Losing My Religion— R.E.M.
#365Songs: December 26th
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” — James Baldwin
Oh life is bigger
It’s bigger than you
And you are not me
The lengths that I will go to
The distance in your eyes
Oh no I’ve said too much
I set it up
“I’m queer.” Two words that took several decades to say out loud, and whether I knew all along and didn’t understand or if I finally understood what I couldn’t identify, I know now.
Words are powerful. It’s why I write. But they’re not always easy to say, or express. Words have meaning when organized a certain way, can be received and misperceived depending on how and when they’re said.
I started The BSidesNarrative over 13 years ago. My mother was dead almost a year, and my kid was one. I was cloaked in grief — still true, today, so many years later — and overwhelmed, angry and unsettled by a family history hidden from me for too long. Here are the opening words of my first post:
“You’ve already heard the A-Side, the story of the sheltered Presbyterian-raised Midwestern boy who leaves behind his insulated world and moves from city to city, adept at avoiding conflict, at ease amongst strangers, and in search of anything and everything.”
I set out to write a memoir, in real time, as I processed a raw unsentimental journey inward, where I’d seek truths in the darkness of blurry depths within my family history, all set to the context of the modern moment.
And that’s what I did, and have been doing, all these years. Or so I thought.
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
To read my own past words, after time has passed, is to see the half truths, the ways in which I still held myself back. Not from you, reader, whoever you are, if you exist at all, but from myself. I scratched old wounds without ever reaching the pain’s source.
I’ve written over 130 essays this year, hundreds of thousands of words — by far my most prolific since graduate school almost two decades ago. And what’s so clear to me today is that I’m still doing it, applying metaphors where the hardest truths should live, writing around the point, masking even as I claim to unmask.
I have implied my queerness without saying the words “I am queer.” When I do say it aloud to the people who know me best they’re not as surprised to hear it as I’d imagined. One of the many problems with masking is that oftentimes you’re only hiding from yourself. Others see in you what you cannot, but it’s not their responsibility to tell you what you can’t hear.
A truth is no less even when you haven’t acknowledged it yet.
Every whisper, of every waking hour
I’m choosing my confessions
Trying to keep an eye on you
Like a hurt, lost and blinded fool, fool
Oh no I’ve said too much
I set it up
Consider this
Consider this the hint of the century
Consider this the slip
That brought me to my knees, failed
Even there, see? The way I move from first to second person, the way I distance myself from myself. Sometimes it’s subtle, the ways in which I fail to reveal myself, the ways in which I withhold my vulnerabilities.
I’m a professional masker, after all, the way I can step into a room and shape shift, manufacture energy to meet the presentation of another. The way I can masterfully shift the subject away from myself so as to reveal very little about my inner life. It’s all a defense mechanism to overcome the fact that others can’t truly know someone who doesn’t know themself.
Fear is a deep wound, rooted so far in the past it’s nearly impossible to track its origins. I grew up in a binary world, where you’re this or that, you’re straight or gay, you’re a Democrat or Republican, you’re religious or you’re the anti-Christ.
What if all these fantasies come
Flailing around
Now I’ve said too much
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
But that was just a dream
That was just a dream
What’s most interesting is that I’ve always queered the spaces around me, long before I knew the word or its meaning. Like everything in life, attraction is not binary to me. I am drawn to people the way I am to ideas, to art. It’s a feeling not an ideology. But in a world that drags you to one thing or another, it’s so challenging to see yourself somewhere on a spectrum. Not this, not that. Identity is not how others identify you, it’s how you understand yourself and how you show up in the world. I know now that I haven’t done that so well, never quite figured out how to live a fully authentic life.
And that’s what makes me the safest queer person in America, a professional masker, a seemingly confident White male who doesn’t wear my pride outwardly. Again, nobody is surprised when I come out to them, but nobody has ever asked me either. Perhaps that’s out of politeness or I’m just that good at masking.
But this is me: a bisexual man with a closet full of masks who is scratching the surface of what it means to be a complicated human in an unforgiving world. There’s no binary for that, and there never should be again.
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spot-light
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don’t know if I can do it
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I thought that I heard you laughing
I thought that I heard you sing
I think I thought I saw you try
But that was just a dream
Try, cry, fly, try
That was just a dream
Just a dream
Just a dream, dream
~
Start following the #365Songs playlist today, and listen to each new song with each new article!
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