August 9, 2009

  • Sometimes Love is Not Enough


    “To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.”

    I have been holding on to hope that through speaking things that are solely positive I would come to enjoy that I am alive.  I have been pushing myself to carry self-dialogues that are solely uplifting, quoting every inspirational source I can think of, even praying and reading Scripture—believing that if I focused on the good things I would be able to find confidence in a bright future.  I had honestly thought this would work; that if I could control my thoughts I could then generate positive self-talk and with enough of that happy self-talk I would eventually find happiness.  I don’t believe that anymore. 

    The problem with the above approach is that it requires that I be alive.  I am not alive.  I am here, physically breathing, but I am dead.  Someone has taken over my life—someone sad, someone consumed by sorrow, consumed by confusion, consumed by uncertainty…too tired to think, too tired to eat, too tired to sleep, too tired to spend energy on making the future look appealing.  The future doesn’t look appealing.  The present doesn’t even look appealing.  I want out.  This person is sucking all the life out of me.   I don’t like him and I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know how to help me get away from him.   I need help.

    The person I was before lived life, and lived it fully; this person was full of hope and trust and positivity.  He was genuine, authentic, unashamed, resilient, brave, genuinely happy and an unlimited source of love to countless people.  He knew oppression, but he had confidence in his ability to overcome it; he knew pain but he knew love could overcome it.  He knew sorrow, but he knew it was fleeting and had faith in the resurgence of joy.  Now, underneath every thought and every action, he feels sorrow, and only sorrow.

    To make something very clear: This is not about the person that I lost.  While losing my very best friend has been extraordinarily painful and consuming, this despair is about so much more than that.  I have never never felt so strongly like I was doing everything in my life wrong.  I have never felt such strong opposition.  I have never felt so weighed down, tied up, oppressed, hopeless, or directionless.  I have never hated myself so strongly.  I have never felt so tired of existing, existence, the human experience, other humans.   I don’t want any of it.

    I don’t really know what to do with myself.  I really don’t feel like trudging forward.  I don’t know how to go about picking up the pieces and collecting myself to move on in the way I need to.  And while the person that I am now has done extraordinary things to improve his life—moved out of his parents’ house, picked up some of the bills he used to have his parents pay, registered for a semester of classes that genuinely interest him, surrounded himself with friends, and created lists of priorities and goals which he has even begun to tackle, looking so motivated and inspired—the fact still remains that the passionate love for life that he had just days ago is nowhere to be found. 

    If we are spirits on a human journey, and I’ve lost my spirit, what am I? An empty shell?  That’s how I feel…. deflated, empty, hollow.  There is nothing to me anymore, I just float on.  I’ve forgotten what it feels like to smile.  I’ve forgotten what it feels like to enjoy a hug.  I’ve forgotten what it feels like to love, to enjoy a sunset, to listen to a song and be happy, to lust after something, to desire to be around people, to want to wake up in the morning, to enjoy being alive, to be alive.

    And while this isn’t about my last relationship, there is something extraordinary that happened in it that you should know about: I took a break from hating myself.   In fact, I almost forgot what it felt like to hate myself–even when that was my strongest internalized feeling for so much of my life.  I’m won’t go so far as to say that this girl’s love is what changed me or that without her I can’t find such self-love on my own; I know that I can find this love again, alone, someday.  But I had never had someone take such care with my heart before.  In places that I felt entirely unlovable and unattractive, I knew love for the first time.  In a world that is so preoccupied with gender and sexuality, I found someone who didn’t care and loved me for me.  I can say with no hesitation, the past four months have been the most meaningful four months of my adult life.  I grew so much as a person.  I discovered a new depth to myself and the life I lead.  I was in love with everything about everything.  I knew joy.

    And then I lost that joy.  The only people whose opinions seem to matter oppose me.  “We love you but we will never approve of your life.”   “We have put up with you living this way for long enough.”  “It is our prayer that you will one day reconnect with the person you were meant to be.”  “We think it would be best for you to pretend you never met her.”

    And people wonder why I actively, consistently grieve over my attraction to women—to the point where I could kill myself over it; to the point where I can fantasize about careening into oncoming traffic easier than I can fantasize about how great the future could be.  People wonder why my whole late adolescence and early adult life I have been preoccupied with gender and sexuality; why I spend so much time educating the world on the issues that homosexual and transsexual individuals face and checking psychological associations religiously to see what current studies and publications report about LGBT people.  I do these things operating under the hypothesis that if I were “just” heterosexual I could love those I love openly in the world, and be accepted and affirmed and supported.  I firmly believe that if I were not “queer” I would not be going through this, that this would not be my life–because my love and my life would have been supported from the start and I wouldn’t have had to fight.  I never wanted this.

    If you can’t see that I am a good person who tries to do the right thing in every circumstance I find myself in, you are the reason I am in agony.  My life is about love, and life, and living in love, and loving passionately.  I am so aware that I can’t help the world that I was born into, this society, the worldviews that shape the people around me, or anything other than myself really.  And with that I try so hard to have control over that person and make that person someone worthy of love and acceptance and approval.  I spend days at a time trying to better myself, looking inward and finding flaws and trying to fix myself to make myself better—a better lover, a better student, a better child, a better friend, a better coworker; more productive and efficient and contributing; better at displaying love, more full of positivity….  I even turn this around and make it external, focusing on society, educating society, showing society that people like me are okay, that I am not a monster, that I am just a kid trying to live his life…. But I’m still the monster anyway; I’m still the fuck-up, the failure, the disappointment. 

    To those who want to knock me down:  Congratulations on your success.

    There are few things that hurt more than thinking about all the apologies I feel that I owe the world right now, even when I don’t feel that all of them make sense.  I’m sorry I caused the one person I loved fully and completely and devoted all my time and energy to for the past four months any pain; I’m sorry that I have hurt her family and I’m sorry if there is even a fraction of it that is beyond repair; I’m sorry for the physical pain she is in and I’m sorry for any part I have had in any of her emotional pain; I am sorry that I can’t be heteronormative and sorry that my parents have to deal with it; sorry that they have had to mourn the loss of certain hopes and dreams for the future, the loss of their daughter, the loss of dresses, etc.  I’m sorry I have lied and snuck around and allowed someone in my life to do the same; I’m sorry that I had even encouraged lying and sneaking; I’m sorry that the best I can do is remove myself from the lives of the people I have hurt and I’m sorry that I can’t actually verbalize these apologies to the people I need to hear them; I’m sorry that I’ve failed you; I’m sorry that there is nothing I can do to show you that my heart is pure.  I’m broken and I’m sorry.  All of me is sorry. 

    And to think I was actually finding happiness and learning to love myself.  To think I was deluded into thinking that there is room for me in the world, that I, Eli, could even exist here.  Was I crazy?

    So here we are.  This is all that exists now.  I am sorry and full of sorrow.  I am on my own, jaded and untrusting.  I’m a new person.  Maybe someday Eli will be around again, but for now there is just this.  

    To those I’ve hurt, I’m sorry.  If there were ways to better apologize, I would do it.  If I knew what the people I have hurt needed to hear, I would say it.  If there was something I could do to make amends, I would do that.  I’ve grown up a lot in the past few weeks; I’m not so naive anymore, not so childlike and trusting.  The world isn’t as beautiful as some sunsets make it seem, and sometimes even love gets you in trouble.  I never meant any disrespect.  I never meant any pain.  I don’t even know how this happened.  I was thinking that it was the right time for me to fight for what I wanted, and I did.

    And in that, somehow everything went wrong.  And in that, I lost myself somewhere. 

    In this life, I have been promised love, but not approval.  And while I believe in the power of love, sometimes love is not enough.

    Love doesn’t always win. 

    Some lessons are harder to learn.