Entry posted by Jean Valjean
2,883 views
There is a conversation I really need to have with my father. Mainly, I will be travelling down to Sioux City a week from now, and I want to take a car so I can bring my sisters with. There's someone I want them to meet, and vice versa.
I don't have a car; my father does. Ever the compliant one, he absolutely will not let us use his stuff, and gave a flat "no." I wonder if I should explain to him exactly what's going on, but I'm afraid.
See, a couple of days ago I mentioned the term "closet heterosexual", and people took that completely the wrong way. To me, that's not a joking term. I was dead serious, because I would use that term to describe myself sometimes. Sexuality goes over my head, and at times I'm afraid to own up to it, afraid to admit that it influences my agendas. My father has demonized me before for being interested in otherwise very constructive activities because he perceived me as having a certain hidden social agenda.
Yet, there's something I'm very serious about. There are things that I want to do with my life, and I have a mission. It goes a bit over my head, and so many ways it's a two person job. I think I met someone who shares my life mission.
I feel I ought to be able to tell him, and yet for the stupidest reasons I'm afraid, and these reasons are very unfair. They shouldn't even exist. Why should I be afraid to tell him? There's nothing to be ashamed of here. Yet, I know that he will belittle me for no reason.
This isn't high school anymore. I'm not heads over heals, dominated by irrational emotions. This isn't some infatuation or emotional dependency. These objectives fit into a larger picture that, for once, I can see, and I have learned now that there's no such thing as failure and that if one objective fails, it's just a window to more opportunities. So I can live with this not working out, in spite of how good this looks to be at the present. I can say that I'm in a healthy state of mind.
It just hurts that he never took me seriously when it mattered the most. He likely will not take me seriously now. That hurts, and I'm afraid. Which is incredibly, incredibly stupid.
I always laughed at the concept of the closet. I thought it was ridiculous, because I didn't care about being socially ostracized. That had been my reality all my life, so I learned to roll with it. I didn't hold back, didn't bother hiding who I was, and threw shyness to the wind. Yet, it's pretty different with parents. They hold a certain power over you. You can't just walk up to them and be the alpha male. You can't turn your unique personality into a vessel for leadership, because so long as you're within their household, the parents are the heads.
And I have to admit, when I'm serious about something like this, a relationship that could potentially influence the rest of my life if it works out, getting belittled by one of the most significant people in my life hurts. I hate being sensitive to that. I've never been sensitive before. The way I grew up, I only new insults and derision. My father had a way of actively attacking my self-esteem in order to toughen me up, so I toughened up. Grew rhinoceros skin. When I had bullies beat me up every day at school and emotionally abuse me, he told me to deal with it, and eventually I found ways of controlling this world more than it controlled me. And I'm still not the son he wanted.
So I developed this "don't deal it if you're not willing to take it." My negative sense of humor, my tendency to get people going and tick people off, my habit of messing with people, all became rather normal. Though I never insulted anyone for their relationships, because that's the one thing I haven't learned to take. There have been so many times that I looked down on people who couldn't handle bullying, or who seemed hypersensitive, and I provoked them for laughs, because that's how I was raised. I still think that there are a lot of hypersensitive people out there who could toughen up, but on certain levels I'm understanding.
There was one a college student. He was gay. He and his lover were kissing in an apartment, and someone took pictures from the window and leaked them all over the internet. That man committed suicide. We could look at this from the perspective of problems homosexuals have to face, but I read this from an article written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., who had the good sense to back up and see this from a much more meaningful perspective. He asked you to imagine if this had been a man kissing a woman. Having an intimate moment like that interrupted and degraded would hurt just as much. The end result could very well have been the same. This was a problem of society not knowing to respect a person's boundaries, and not valuing basic human decency.
What I took away from this is that when it comes to their relationships, to those things that are very intimate to people, it's completely understandable that they'd be far more sensitive than usual. So I begin to understand the closet. I expect people have powerful, commanding personalities worthy of alpha status, and yet I am learning to forgive them for the hardship of hiding the more intimate areas of their lives. Even the great leaders of our society, from political officials to military generals, clamp up when it comes to their family life. Everyone lives in the closet to some extent. For that, I forgive them, and I sympathize with them. I wish it wasn't that way, and for those who live a closeted life from those who they should trust the most, I pray for you.
24601
34 Comments
Recommended Comments