place you come to know as your second home, the vice you love to inhabit.
Growing up I was raised in a Christian home where I did not celebrate any holidays including birthdays not even my own. In this world people tend to connect primarily through holidays and birthdays and often take it personally when you do not celebrate these things with them. I was raised to believe that holidays and birthdays were celebrations that were based on the veneration of false gods, the perpetuation of pagan traditions and the glorification of customs that displeased God. When you try explaining your beliefs to others, often times they do not want to hear them and write you off as some holy rolling zealot which in and of itself is an isolating experience.
Growing up Christian is hard mainly because you are always in conflict with your desires. You skirt a delicate balance between wanting to be human, complete with the expression of all things deemed sinful yet deliciously sensuous and wanting to be God’s soldier, donning righteousness like it were the new fall line. You want so bad to talk about those less than desirable desires that haunt your mindspace daily but you are afraid of leading others into temptation so in an effort not to be a stumbling block to fellow Christians, you bury them under a well-maintained mask of piety. You bury so much of yourself you wonder sometimes if you are dead or alive.
Then an interesting thing happens. Your teenage years hit and you enter into a different war. It is a war between you, Gods will and your hormones. For me, it was not so much girls I wanted but rather the bodies of boys. I looked at boys like I looked at girls, at first with an innocent curiosity and then a guilty longing. You are told this is wrong. You pray hard and try your best to deny what you’ve become. Your last name becomes shame and shame is not something that gets you friends as you bury yourself in performing heterosexuality aka straightness. You wear your pants a little bit too baggy, add a performative bop to your walk, exaggerate your mannerisms while masking the limp wrist, the switch, the soft laugh that was the object of much ridicule by the more masculine presenting boys. Gradually you drown in the sea of your body and crawl into the ground of your own bones as you work to construct your own invisibility hoping not to be seen at all. But inside you still long to be known just not as someone who hurts so much. Shame carries an echo one that keeps you alone.
In an effort to quell those awful feelings of loneliness and deep despair, you gravitate to anyone who will have you, who will say “yes I see you, I know you, I want you, you are special here, you are admired, loved and revered”. You find yourself dealing with people who you don’t really want to deal with more so out of desperation than desire. Seeking friendship with anyone as a means to avoid pain is a recipe for disaster as often times you skip steps in the get-to-know-you-process. You overlook deep character flaws and find yourself gravitating towards toxic personalities and those who are character disordered. It is like a band aid to a bullet wound but thing about wounds is that once you’re bleeding to death, you will do anything to make it stop even if it isn’t always effective.
So the years progress and you go from one shit storm to the next and ultimately your patience for relationships wears thin and you meet dead friendship after dead friendship, one after the next and before you know it you are here, writing about the small deaths, lamenting the fact that you are almost forty with no one to share your tired existence with. You wonder how you got here at all although deep down inside you already know. The reasons are endless:
1. You are Gods child and they resent you for your morals
2. They are threatened by your looks, talents, intelligence and style
3. You give so much to others and not enough to yourself.
4. You expect too much from everyone else.
5. You bury so much of yourself as a result of your childhood
6. You don’t celebrate holidays
7. You are a gay Christian seeking redemption/emergence from a life that offers you nothing but full emptiness.
8. Your childhood put a bomb inside of you that now makes it impossible for you to let others get but so close to you.
The list goes on and on and the aloneness gets big and strong. To admit this to the world, hell to admit this even to yourself is harder on the heart than what is felt. Trying to find the right words to express the already indescribable hell of feeling all alone in this world is a special kind of trauma that just exacerbates the pain that you already feel and accessorizes it with humiliation and shame. It is truly a disenfranchised grief, one you always seem to bury just for some temporary relief.
