Some Thing(s) Borrowed
Because I'm Just Blue
This is Sitting Queerly, a newsletter about the late blooming queer experience and the lofty goal of opening up conversations and celebrating those who embrace their full selves.
For weeks I have felt this increasing malaise.
It isn’t persistent, more of a waxing and waning, but the descent from each crescendo is becoming steeper each time. I feel suddenly anxious, restless, even slightly nauseated for days at a time. I am simultaneously irritated when I have a full plate on a given day but also relieved that I know my time and mind will be occupied. If I have downtime, I either become obsessed with some mundane activity, such as making smut-inspired prints or Frankensteining a favorite but worn polo into a crude tank top, or I disassociate on the couch while watching YouTube or robotically swiping between apps.
I have ascribed it to any of a number of things going on in my life, from the car crash I was in back in February or the gray Pacific Northwest winter weather to the United States’ devolution to a faux libertarian fever/wet dream or the domestic travails of raising a kid who, unlike their father, does not like going to school and makes it everybody’s problem.
But it’s deeper than all the above, regardless of how dire or superficial those issues may be.. And yet, the best I’ve been able to manage so far are the following three sentences, scrawled in my journal a few days ago.
“I fucking hate being this cryptic, this ill-defined. But it’s not tangible, this feeling. It’s just everywhere.”
So, I’m borrowing the words of others today. To describe where I am and where I hope to be.1
I’ll be back as soon as I can.2
Honoring myself as a gay man feels like a very solitary act. I can’t force people to accept it or even recognize it. There have been many people that I know and came out to that have not mentioned it in the 5 years that I have been out. It’s not like I really want them to mention it, so it gets really complicated really fast because not even I know what I really want out of them. Maybe it’s just gentle acknowledgement in some way so that I don’t feel like I made all this up.
,
…I think those of us who are bi men married to women really have a unique set of difficulties because of the social system we work within- all of the effects of erasure, however passive, how hard it is to really express all parts of ourselves when we live within a framework where people are expected to have narrower needs, more linear attractions, and maybe even fewer identities.
-a friend
Do you ever feel like you're building something but never quite finishing?...The problem is that it's easy for me to always feel like I'm in a building season because there is always something to be worked on. That's not the hard work.
, More To The StoryI think one of the realities of being bi is that no matter how fully I embrace it and accept it and believe it to be my authentic self, there is sort of a built-in/by definition dichotomy that comes with this identity. I wonder if that sets us all up for some amount of disappointment or wondering about the gaps in our life, even as we otherwise lean into all the ways that being bi is awesome and additive.
-a friend
The wound has a voice. It says that I've already done years of therapy, and yet I still hurt this much, so what's the fucking point? It tells me that I can only text friends so many times when I'm in a dark place and hear, "Man that sounds so rough, I'm sorry to hear that" so many times before it becomes meaningless, the way words repeated over and over eventually become meaningless, and I wonder why I reach out at all. It tells me that I am running out of words. Describing and writing and connecting with language empties me of metaphors but not the pain itself. Sometimes, all that's left is just the pain, voiceless yet howling, nothing yet infinite. The suffering is in a fistfight with the words and eventually, the words fail and the suffering still stands. Above all, the wound says that it is my companion forever, that I will just live this way until I die.
,
I am here, treading the water with you. Be careful who offers you a hand. It isn't too late for us.
,I can look in my sketchbooks and see periods of being disappointed in what I’ve created and thinking I’m finally empty and finished, but I can also see a pattern of continuing on and creating things that surprise me and remind me I still have more to give. I suspect we all have these. In our lives and our art…times when we think we’re failing so badly and times when we’re absolutely nailing it.
The trick, I think, is in not giving up even when it’s dark.
,
You were made
,
to rest when you need rest,
to close your eyes
when they are heavy
so that you can finally
allow yourself
to dream.
I do want to assure folks who may be concerned: I am safe and I’ve made it through much worse. But I haven’t had a bout this persistent in months, maybe even years, and I need to not let it get away from me.
It pains me that so many new subscribers have signed on since I published two weeks ago and they’ve seen nothing until now and it’s not even mostly my writing. I hope you stick around.
Thanks so much for the shout out! 💖💖
<3