The Letter That Never Arrived

A lot of you know that I've been struggling a lot this year, even my final semester of college. A lot has happened, but one thing in particular I've been struggling with is someone I really cared about and hurt. It hurts to say that maybe, just maybe things weren't meant to happen between the two of us and that we should just be friends, close friends. He is a very sweet and gentle guy, but I hurt him very much even though it was unintentional.

Early in my relationship with him, I wrote him a letter. It never got to him and was sent back to me. I didn't want to open it because I was going to give it to him, but I always forgot to take it with me when I went to go see him. It had been nearly eight months since I wrote it, I finally opened it up to see what I had written, of course I had a few drinks in me when this happened. It is a piece of sentimentality and I cried for a while because I did care about him eight months ago, and I still do.

This is what it said:

April 24, 2012

Hey ----,

I thought I would just write you a letter since you're having a rough week. I am very much looking forward to this weekend. Nice dinner/picnic in the park, a walk around the park, and --- is going to get us a little something for later in the night.

I'm very much enjoying getting to know you. You are very genuine and it is very refreshing to have you in my life right now. Thank you for having me take things slow for once so I can get to know you. I hope we continue this trend and maybe we could play a "get to know each other" game if you'd like this weekend.

Still working on the "surprise" for you as well. Unless this is all the "surprise" you needed. I just want you to feel better this week, I know what you've been through has been a battle, but I'm here for you. I respect you and I definitely want what is best for you in the long scheme of things.

I'm very much looking forward to this weekend. Just spending the time with you is enough to keep me going and of course a few nights of peaceful sleep. I guess I'll be talking to you more after you get this letter.

See you soon,
--- -----

I cried and cried until I fell asleep holding it in my hand and re-reading it. My own words meant for another, the person I care for, just hit me. It just goes to show that words are powerful things, even your own, even if they weren't meant for you. I just wish I could turn back the clock back to June and stop myself from making that snap decision and had the "boyfriend" talk with him. Things just weren't meant to be like that I guess.

If you, you know who you are, are reading this, you will always be a close friend. You are someone I can count on to listen and give me some advice. I hope you find the right guy for you and hopefully he won't hurt you like I did. I love you my friend.

Just an Irritating Year

You want to know what? I've had a really rough time this year. There are some people that I have met that I really do love, and there are some people that can rot in hell if such a place existed. I know I should be waiting for the end of the year for this, but I'm near the point of aggravation that I cannot contain myself anymore.

1) I had an abusive relationship going into this year. He seemed like a lovely guy, but he isolated me until I had no one but him. He verbally abused me and I had no choice, but to wake the hell up and realize that he was not good for me and break up with him.

2) I was stressed out with losing a few friends because I was affiliated with something that was supposed to help the community as a whole. One friend in particular was lost because some people couldn't keep their noses out of private affairs that needed no explaining. And in turn this affiliation turned their backs on one of their own and tried to make me look like the bad guy when they should have looked in the mirror themselves.

3) My parents and brother moved to Arizona. This stressed me out immensely and still does because home for me no longer home.

4) I met an incredible guy in April and it ended so horribly because ONE person thought it was okay to destroy something that made me so happy with my life. Which after that happened, I drank and drank because I was so depressed and because it repressed the nightmares I had for two months. And as much as I fight I am pushed down more and more because he doesn't trust me anymore. It makes me cry at night because I feel like my heart was taken out, stomped on, and put back in. It is so hard to make it through the day because I don't have him. Not a day goes by that I regret letting someone do that to us.

5) My graduate school dreams were crushed. My Graduate Record Exam (GRE) scores are too low because of the people who are insecure about their scores re-take it constantly pushing intelligent people's scores, like mine, down. And facing the reality that only ONE person believes in me in the psychology department and she isn't even my best friend (who has been insufferable lately) or colleague, but the most kind-hearted professor in the psychology department. I'm disheartened and depressed about that and still obviously grieving about it. I know I have other people who believe in me, but I just don't feel it at all from most.

6) Being accused of being shallow. I hate it when I'm accused of this. Listen if you are not my type I will still talk to you, there is nothing in my book that keeps me from having a good friendship with you, it's as simple as that. I love people like I love the woods and the ocean. I will talk to anyone with no prejudice just so long as you are a kind person and don't do me wrong in my eyes.

7) I'm really tired of people avoiding me because they can't be cordial with others and get over giving the cold shoulder to others because they think that "the other person hates me or as no use for me, I know I'll be an ice queen!" It gets REALLY tiring, annoying, and not to mention childish. Grow some gender appropriate gonads and face your issues! It's not that difficult.

I do count my blessings everyday because there were some good things that happened to me this year, like having a place to stay with amazing roommates, parents and friends that love me, and an education and finally graduating on the 21st this month. But really when you look at it 2012 is an awful year for this kid. Sometimes certain years have that crap storm that is unrelenting and there just seems to be no way out. I'll get over it like I always do because of my resilience, but even then I worry that is not enough.

What Spirituality Means to Me

I remember the first time I entered a church, I was six years old and it wasn’t even the church of my family’s denomination. My parents placed me at a catholic school as a kid because I got jealous that my autistic brother got to go to school before I did, mind you I was only four at that time. I believe it was Ash Wednesday when I first went; I didn’t know what it meant or what it stood for. So as the curious kid as I was, and still am, I asked my first grade teacher what we were doing. Of course she didn’t give me a clear answer and I still don’t really know what it is to this day, in which I do plead ignorance in the sense that I don’t really know much about Catholicism. It also didn’t help that I grew up in a family of mixed denominations. My dad was raised Episcopal and my mom was raised Southern Baptist.  I don’t really know what my parents wanted for me as far as religious beliefs went, so it really made things confusing growing up. When I was nine, my mom took me to church with my adopted grandfather. This church was a Protestant church if memory serves correctly, and I was put into a Sunday school class with children my age. In this class that one Sunday they were talking about Jesus and how he did good deeds for others he didn’t even know. Because I was the “new kid” in class, I was called on a lot more than the other children. One thing out of my curiosity I asked, “How do we know Jesus really did those things?” I was told by the teacher that the Bible says so. I was nine and didn’t want to accept that answer. I left the room to look for my mom and when I did, I asked her if we could leave and to not take me back to that church again. Then the move to Idaho happened and I was exposed to another type of religion, Mormonism, which I still don’t have a lot of knowledge of and most of what I know is lies my parents told me about it. My first exposure to it was when I asked a girl to come to my house for dinner because she was a good friend, she asked her parents and they told her that she could go because it sounded like a date rather than having a friend over for dinner. I asked her why and it was because she couldn’t date until she was sixteen, in which this made no sense to me at all because I didn’t ask her out on a date. The next time I went to church I was twelve, and it was for a youth group and the local church college Northwest Nazarene University. I went with some good friends I had at the time and had a great time there. Although stirring inside of me were feelings that didn’t make sense. It was like the thinking was being done for me and not my own. After my best friend at the time moved away, I stopped going for years. And through those years I was trying to come to terms with what I been taught in religion with my sexuality, which was very difficult to do for someone aged thirteen through eighteen. I started going to church again when I entered college with some friends I had made in the dormitories. This church was an interesting one, something I had never experienced before. Songs about God and Jesus by religious singers and groups like Casting Crowns, then a sermon, and finally an encore performance. I’m not friends with some of these people anymore because of either my sexuality or because I question religion in its entirety. I stopped going to church at nineteen and haven’t been back since because my views don’t mesh well with some of their views, especially when it came down to my sexuality and who I am as a person. 

This isn’t about Catholics, Baptists, Protestants, Mormons, or what it is about them I do and don’t like. This is about what Spirituality means to me and also what Agnostic means to me as well because I belong in both camps, but they are both situational in my views and I’m not going to claim that I’m right or wrong, this is just purely explanatory for my belief system that works for myself.

Spirituality is different for everyone. It is high meaningful to say that it is a broad spectrum of beliefs rather than a static view. Of course my idea of Spirituality is going on a long run and thinking about life decisions that must be made or even just meditating on my own or in yoga class. My belief in Heaven is that there is one and we all go there regardless of what we did on Earth and my belief is that Hell doesn’t exist because we are currently experiencing it in our waking life. Hell is said to be a place of fire and brimstone, a place where those who sinned go to experience unimaginable pain and discomfort. Earth, I believe is our Hell, there is no Satan or demons; there is experience of pain and discomfort at unimaginable levels. If Jesus did die for our sins than why is it that we cannot sin freely without being told we are going to Hell? The answer I have arrived at for myself is that humans are going to be sinners; no matter how hard we try we are never going to be perfect, therefore we always sin and we’d all be going to Hell anyway. I can’t honestly say that, and this one is overused, that I’m going to Hell just because I’m gay. This is where my belief in God comes into the picture. I believe that God can possibly be a man or a woman, we don’t really know for sure and since watching “Joan of Arcadia” I hold this belief that if you believe God is a man then that is your view, and same goes for if you believe God is a woman. He/She has set a path for us to follow and gives us a choice on such a path. He/She also creates us in the beginning of our life here on Earth. Suffice to say I was born gay and is not a choice because I have something to learn as a gay man that someone didn’t learn at all for whatever reason it may be. My soul is of God’s essence, just like everybody else’s. When we do die we become a part of He/She, with no judgment aside from whether we return to Earth or not, which this idea is called reincarnation, only I don’t believe we become a plant or animal when we learned our lesson. But this is what I personally believe. Another reason I’m not completely agnostic is that there are many things that can’t be explained objectively. An example is my friendship with my best friend. I was dating an incredibly abusive person at the start of this year and I actually met her in an undergraduate Practicum class and she saw that I was in constant sadness. She started hanging around me and eventually things blew up between this guy and I. I had a good talk with her about what to do, as well as another good friend of mine, and decided to break-up with him. She also noticed that I wasn’t eating that well and becoming anorexic and helped me get out of that hole I was in. If she didn’t come into my life I would’ve just starved myself into malnutrition. She has helped me in more ways than one. It is unsuspected friendships like hers that keep me believing in God.

Agnostism to me is when I am in the lab or when I’m making a decision for my life, which is in tie with my spirituality. When I am in the psychology labs I have to be objective and not let personal ideas get in my way. I think of it as my scientist-self. There is protocol to be followed and decisions have to be made in a non-personal manner. This idea is still fairly new to me, but when I do think about it a lot of questions do come to my mind. My main question is what kind of God puts someone on Earth that is homosexual and allows others to be ridiculed for who they are? That was something I asked myself during high school when I was being bullied for being different. It just didn’t seem fair at all. A great friend of mine and I were talking about this last night, is that the good gay men constantly get hurt, not just by patterns of hurt we all go through, but because people make the decision to hurt others for no reason other than that they are different and don’t fit into a mold.

Sure it gets confusing since I have a foot in one world and the other one in another. When it comes down to it, this works for me as a person and helps me work out what is going on in the world. This helps me create a world that is easier to understand and still be able to be a skeptic in a dangerous world such as ours. Even with being a gay male, I still have faith in what I believe to be true and no one can take that away from me. Because everyone’s ideas of religion, spirituality, and skepticism are different. Some are more different than night and day, and instead of causing an argument over who is right and who is wrong, we should try to understand our differences and learn from each other.

The Art of Letting Go

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." -Eleanor Roosevelt

Last week, I did something of a miraculous nature. Something that you think would be an easy task. I let my guilt over a situation go. This guilt just became too great for me so, I sat down and wrote a letter to a guy I really care about. He wasn't the cause of my guilt, but the situation that caused our relationship to end. It has taken me a while to get over not having control over a situation that had me isolated, manipulated, and unable to think about anything. Forgiving yourself is the hardest thing to do when you internalize everything. Constantly reevaluating the situation, seeing how things could have been different from what really happened. It just takes too much energy thinking about the mundane. Just being inside your head and having thoughts race, it is enough to make your head hurt and pass out because you just expended all of your energy.

I am thankful for still having him as a close friend. It was just the situation I attached to him I had to let go of. I never wanted to lose him since his caustic sarcasm keeps me on my toes, he is someone who can understand my situation with my family, and we could hold an intelligent conversation without needing to dumb it down. I would say we have a great friendship, I for once got to know someone as a person and then fall in love with that person, another gay man I could trust fully. Even though I said some callous things to him, he still knew it wasn't me speaking, but someone who was told cadges and manipulated by someone who had the intent of being a malicious bastard. Having a best friend that I nearly lost, but played the game back to get me back with the help of someone who did care about me, and still does. The maliciousness ended after talking to the individual, who deems me at fault, about materialistic things, and saying I was the selfish one. Projection is the con-artist's number one weakness. Not to mention three days into knowing this person, I knew thing were going to go bad, but he never left me alone to think at all. This was what I had to realize before I had to let it go. Nothing could have stopped this situation, aside from a good couple days of thinking and gaining more information.

Mind you this was only the first step I took: realizing that because it was a past event I cannot by any means change it. With me being an internalizer, it takes a lot to get over breakups, situation that have already happened, and abandonment. There are days where I don't think I deserve anybody I have in my life. I don't think I deserve a great guy because the happiness is all too real and foreign. I shouldn't have to feel like crap over everything anymore. Although letting go is hard and I'm still letting bits and pieces go, there is still a part of me that want a second chance with the one guy I did love. There will come a time when all is halcyon and maybe, just maybe I'll get to that third step. The second step is to simply accept the situation because even thought I allowed myself to be manipulated, it wasn't my fault in full. I have accepted what fate has done and that much I cannot change

Is This What It Feels To Really Cry?

I don't even know where to begin to explain this. I know there is nothing wrong with crying. Many thoughts enter into my mind. Some are more important than others. The other night my thoughts were racing so badly that I wanted to cry, although too exhausted to do so. When I got an e-mail from my father, after basically saying I didn't have to go down to Arizona for Christmas, saying he wanted to book a flight for me to go down there. I wanted to cry because I know nothing will have changed at all in mine and my family's relationship.

I understand why my mind races so much, having higher level of processing than others and having very high emotional intelligence. But why is it when I want to cry, I just can't do it? Is it society that has done this with traditional gender roles? Is it because I'm trying to hide behind a veil of seriousness and professionalism because I want to look perfect? The answer really is both.

In society, it is modeled for males to keep a straight face, from little to no emotional expression. If you are sad in public you are seen as a weakling. If you are angry in public you are seen as aggressive. If you are happy in public you are seen as naive. So it is just better to not express anything at all. As a gay man who expresses himself more toward the masculine side of the spectrum, it is incredibly hard to be congruent with my emotions. Because of societal pressure, that in all honesty I don't have to follow, I am backed against the wall with not wanting to express how I feel and really expressing how I feel. I despise that I must walk around stone-faced and come off as incredibly standoffish toward others, but that is the damage I let society do to me. It's hard to fall out of that pattern considering what has happened to me in past years, but I'm making the smaller changes in myself to do so, such as crying when I’m upset, fight with a punching bag I have in my backyard, or smiling when I am really happy, not fake happy.

The reasoning behind hiding behind a veil of seriousness and professionalism is my ambition to be the perfect person. There really is no such thing, but yet I strive for it anyway because that's what I was taught. I want people to see that I can be a role model, a great friend, a great potential partner, and just an overall amazing person. However, I have been told I don't have to do this contrary to my thoughts on perfectionism. I've been told I have been a role model, a great friend, I have the potential to attract a male partner and be a great partner in return, and that I am an amazing person overall. But, try having years and years of never being good enough for anybody. I'm pretty sure that in the womb I was expected to be the perfect person. It would really be a downer if that were true. There is no real way of knowing, but I do however know that I can't be perfect because there is no existence of perfect out there. You may be wondering, "How does crying come into to this?" That answer is fairly complex. In psychology we call this inappropriate affect, meaning that your emotion internally doesn’t match your emotion externally. So basically, when I feel sad on the inside and feel the physiological response to cry, I cover it up with being happy and smiling, or just keeping a straight face. All in all, it causes issues if you do it all the time in everyday situations and not just at work or at school.

So, really, the point is I only breakdown when the bottle inside me explodes, or when I drink a little too much. It just seems like I’m desensitized to crying as a response to being sad and I’m trying to become more congruent with this emotion. I can’t really stop my brain from racing and I can’t stop from highly emotionally intelligent, but what I can do is make the changes necessary to be the person I want to be and not what others expect me to be. I just want to know what it really feels like to cry, to let the tears flood, to just express this is my reaction to the situation, to feel that vulnerability, and for once not being able to be the strong one.