"What parents want, is for their kids to be successful."
It was a polite conversation, not heated at all, although a lifetime of cumulative disappointments seemed to anchor the conversation, attached firmly to the chair I most often see him in now, extending down, down, down into the past, all the way back to my first stubborn defiance. Which, if memory serves, was the time I touched an overly warm oven burner moments after being told not to. It did not go well for me I am told.
My mother was seated in her chair, a few feet to the right. I briefly flashed back to coming out to them, what, 10 years ago now? They were seated in kind of a mirror image now to how they were then. Different house, different sides of the room, same disappointing child.
I didn't have much to say. I'm well aware I'm a disappointment, to myself more than anyone. I'm one of those obnoxious jerks that talks about Smart Kid Syndrome, and how much it sucks to test well and then basically fail out of life, because you aren't always trained to actually function in the world when you test well. As it turns out, testing well does not necessarily mean I am smart enough to adapt and fill in the massive gaps in my education and upbringing. Alas. Maybe they should test for other qualities too.
I mean, it can only be a choice at this point. I have been rejecting the world and my place in it since the world was adventism and my place in it was believing without question, proclaiming the good word so that others might believe without question, getting married to a woman, fathering 1.5 children, being the manful head of my household, being active in the church, and living a quiet life of desperation. And then once the adventist education cannon primed me, aimed me at the world and missed by a wide margin, I just kept rejecting the world out of habit. In my defense, while men loving men and the occasional drink aren't necessarily a recipe for instant and eternal unhappiness and separation from any sense of spiritual fulfillment (in fact, the first time I had sex with a man I felt like a choir of angels descended from heaven on a beam of light, just as counterpoint), the "secular" world turns out to suck shit in a wide of variety of exciting ways too. Nuts to all of it, in my humble opinion.
Trying to live your own life, even as it strays outside the bounds of parental expectations is the eternal struggle, of course. I am not special or unusual in that regard. Nor is rejecting society (Maaaan, I threw it the ground!). I'm not interested in acquiring wealth for the sake of wealth, although who wouldn't want to not worry about money really? My sole aspiration with regard to money is not to worry about money. I just don't want to think about it. I want companionship, but I'm kind of misanthropic. A lot of the norms and models of the communities around me irritate my delicate sensibilities on contact. None of it makes me special or unusual or even interesting, just grumpy.
It's childish. I know that. I want to live my life, but not the way anyone else lives their life. Out of a perverse desire to be special or a stubborn refusal to be happy on the world's terms. This planet is twisted and to be happy here feels perverse. Genuinely deviant shit, thriving in this hellhole. It feels like an attitude I should have grown out of as a teenager, but, as a matter of personal failure and pride, did not.
The explicit failure here, as I am quick to point out about other people on Twitter, is the failure of imagination in finding alternatives. I reject fundamentalist christianity and exploitative, miserable, violent, oppressive, selfish, and mean-fucking-spirited american capitalism but I have yet to exercise even the smallest amount of imagination in how to transcend those contexts. Or at least to live within them without immediately collapsing in depression and defeat. As survival strategies go, it's been less than ideal.
I do want SOMETHING. I want a community I feel like I belong to, a purpose that makes sense to me, egalitarian companionship with natural chemistry. Some sort of spiritually fulfilling practice, three words I have yet to fully define. I want some time in nature. I want cities designed for people. I want a fair, just and humanist society. I have no idea how to resolve those ideas into coherent concepts in my current context, but I do want them. That I make no effort to provide clarity for myself will probably be reason #1 the white light shoots me back to reincarnate with a heavy sigh.
I wish I could tell my father than I want to be successful too. I wish I could tell him I knew what that looks like. In the meantime, I'll have to sate myself with my usual fantasies of being abducted by aliens and placed in a zoo. Like any functioning adult would.
