Armchair Omphaloskepsis

You know, being in the closet was an experience that was painful and terrible and no good but I don't think it's particularly unique. "Being in the closet" as a gay person is just another way of saying "living a lie," and the particular lie can be anything, not just sexual orientation. I keep re-learning this lesson over and over.

For instance, staying in a relationship you know is not for you, but trying to put a cheerful face on it and hope it gets better is one way of being in the closet. As is staying in a religious community and pretending belief when you really don't believe in the religion anymore. Basically, any time I've pretended to be something I'm not for any reason I've rationalized for myself has been a time of profound depression and unnecessary suffering. It's a heavy burden to live a lie and I think we should try to do that as little as possible. Indeed, any time I've decided to step out of any of these closets (ignoring for now that it was usually just to step into the closet across the hall), it's been with the relief of a weight lifted. I don't wish living a lie to anyone, least of all myself.

It's hard though, sometimes you're lying to yourself in the closet just as much as you're lying to everyone else. It took me years to admit to myself that I probably wanted to kiss on dudes, let alone actually try and meet guys. Like there's basically three phases to life in the closet:  denial (lying to everyone and yourself), coming to terms (admitting to yourself the truth of the matter and chewing on it a bit, while maintaining the fiction to everyone else), and finally revelation, where you feel safe enough to live your truth openly. Stage 1 is a misery, and that misery seeps out in myriad ways. I recommend it to no one. Stage 2, is better. It can be deeply uncomfortable to consciously pretend to be someone you're not, and indeed that discomfort is largely going to be the motivation for moving to stage 3, but depending on the situation, it may be preferably in terms of physical safety or security to stay in stage 2. Which is to say, sometimes you are ready to share your truth but the world is not ready to hear it. Stage 3 is, in my admittedly privileged experience, liberation. I recommend it to everyone who can possibly do it.

As some armchair omphaloskepsis, I was thinking today that maybe we go through these stages en masse sometimes. Like for a long time we were collectively in stage 1 about how the world was going. Things are fine, capitalism doesn't produce too much suffering, cops and politicians only abuse their power in movies, everything is fine, nothing to see here, please don't rock the boat. But with the emergence of the internet, there's just been a lot more visibility to the horrors of the world we've built, because we're all comparing notes and discovering some of these miseries are not, in fact, outliers that don't challenge the story of who we are, but staggeringly common miseries that, in fact, challenge fundamental assumptions of the story we tell ourselves about how the world is. Just like there was only so many times I could get a little flushed when meeting a hot guy before I had to admit "purely heterosexual" was maybe not the most accurate assessment of my sexual identity, there's only so many times that the news of the day can make us sick to our stomachs before we start to think, "you know, maybe we aren't who we think we are and it's time to re-evaluate and try new things."

Some people respond to this new knowledge by doubling down on the lying to themselves and others, doing metaphysical contortions to assure themselves and others that bombing weddings is okay and necessary, and killing unarmed kids is okay and necessary and the financial class stealing everyone's pensions is just a necessary end in capitalism and nobody needs to be punished and everything can just stay the same. This is misery. On some animal level we always recognize cruelty and misery when we see it, and lying about it ourselves and others is a good way to become a very unhappy person. It is misery upon misery.

Some people are tired of lying to themselves about it, but have no new story to tell the world yet. So the world is misery, but what can I as a single person do to change an entire system? Probably nothing! So we kind of sit with this new knowledge of the sorrows of the civilization we've built, but having no real clear alternative, and not wanting to find ourselves on the outskirts of our communities we continue to go along with the story of how things are, even though it's uncomfortable to live that lie. Because what else can we do?  What's the point of coming out with the truth when everyone else isn't ready to hear it?  When there are entire industries dedicated to undercutting the very idea of truth or "facts" or "science."  What's the point of telling your truth when everyone on earth has been primed to respond, "yeah, but that's just your opinion man" whether that truth is your own sexual identity or scientific research that conflicts with someone's gut feeling about how the results should look?

This is stage 2, and it is still kind of a misery, but it's also a relief. Everyone knows what it feels like to wake up, and waking up is not a decision, it's just the moment when you finally realize you are conscious.

I think it's stage 3 we live in fear of, bringing the truth out into the light and dealing with it directly.  There's such a thing as too much truth too fast. I think stage 3, if we ever get there, could look really ugly or really beautiful or maybe a big messy mixture of both. Dealing forthrightly with the misery of the world could result in a whole heap of new miseries, as decades of pent-up rage and pain get meted out on each other in some kind of bloody revolution. If the truth is that the authorities HAVE been abusing their power and having been committing terrible acts without any sort of oversight or accountability, if we all agreed that was true, there's the scary moment where we decide how we're going to hold them to account. Do we haul out the guillotines or throw them out of office or simply run them out of public life? Will we be thinking rationally in that moment, and abiding by deep-seated beliefs about who we are and how we like to treat people or will the bottled pressure be too much for sanity and lead to a cathartic bout of terrible behavior on our own part?

This is the fear of stage 2.  That telling our truths will just be too much. That it will spark violence, that it will destroy and hurt more than it helps. And that's true, telling your truth can cause more pain than the status quo ever did. There are many truths you could tell your ex during a break-up that only hurt everyone involved. But there is a way to tell at least some of those truths that maintains the dignity and humanity of both parties. And, as you might have noticed, maintaining the dignity and humanity of one's opponents is not something high on anyone's priority list these days.

But we could tell the truth. We could be firm but kind. We could talk about it. We could listen. We could recognize and respect our common humanity even in the face of difficult truths. We could see ourselves in the other. And it would be great.

Winter is Cold, children

There’s a certain subset of kids movies that seem to be run by deranged adults who want to make children weep as often as they possibly can. Like, there’s just some people who think it’s vitally important to remind every child every week that their beloved pet or parent or friend is going to die much sooner than they think. So it’s an hour and a half of a lovable dog hero, followed by it’s untimely demise, pause for weeping, then yay, puppies! 

Like, the occasional “mortality is coming children, and you are hopelessly naive” kind of ending is probably okay, but there’s just an astonishing amount of creative adults who think they need to be the Avatar of Sorrow to unsuspecting children. 

I don’t get it. I mean for adults, yeah, the winter is cold, life is brutal, people are jerks, etc. so of COURSE adult fiction is a dystopian tragedy. But man, there’s no need to pre-emptively embitter children like they’re a pair of jeans that needs to be artfully damaged because this is the fashion of the day. Time and the bitter, nihilistic society they will eventually be dropped into will do that just fine on it’s own, thank you very much.

Please don’t let any children read this.