Understanding things

It's all coming together

This is a very rough draft of a brief overview of what the fuck this has all been about.

I find it sort of funny that this journey began with some loose ideas about acceptance—finding inspiration in the words of The Dude and Dr. Frank-N-Furter—and recognizing that successful communities, full of good people, could be built around failure. (There is something about that that speaks directly to my heart.) At this, I began analyzing my life, trying to understand just what about me makes me feel good (and wanting to join those communities) watching those movies; trying to find what it is that makes me part of the cult. To figure me out, I turned to existential fiction where thoughtful men struggle to find social success in ways that aren’t unfamiliar to me, but all the while knowing, somehow, that these men and I are different—a bit.
I saw in the underground man an isolation and social awkwardness that reminded me of my own struggles to make connections to a community. This began in my childhood and would continue on, through adolescence, into adulthood. We both had a desire for respect, which would turn into a desire for recognition (once the successes we believed were coming, in fact, didn't), and then, simply, we learned to desire forgiveness for how we carried on all that time.
In the invisible man, I saw a similar awkwardness, but also a desire for success that would come to mold a young man according to what he believed were the world’s expectations of him. He would reveal to me that I was measuring my own success by way of a paradigm (governed by conventional masculine behavior) by which I have always (and will always) fail to achieve the success I desire(d) (because the measuring post is a false one). He also showed me that I was using women to elevate my masculine status, to help me be one of the boys.
In Raskalnikov and Zits, and others, I began to see something new that I desired. Raskalnikov, after having learned that he is just like everyone else, that he is not special in the way that we, the most thoughtful and introspective, perceive we are, begins a search for community. (It might have even started before that, with Marmeladov). He kills two women in the interest of funding his intellectual success (and convinces himself that he’s done a service to the community for it), but is quickly overcome with what seems to be an emotional response that he cannot cope with, and he feels the guilt, and his loneliness, and his vulnerability, and he, for as much as he will fight it, realizes that he cannot carry his burden alone—and, so, seeks to join into a community. Zits, though somewhat younger in age and experience, seems to take a similar emotional journey, though his begins with the imminence of a murder (one that he is about to commit) when the story quickly becomes a supernatural journey through space and time. As Zits jumps from consciousness to consciousness, he gets to experience the lives of a variety of people as they each face making critical decisions in their respective lives. This, if we think back to the underground man, helps Zits make a connection with others (something the UM could not do) and it helps him recognize that he is a part of a community, that his actions can affect that community, and that they're actions, likewise, have an affect on him.
That he (Zits) believed, walking into a bank with a loaded gun, he needed to prove to the world that he deserved some form of justice—that things hadn’t been quite fair for him, and that the best way, in his perception, to get the community’s attention is to prove himself by a show of power (see masculine convention in the invisible man and Raskalnikov), which our American government does all over the world, is good evidence that, at the base of it all, there was a yearning for belonging that just could not be reconciled in a rational—and masculine—way. This is especially relevant today with regards to the acts of mass violence perpetrated by youth who, on the face of it, seem to have everything they need to achieve conventional success, but somehow perceive themselves as failing and, so, desiring that recognition of affect-ability, lash out against the world. (This is another paper topic, but something that should be mentioned and thought about deeply--eliminating firearms does not eliminate the desire to do harm, especially for those suffering this skewed perception)
I don’t suspect that I would ever have turned violent, but another way to achieve this illusion of power, and to grab attention, is by committing suicide. I have thought of killing myself—I believe that everyone has. I have never genuinely considered it, though, meaning, I've never put the gun in my mouth or stepped to the edge. Instead, I run away, moving to a new city and practice at living a life there until I can’t seem to tolerate it anymore. I'll then move back to the area where my friends and family reside, thinking that, perhaps, things may have changed, but, invariably discovering that I am still unhappy and still without the community that I desire (which, it seems, all of these existential men are after).
And, so, I ask myself what my ideal community looks like, and I realize that my ideal community looks just like the one I have now, but it's one in which I am happy. And, so, I begin to wonder how that is achievable, and I realize that i am the one variable that needs changing, and that that change has a great deal to do with loving myself.
For most of my life, I have been struggling to understand my sexuality. I am romantically and physically attracted to both men and women, but have had disproportionately more relationships with women because I have been afraid of being labeled a homosexual, which, if it were to turn out that I am not (or, rather, if I were to find happiness in a relationship with a woman), having had been openly intimate with men will certainly have repercussions (unwarranted as they are), within my community, on my ability to find some sort of social success while attempting to construct a meaningful life. That I have had more unhappy relationships with women, though, begs me to consider that my motivations there have more to do with being seen and recognized as a successful heterosexual man than it is because I’m in love. It’s only ever been, as much as it pains me to think that I’ve used several women in this way, about bolstering my heterosexual prowess.
And, so, I’m gay. I am gay. And that is taking more getting used to than I thought it should. It hasn’t got as much to do with accepting it as it does in just thinking of myself as a gay man--as it does in terms of thinking of my life as full of new potential, because I am free from the prison I locked myself away in all those years. And what does that mean? It means that I can learn to abide by my situation--and be happy there--however difficult or imperfect it may seem for some, because it is my fucking rug they’re pissing on. It means that, rather than dream it, I can choose to be it.
If only the time warp were real, I could go back to visit that younger me who has this whole journey ahead of him, to explain to him all of these things. If only.