California is having a heat wave, and I’ve been having bad dreams. I wake at 4am, anxious, sweating, and bright-eyed, unable to fall back. So I try to soothe myself with sudoku or Contact, starring Jody Foster and hope I can catch a few more winks before the day begins. If not, I try to either trust the wisdom of my body—that it will sleep when it needs to sleep. Or, I try to figure out what’s bothering me. What’s causing the anxiety. What are these nightmares all about?
There are two places where my best thinking on these matters happens: in the shower, and on my morning walks. I’m usually too gratefully distracted by the hot water and getting clean in the shower, or by the birds, bay, sun and bright flowers on my walks to notice that I’ve begun working it out. It’s only after I’ve “composed the speech,” or “published the poem” when I realize that I’m not really in the shower, or on my walk; I’m deep in my head, giving a speech at the Oscar’s, or reading the poem to a handful of people in an obscure bookshop. And what’s in the speech or the poem always points me toward understanding what’s wrong. Today’s speech went something like this:
It’s easier to be unbothered by mean words from a stranger, or a person who is well known to be an unkind person. Their words may hurt, but the pain passes quickly. It has no purchase; it cannot find its way in, because that person is not dear to you. They are on the outside throwing rocks. You talk it over with your friends who love you, and together you make it go away.
But the unkind word from the person you love, who is supposed to love you, is already inside. You will grow, and heal around it, and the size of this grown you relative to the size of that hurt will make it seem like it’s gone—the way a tree with a sign nailed to it folds itself, slowly, over time, around the nail. After the sign has long fallen away, the little nail remains, a part of the tree now, unseen by others, forgotten by the tree which keeps on growing. Until, certain conditions—like, for the tree, an electrical storm—awaken the old ache. And though you may be older, and bigger, and you may have all the information and education and perspective to understand those old harms are not now nor were they ever killing blows—even though you are older now and know better, the littler version of you, the one who first took in that pain when it was so big and you weren’t yet, will fill with doubt: Maybe what they said was true. Maybe I am no good.
I have a complicated Coming Out story with my mother and my father. While I had already known I was Queer for some time, my mother—who hated it when people kept things from her—essentially outed me in a confrontation when I was 23 years old. She was angry that I was gay and wanted me to say it—an anger that I now know was fear: fear that I would go to Hell, that I would be attacked or injured, that I would not be okay, or safe. Most of these fears originated from her Catholicism, and they were very real to her: as a Catholic mother, responsible for the well being of her kid, she felt she had failed. I can imagine, now, what it must have felt like to truly believe in heaven, to believe you were going there, and then to learn that your child would not only not be joining you, but would suffer in eternal hellfires. Can you imagine being torn away from your baby, then having to witness them being tortured? And because she believed she had failed, I’m sure she also thought there was some punishment waiting for her, too. My father was interesting. At first, he seemed to be just fine with my queerness, and functioned as a bridge between me and my mom in those rocky first years after she Outed me. Later, he equated my living into my queerness, with his extra-marital affair, as a way to justify it. Still later he used my queerness to assuage his own guilt about my mother’s alcoholism*. So now, I repeat:
…though I may be older, and bigger, and I may have all the information and education and perspective to understand my father’s words were not now nor were they ever killing blows—the littler version of me, the one who first took in that pain when it was so big and I wasn’t yet, still fills with doubt: Maybe what he said was true. Maybe I am no good.
This episode is a difficult one for me. I am releasing it today, June 30, on the last day of Pride Month, to remind each and everyone of us—me included—to be thoughtful with the words we use every single day. Because words matter, and they stick around for a long, long time.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Unfit to Print to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
