A long, imperfect post about some of my history as a writer
I never meant to start a blog. Well, I guess I did, but I never meant for it to become what it has. This all started out as a diary: during the late winter of 2020/21 I began to keep a record of my daily activities, because otherwise it felt as though I hadn’t done anything at all by the end of the day. I would write things like:
- Woke up
- Had scrambled eggs for breakfast
- Made coffee
- Played with cat
- Read book for class
- Went for walk by beach
And so on. I don’t have the actual diary on me, but that’s the effect of it. After a while, though, I began to write more narratively: I started talking about my thoughts, my memories, my feelings. This was during the height of COVID-19, and I was living alone: besides my cat, the diary was often the only person I spoke to in a day. It became a repository of my anxieties, my fears, my neuroses. It became a repository of my darkest, and most joyful, moments.
I have always written as a response to a time of high activation: when I get upset or overwhelmed, my first response is always to write about it. When I was a freshman in highschool, just fifteen years old, I wrote a piece about my experience as a young queer kid in the dorms. Here it is, in its entirety (names have been changed to preserve anonymity). This was during the spring of my first year of boarding school.
I was at crew practice once, when a little coxswain asked me to crack his back. I lifted him up from behind, bounced him up and down, and realizing how light he was, swung him around from side to side. He laughed. In the milling crowd, a voice next to me said, “That looked really gay.” I was caught off guard, to say the least. He carried on: “Yeah, you looked like how when the girl comes running towards the guy, and he picks her up and swings her around and kisses her. You looked like you were about to kiss. Don’t kiss in front of me.” My mental response was, of course, “Well, fuck you too, then.” Outside, I said nothing, and only bowed my head in apology. I didn’t feel like defending myself, it’s not worth it. So what if I’m gay? Does that hurt you? GAAAAAYYYYYY. Fag. Homo. Fairy, poof, queer.
At night, we sometimes [have] dorm functions, led by responsible adults and seniors. During one, we discuss a checklist of “things to do to be a man.” They’re “Man talks.” One of the items is “How to talk to women,” which we all know means, “How to get into a [relationship.] /[sic.]/” Of course, no man would ever want to seduce another man. Weirdos. It goes without saying that we all love big tits, and fucking pussy. Why would anything to the contrary even occur to you? “How many girls have you hooked up with? None? You could totally hook up with her, why don’t you?” is a daily occurrence. What if I don’t want to hook up with random girls? It never even crossed your mind, did it, not even as a remote possibility? I said once, “You know who I thought were dating? Robert and Michael.” Response: “No way. You know whose friendship is really cute? Alex and Greg’s. They cuddle!” It’s as if “gay” isn’t even a legitimate identity; the entire idea is totally dismissed. The only attention people give to it is joking: “There’s a party in my pants, boys, and you’re all invited!” People pantomime humping each other all the time, saying it’s a “raping.” I once asked someone, when they said that they regularly “raped” their roommate, if they had ever gotten physically excited by the act. It seemed fair, what else happens when you rub your crotch vigorously against someone, for several minutes? “What kind of fucked up person do you think I am?” There’s no fear of being aroused, or any pleasure coming out of it. It’s not even awkward, it’s just a dumb joke. Because the physical manifestation of your love for another human being is hilarious. Fucking hilarious.
A Story, pt. 2: I was, like any other normal high schooler, reading a webcomic during my down time. Of course, much to my surprise, it featured not only straight, but gay sex. A lot of it. The context was really funny, so I kept reading, anyway. (Ok, maybe not so funny, but it felt good to have a stranger legitimize gay love[.]) Someone sat down next to me, and when I reached a gay sex panel, they covered it with their hand, and demanded that I change it immediately. They responded like they had seen something physically detestable, like a gory car accident, or puppies being fed into a wood-chipper, not sex. But to them, of course, gay sex is just as disgusting as any horrific imagining. Thanks anonymous freshman boy, for making the way I know to express love for another into your fucking freak-show nightmare. That makes me feel good about myself. Real good.
At a place like St. Andrews’s, you are what you appear to be. Well, I’m not. It’s only comfortable if you’re straight, because that’s what we all assume we are, because that’s the safest assumption. Well, here we go: I fantasize at night about fucking other guys, I have a huge crush on a boy down the hall. Ah well. Outside of my bed, I just have to personify as straight. I have to think, act, and love straight. I have to tell myself that I’m straight, and forget anything to the contrary, and it almost works. But I have moments where I can’t lie to myself, and I just want to scream. But if I came out? “Did you hear? Preston’s gay.” “Preston’s gay? I know it!” I’d just be the weird outsider, nobody to identify with. A community of one. There’s no role models to look up to, nobody to confide in. I have nobody to follow, but straights have dozens of normal, straight families to learn from. They have a whole world tailored to them, made to teach them how to be normal. Everybody around me is getting with girls, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, when all I want is a nice guy to talk to, and hold, and maybe, eventually, love. But, no such luck. Ah well, lonely nights in the room, here I come.
So, in the end, this place isn’t “Radically accepting.” A majority, at most, passively tolerates. “I don’t care if you’re gay, just don’t try date and me.” Because that really helps. The most (and almost only) vocal group in the whole community are those who would deny us. The only voices we hear discussing this are those around us, and those around us hate and fear us. Who cares what the teachers say? I don’t have to live, work, love, and play, with the teachers. There’s a reason the students are the most important part of the St. Andrew’s experience, and they say “No,” without even knowing it. I can’t ask a fucking guy to prom, who’d go with me? I couldn’t grind with another guy at a rave, or go to an Amos classroom with my boyfriend, or hold his hand in public. There’s nobody’s lips to kiss, or hand to hold.
But, I get it. There’s too few people, too focused on universality, to tailor to a small, hidden minority. So, if I have to suffer in silence, lying myself into conformity, to let the majority be comfortable, let me suffer, for patience is the highest virtue.
Maybe a little melodramatic, but that’s what I was like when I was fifteen. It’s astonishing how little we change: I can feel exactly how frustrated I was when I wrote that, how angry and confused. I forgot, until I read it just now, about the little details of my daily experience in high school. They’re all true, all the details. I can picture where down the hall his room was compared to mine; I remember the sticky afternoons on the crew docks and the little coxwain… The headmaster loved my piece; he loved my writing from then on. I remember sitting together with him on a bench in the front lawn of the school, reading him the piece. Of course, the spice and criticism delighted him to no end. I can only hope that it improved the school. Of course, standing behind us was another student, carefully eavesdropping; he told everything to everyone. It transpired, in the end, that he was insecure that he might be gay. God, listen to me: “insecure that he might be gay.” Someone eight years younger than me would probably call me homophobic for saying that, but that’s how it was!
In my junior (third) year, we were tasked with writing a chapel talk as an exercise in public speaking. The strongest handful from the class were invited to speak in front of the entire school. The first version of my talk was something heavy about how my mother should give me space because, like the prodigal child, I’d come back if allowed to leave. Of course, I was right: I did need my space, and I am closer to my mother now than I was then, but it wasn’t the time to say that yet. Frustrated by being unable to express myself properly, I, on the night before we were expected to turn the pieces in, rewrote it from scratch. This is what I wrote (again, names
On August 29, 1986, upon returning from a spiritual journey in Africa, Paul Simon published his greatest album, Graceland. On March 12, 2010, my uncle Louis committed suicide. And on March, 16, 2010, the title song, Graceland, was played at my uncle’s memorial service. The song’s title refers to Elvis Presley’s estate, and the lyrics describe how Paul Simon is “going to Graceland.” The music is upbeat and sparkling, with bright guitars and driving percussion. Perhaps not very appropriate to end a funeral. However, as the years have gone by, and I’ve listened to the song time and time again, I’ve come to see that it is much more fitting than I had thought at first.
Suicide has haunted my entire waking memory, and much of the sleeping. I don’t remember a time when death didn’t seem like an appealing option, as if I were clawing at the inside of the coffin of my life, and it was the only way to get free. My mother and father had a chaotic relationship, alcohol and anger issues were founding pillars of my childhood. The three of us, Mother, Father, and Son, are each plagued by incredible anxiety, about which you’ve heard a lot from this very pulpit, thanks to Ms. Nelson and her insightful words. This makes any household with us three tense and dangerous, one of us always moments away from crying, screaming, coming at the others with knives, or some dreadful combination of the three.
Lying awake at night, I dreamed of the refuge of silence. Or more clearly, of the pity that some debilitating injury would bring me. Nobody would dare scream and curse around a cripple, would they? When we moved to the states, my parents finally divorced each other, perhaps out of mercy, or fatigue. And like every child of divorced parents, I thought that it was all my fault. Maybe if I had been a more loving, more respectful, more perfect son, my mommy and daddy would still love each other. Dying became my obsession. Haunting the back of my mind was the glowing red button that said, “ESCAPE.” Escape from being lonely, and afraid, and sad. Escape from the drowning black depression that filled my body until it poured out of my eyes as tears.
Then, my uncle Louis was dead. Louis had always been the source of calm, cool, and stable in our family. When my mother had breast cancer, right after her divorce, he stayed with us. My mother still reminisces about the days when things just suddenly “worked”, and we knew that it was Louis’s magic touch that had made it so. His daughter once got her pet ferret, Mary Sue, stuck under a refrigerator. The fridge was on blocks, so it couldn’t be moved without crushing the ferret, so over the phone, my uncle Louis talked her through taking off the back of the refrigerator and pulling the ferret through its workings, sight unseen.
Then his wife found him hanging in the tool shed. Suddenly, he had removed himself from our lives. I had never experienced suicide outside of my mind before, so in that time, I observed many things. His wife, a small, quiet, brilliant woman, was destroyed. Unable to speak, eat, or even leave her curled position on the couch, she had cried herself dry until her face stayed contorted in the sheer pain of loss. His children and family had to come together to support her, and repair our own broken hearts. I had never thought of all of the mundane things that happen when somebody dies, writing an obituary, planning a funeral, tax matters, and the question of what to do with his old files.
My mother and I chose the readings for the funeral, these being John 1, “In the beginning was the word,” the 23rd Psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” and a reading from Luke, the parable of the Prodigal son, which you have just heard. My mother was very touched by this last reading, and I didn’t know why. It is a story that always confused me, the seeming injustice that the father does to his elder son and the irrational kindness that he offers to the younger posing awkward ethical dilemmas about forgiveness and love. The context of the reading leads us to believe that the father represents God, and the younger son, his people.
Maybe my mother was worried that Louis had wandered away from God, his father. He had spent his entire life as a scientist looking for the answers, and they were right there with the Lord. Maybe I’m not giving her enough credit. She more likely thought that she had left Louis, and while she was away, he had died. She felt guilty for leaving him, and that she didn’t deserve the forgiveness that the father gives his son, because she didn’t deserve to forgive herself for what she had done. To some extent, we all felt guilty for leaving Louis. Maybe if one of us had called last week, or sent a quick email to check up, he would still be alive, and we wouldn’t have to struggle like we had been with our loss.
However, my mother began to cry when Graceland was played. Paul Simon’s simple song about going to a museum became so much more to us in that moment. It became a symbol for going home, like the prodigal son to his father’s open arms, like Louis to God’s. It became a symbol for heaven, for being free. It helped me begin to realize what suicide really means, and the effects that it has on those who experience its pain, not just those who commit it.
Now, I had seen what suicide left behind. I had seen the pain that it brought. I had seen the confusion and desperation that it gave to each of us. And I had seen the fear that being so close to death struck into the hearts of its survivors. And I had seen how hard we all had to struggle to forgive ourselves for what we had let Louis do, and how we had failed him.
I’d like to think that this shocked me onto the straight and narrow. I’d like to tell you all that I, having seen the consequences, never considered death as an escape ever again, but I would be lying.
Real life is much more nuanced. I’ve been in therapy for the majority of my life, working on my anxiety and suicidal thoughts, I’m drugged within an inch of my life, and I’m in a safe, supporting environment here at St. Andrew’s.
But sometimes, when I’m alone at night in the dark after a draining day, my old demons creep up to me, and I have to shove them back into the furthest corners of my mind and sometimes; sometimes [sic.] they stay around, following on my shoulder, draping themselves over my mind like cats on a warm window sill. Sometimes the call of the abyss still haunts me. So if you see me on one of those days, when I’m quiet and introspective, I’m avoiding people, and generally being surly and mean, now you know what’s going on. I’m going to Graceland.
That evening, the headmaster invited me to his “senior tutorial”, a small group of fourth year students who met to study texts of interest. We read my piece. People, generally, were impressed. I don’t know—I guess if you say something forcefully enough, people will listen. I was seventeen when I wrote that.
At University, I never had the space to express myself in the form of an essay: it’s not encouraged in the UK system to write in that style, presumably because it’s “opinion” and not “argument” (though I’m not sure that I know the difference). So I didn’t: I practiced writing in a cool academic style, but I could never get it together. It was never good enough, never right. There was always something missing. It began to make me feel as though I was a bad writer—perhaps I am. It certainly made me feel stupid. Eventually, I gave up writing for myself all together, exccept in private places that noone would ever see: I was ashamed of the spiteful, uncharitable things people said; I was ashamed that my writing wasn’t all things to all people.
Maybe the story is that I left the comfort of a small high school where I was encouraged in my excesses and went off to university where I was beaten down to size. I guess that’s one read on it. I’ve talked before about how I left university feeling stupid (and I use that ugly word on purpose because it’s painful). It’s not as though I did better on school assignments in high school: my grades were middling/low B’s all the way through, and my high school teachers critized my lacking je ne sais quoi just like my university professors did. But in high school there was at least some space for me to write creatively. I guess that’s not what university is for, is it?
In the end, I started to write this blog because I wanted somewhere to write that was my own. Nobody reads this who has any say: it isn’t for a grade, for a performance, for a group. It’s my space to write what I want to write, how I want to write it. Sometimes it’s excessively personal; sometimes it’s excessively moody. The posts are often ill conceived and rash, or they reveal far too much about me to be appropriate for the open internet. But fuck that—nobody ever did anything great by being self-conscious: at some point or another, you’re going to have to make a fool of yourself; you’re going to have to say some stupid shit. But don’t let that keep you from saying anything. It sure as hell isn’t gonna stop me.
