Rude Awakenings (Jim)
Rude Awakenings 11/30/2005
I never saw it coming - that blinding light as I left the bar, that made my knees weak, as I fell back against the wall, knowing in my gut that some great truth was about to be realized. Then there it was - I was trying to kill myself!
A few things had changed but I’d continued to live in a highly productive numbness, till this moment. I worked everyday, secure in my great paying job, and drank every night. So what was new? I was drinking a bit less, and maybe a bit more bitterly. And there was this blaring siren going off in my head, as I went home to shelters and halfway houses each night with HIV+ men, on their last breath. In the numbness I barely concerned myself with why, though.
There was something attractive about them having one foot in the grave, about their nearness to death, about their crossing beyond. Something freeing too, in their clammy skin, their raspy breath, in our rash, reckless, love making, that made it all the more real. It might be their/my last moment. I wanted to be as close to death as possible. I was making love to death.
Something had changed to in me too, when I came back from Germany. It was an unbelievable two weeks, outside my confines. Two weeks of families taking us in, of breads and honeys, and cheeses and grains for breakfast. Of castles and cathedral spires and organs for lunch, of bike rides along the wall. Of beautiful, alarmingly dangerous men, restless, idle, and out of work, on the streets. Of wines and violin for dinner and ales from the cellar in the evenings. When I returned to my life it was too small, too constricting, suffocating, dead. This had been my world for 20 years! A single tiny grain of sand shifted then to the other side of the teeter-tauter, changing my whole balance within.
As I stood stunned with my back to the wall, I saw that I was like Humpty-Dumpty on the wall, about to take a great fall. I had known I was gay since I’d left Pat at 20, and yet here I was 40, and still on this wall. To survive this near brush with death, I had to come down from the wall. It was going to be messy, indeed.
For another year, things continued pretty much as they had before the insane recklessness. I saw a therapist once a week, who looking utterly bored, told me my hour had started and then had ended, and said nothing in between. And I didn’t know what to say. As the year progressed though I would begin earlier and earlier to wonder what it was that I wanted to talk about, till eventually I was wondering it all day, every day. But I hadn’t a clue. A noose was tightening around my throat.
One night I had a panic attack. It began with just a creepy feeling about the world, that grew into a realization that I wasn’t wanted in this world. Not only did the world not want me, as I was, but neither did I want to be me. That began a panic in my soul, that I couldn’t escape. I called my friend Joe to spend the night with me, but all I could do was pace, feeling I would die. I’d run outside thinking it was too close inside, and outside, with the stars, it was too unconstrained. With survival threatened within, I forgot to eat, sleep, or drink, so that my body was wracked with fevers and chills, in different parts of me, all at the same time. I envisioned myself as a snake that so desperately wanted to shed it’s skin. It chafed me raw. The panic itself felt like a whirlpool, sucking me deeper and deeper in, till I could see less and less beyond it. It finally ended, some 20 hours later, when I latched on to anything outside of me, to pull me out.
The panic attacks came and went for about a year after that first one. My soul was mortified that I had only decided not to die, but not that I wanted to live. I lived because others wanted me too. The anxiety was around knowing that part of me was in agreement with those that didn’t want me to be, that said I shouldn’t exist. So still flirting with death, my capacities began to shut down. I couldn’t work. I’d be at church and a best friend would walk up and suddenly, I knew I knew them, but couldn’t remember them. Or suddenly I’d forget how to speak and understand English. Words were just a meaningless garble of sounds. I was scared, not knowing where it would lead, or end.
The paradox that had given me hope though, while facing the awful truth, was that some people (friends and family) would not want it to end for me here, in this way. So if I had to fall from the wall, I’d splatter on the side of self-acceptance, as gay. It was not the way I’d always hoped to come out to my family, though. I’d always hoped I’d be so in love, anyone could see it, and be happy for me. Instead I crawled home utterly broken, and in front of my parents, my brothers and sisters and their spouses, I groveled, ‘I need you to see me and love me, as I am. I never wanted to hurt you by telling you this, but I can no longer carry it. Can you still love me?’ Splat!
That was the beginning though, not the end of visibility and acceptance. Since I was naked in this small initial clearing, I’d try to continue the revealing, but it was always met with pregnant silence. Once, I had gone on a canoe trip down the Current river in Missouri, with gay friends from Atlanta. I felt so dirty coming back, that I imagined that I had to get away from them immediately, and shower and go to church for a whole day, but once back in Atlanta, the need was gone. Another time with Ty, my black lover, in a restaurant in Atlanta, I could feel all eyes on us as we came in. I saw an elderly couple boring a hole in me of contempt, and suddenly their feelings and judgement were mine. I had to choose whose feelings I wanted, mine or theirs. Did where I was, change who I was? I was so porous.
Any love for me still came from outside of me and not from within.
I never saw it coming - that blinding light as I left the bar, that made my knees weak, as I fell back against the wall, knowing in my gut that some great truth was about to be realized. Then there it was - I was trying to kill myself!
A few things had changed but I’d continued to live in a highly productive numbness, till this moment. I worked everyday, secure in my great paying job, and drank every night. So what was new? I was drinking a bit less, and maybe a bit more bitterly. And there was this blaring siren going off in my head, as I went home to shelters and halfway houses each night with HIV+ men, on their last breath. In the numbness I barely concerned myself with why, though.
There was something attractive about them having one foot in the grave, about their nearness to death, about their crossing beyond. Something freeing too, in their clammy skin, their raspy breath, in our rash, reckless, love making, that made it all the more real. It might be their/my last moment. I wanted to be as close to death as possible. I was making love to death.
Something had changed to in me too, when I came back from Germany. It was an unbelievable two weeks, outside my confines. Two weeks of families taking us in, of breads and honeys, and cheeses and grains for breakfast. Of castles and cathedral spires and organs for lunch, of bike rides along the wall. Of beautiful, alarmingly dangerous men, restless, idle, and out of work, on the streets. Of wines and violin for dinner and ales from the cellar in the evenings. When I returned to my life it was too small, too constricting, suffocating, dead. This had been my world for 20 years! A single tiny grain of sand shifted then to the other side of the teeter-tauter, changing my whole balance within.
As I stood stunned with my back to the wall, I saw that I was like Humpty-Dumpty on the wall, about to take a great fall. I had known I was gay since I’d left Pat at 20, and yet here I was 40, and still on this wall. To survive this near brush with death, I had to come down from the wall. It was going to be messy, indeed.
For another year, things continued pretty much as they had before the insane recklessness. I saw a therapist once a week, who looking utterly bored, told me my hour had started and then had ended, and said nothing in between. And I didn’t know what to say. As the year progressed though I would begin earlier and earlier to wonder what it was that I wanted to talk about, till eventually I was wondering it all day, every day. But I hadn’t a clue. A noose was tightening around my throat.
One night I had a panic attack. It began with just a creepy feeling about the world, that grew into a realization that I wasn’t wanted in this world. Not only did the world not want me, as I was, but neither did I want to be me. That began a panic in my soul, that I couldn’t escape. I called my friend Joe to spend the night with me, but all I could do was pace, feeling I would die. I’d run outside thinking it was too close inside, and outside, with the stars, it was too unconstrained. With survival threatened within, I forgot to eat, sleep, or drink, so that my body was wracked with fevers and chills, in different parts of me, all at the same time. I envisioned myself as a snake that so desperately wanted to shed it’s skin. It chafed me raw. The panic itself felt like a whirlpool, sucking me deeper and deeper in, till I could see less and less beyond it. It finally ended, some 20 hours later, when I latched on to anything outside of me, to pull me out.
The panic attacks came and went for about a year after that first one. My soul was mortified that I had only decided not to die, but not that I wanted to live. I lived because others wanted me too. The anxiety was around knowing that part of me was in agreement with those that didn’t want me to be, that said I shouldn’t exist. So still flirting with death, my capacities began to shut down. I couldn’t work. I’d be at church and a best friend would walk up and suddenly, I knew I knew them, but couldn’t remember them. Or suddenly I’d forget how to speak and understand English. Words were just a meaningless garble of sounds. I was scared, not knowing where it would lead, or end.
The paradox that had given me hope though, while facing the awful truth, was that some people (friends and family) would not want it to end for me here, in this way. So if I had to fall from the wall, I’d splatter on the side of self-acceptance, as gay. It was not the way I’d always hoped to come out to my family, though. I’d always hoped I’d be so in love, anyone could see it, and be happy for me. Instead I crawled home utterly broken, and in front of my parents, my brothers and sisters and their spouses, I groveled, ‘I need you to see me and love me, as I am. I never wanted to hurt you by telling you this, but I can no longer carry it. Can you still love me?’ Splat!
That was the beginning though, not the end of visibility and acceptance. Since I was naked in this small initial clearing, I’d try to continue the revealing, but it was always met with pregnant silence. Once, I had gone on a canoe trip down the Current river in Missouri, with gay friends from Atlanta. I felt so dirty coming back, that I imagined that I had to get away from them immediately, and shower and go to church for a whole day, but once back in Atlanta, the need was gone. Another time with Ty, my black lover, in a restaurant in Atlanta, I could feel all eyes on us as we came in. I saw an elderly couple boring a hole in me of contempt, and suddenly their feelings and judgement were mine. I had to choose whose feelings I wanted, mine or theirs. Did where I was, change who I was? I was so porous.
Any love for me still came from outside of me and not from within.
posted by LifeWriter at 6:31 PM
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