I Think I Love You: Part 2

I Want To Know You Love Me

It was only a couple months later that I realized I really liked this new girl at my school. But Ariel didn't really like that I also liked guys. She might have been more confused that I was. I had a girlfriend in junior high but that was my attempt to “force” myself to be straight and to cover up the little crush I had on Elijah before we were friends. I did like Lily but not as more than friends. But I liked Ariel more than I had liked Dustin or Elijah. But I screwed it up by being honest about my feelings. I wrote just as many poems about her than my secret crush on my straight best friend. I stuffed some notes into her locker. Because I could. Because that was normal. And I desperately wanted to be normal. But normal is both relative and overrated. For me, liking guys felt more normal. She was the exception. The one I would “go straight for.” I had hoped that Elijah would be my friend again when I told him I liked a girl now, but he burned that bridged with no hope of reconstruction. 

I lost my best friend, my boyfriend cheated on me, and then my dream girl straight up rejected me. So I gave up on relationships and “Snapchatted" back every guy who flashed me a smile and dropped his pants. But all I really wanted was to hear the "I love you’s" even if they were void of love. It's not like I was going to hear it from someone who actually loved me because they had all abandoned me. So eventually I decided that if I was going to keep screwing around, I might as well fuck up my life all the way. Literally. I thought having sex was normal. I thought sex was the ultimate expression of what love should be, and I so desperately wanted love. So I thought I could skip straight to that climax, but it didn't feel normal for me. Even kissing felt wrong like it was against my nature. With a little soul searching and research I figured out that I'm pan-romantic asexual. So now how am I suppose to find someone who's as fucked up as I am who would also be ok with a sexless love life?

Sometimes I wonder if I'm even capable of love. My girlfriend, my best friend, my boyfriend, my dream girl. I don't think I was in love with them as much as I was in love with the idea of being in love. Everyone seems so desperate to find love. It’s what all the books and movies are all about. So I thought it was normal for me to want it too. But it took me fucking up one last time to finally be in a place where I’m ok with not being normal. And I'm really ok if I never find this love everyone else is chasing after.

    
I’m more than ok with being single. I no longer feel the need to measure my happiness with “I love you’s.” In contemplative retrospect, I was happiest when I was with Elijah, my best friend, you know, before he was bigoted. He never said “I love you.” He didn’t have to. I knew he loved me by his actions. I’m not looking for another Dustin who’s just as screwed up as I am. I’m not looking for another Ariel so that I can feel normal. I’m looking for another Elijah, a better Elijah. A true best friend. Someone I trust and love enough to share my every secret. Someone who will never give up on me. Someone I’m willing to fight for. 

Our hormones tell us that we can find love in sex. Our parents tell us that we will find love in marriage and giving them grandchildren. Society tell us that we can find love in romance and relationships. Our friends show us what love really is. I’m a 21-year-old senior in college about to graduate and enter the “real world.” I don’t need to hear “I love you’s” anymore. I need to see it in my friends who will stick by me till the end. It's not the love I always wanted. It’s the love I always needed. 

Therapy Tactics (self-harming) - How TV Saved Me: Don't try this at home (part 2)

This is how a Canadian show saved my life. Degrassi was one of the many, many shows I wasn’t allowed to watch. I also wasn’t allowed to go to movie theaters, not even to watch Winnie the fucking Pooh Bear. So because I knew my parents were simply wrong on that account, I decided I should throw out all the other rules too. Degrassi was on TeenNick so I saw all the commercial while watching regular Nick shows (also wasn’t allowed to watch Spongebob or Drake & Josh). So yeah, if case you didn’t know Degrassi is basically a high school soap drama, but shows real life problems and situations. It’s not Disneyfied to always have a magical happy ending. There’s a school shooting. Someone dies. The school mourns and it shows every stage of grief. A girl gets pregnant. We watch her struggle between choosing to keep the baby or have an abortion and how her friends and family react. So it is pretty hard to find a tv character that you can relate to 100%, but with so many characters I was able to relate to a few different characters that covered all my major bases. There were two bases that were not covered anywhere else in my limited knowledge of the whole world. One, there was a gay guy. Now days that’s not a huge surprise. Maybe not on Disney channel, but most shows now have at least one token gay character. Even Friends had a Lesbian wedding. But here was a gay guy about my age who struggled with coming out. His parents were homophobic. They kicked him out when they found out he was gay. I had that fear from the beginning. So that meant a lot to me to see someone facing the same real world shit I was dealing with. And they even follow his story with the all the normal struggles of dating. The same things you see on every show with straight people. It’s really not that different. It was refreshing to see that I have a chance at finding love and all its pain and suffering just like everyone else.

The second and more time sensitive and extremely controversial thing was seeing someone on screen self-harm. I hadn’t tried that yet.

Life Before and After A Suicide Attempt

Although I think suicide is the most important struggle since it's permanent and it's also what I used poetry to help me process the most, I decided not to lead with it but instead some of the major contributing factors for me. I don't think someone commits or attempts to commit suicide for just one reason. I didn't try to kill myself just because I was stuck in a massive depressive episode for years. I didn't try to kill myself just because I was gay and that wasn't acceptable in the Christian environment I was trapped in. I didn't just try to kill myself because I didn't feel like I could ever be the man I was "supposed to be." Yes, all those things pushed me closer to the edge, pushed the knife a little deeper. But after all that I tried to kill myself because of society and not just the one I locally lived in. I was 11 and I didn't want to grow up to be a teenager because teenagers are idiots. I should know now that I've crossed that bridge recently. But I saw them on TV, in books, in my life, (I'd say in movies but I wasn't allowed to go to those), and I so desperately did not want to be one of those. Aside from the aforementioned, I had lived as great a life an eleven-year-old could live. I was fully content with dying and escaping the future torment. But I'm here now so that obviously didn't work out. Before I knew it I was a godforsaken teenager. Puberty, honestly, wasn't that big of a deal for me. It hit me rather early for a guy and I was like ok. The hard part was that I was like ok I like guys, how do I stop? I had a couple best friends who I called my Lights. As long as I was around one of them I was ok. But at night the depression hit hard and fast. And unless you're familiar with that level of depression, it's too hard to explain in any way that isn't a face to face conversation. But one by one my Lights went out for different reasons. But by then I was already almost done with being a teenager. And I had become the monster I was trying so drastically to avoid. I had lost most of my innocence, not that any of us are innocent to begin with. I decided my freshman year of high school that I had to get as far from this homophobic environment as possible and as fast as possible. And I was too afraid to ask my parents to let me go to a public school, and I couldn't even play the financial card since my mom worked at the school so it was practically free. I honestly just wanted a place to get away from the same people I knew since I was 5 and saw six days a week none of whom I could trust. And yes, I was hoping to meet a cute guy or any non-hetero so I knew I wasn't alone. Because I don't know what's lonelier than being the only inmate living in a prison with no bars surrounded by wardens who preach love but would hate me if they knew who I had a crush on. So if I was going to be stuck in this system till I graduated, I might as well move up my release date. And who needs a sophomore year of high school anyways. I'd make a joke about a "wise fool" but that's etymologically incorrect.

Remember when I went to a mental hospital?

Suicide Songs: Monday

It's Monday afternoon and no one in class notices or cares

That Max isn't there but with a gun from who knows where

He's been attacked and harassed everyday since freshman year

Verbally, physically, emotionally filled with fear

He's seen the videos and read the headlines 

Seems like everyday a star comes out 

Until now it's been enough to get through the day

But the dance on Friday night was their last chance

The bell's about to ring but Max can't relax 

He feels like he's going to have a heart attack

The halls are going to fill and his tears are starting to pour

He's afraid. He's always been afraid here

But he won't be for much longer

In the next moment he feels a little stronger 

Ring ring bang bang 

He didn't know he wasn't the only one afraid

That the boy he asked to the dance actually wanted to be more than best friends

That his “friends” heard him say yes

So they beat him up too

Max got stood up because Mitch could no longer stand

Suicide Songs: Intro

The last few weeks were an introduction to poetry and to myself. I started writing poetry because I was hopelessly depressed and I had no voice. I had no one to talk to. No one I trusted. I was alone. Alone in my pain. Poetry kept me alive. Poetry gave me life. Poetry gave structure to my chaos and confusion. I was mentally ill but wasn't sure. I didn't want to accept myself because I was afraid of what my family and church (i.e. everyone I knew) would do to me if they found out I was gay. So I tried to drown myself when I was 11. I started cutting myself when I was 15. I also stopped eating. I don't know how I would have survived without poetry. If I couldn't say everything I needed to say without actually saying it.

But as I mentioned in the mini-memoir, I did end up in a mental hospital when I was 16. It really was the best thing that could have happened to me. Even though the boy broke my heart and I let that screw up my most important friendship, I was no longer alone. There are so many people out there just like me. Suffering from the same depression and oppression. But that's where traditional therapy ends. It gives you the tools to overcome obstacles. It provides a system that reduces your risk of relapsing. But it can't make you forget. And I'll talk more about this next week.

For these next 7 days, I'm just going to share 7 stories. 7 completely different souls. 7 completely different circumstances. 7 same "solutions" to those 7 very different problems. Just 7 ways suicide happens in our society.

Therapy Tactics on Gender Identity and Gender Roles

Coming out as transgender or genderqueer is similar to Coming Out as I mentioned in last week's post. What's different is that there's a lot more transphobia than homophobia even within the gay community as well as there being a lesser understanding of gender compared to sexuality. Gender is who you are. Sexuality is who you want to fuck.  It's sad that we understand and accept lust more than people. The world today is such a hyper-sexualized place that everyone understands what homosexuality is because we're all horny as fuck and don't know how to keep it in our pants. You don't have to agree with it to understand why someone would want to fuck someone else regardless of gender.

Explaining Non-Binary Systems: Gender Identity

Explaining Non-binary systems: Sexual & Romantic Orientation

I Think I Love You: Part 1

I Don’t Want To Hear “I Love You”

Is there anything crazier than falling in love in a psychiatric hospital? I’m not sure if it was true love, but it was the first time I said “I love you” and meant it. Where else could I possibly find someone as broken as I am? I’ll never forget my stay at Canyon Ridge Hospital in Southern California my senior year of high school. How can I forget when I’m reminded every time I look at the scars on my wrists? 

When I used to tell the story of my first real relationship, the setting is “summer camp” and I conveniently avoid pronouns. Now I’m a senior in college in New York City and in a much better place in every way. I don’t feel like I have to lie anymore. Instead of arriving in a “school bus,” I arrived strapped down in an ambulance.

Maybe it was Cupid’s arrow or whatever drugs were dripping in my IV, but I fell in love with the first person who talked to me who wasn’t taking my vitals. I was sitting silently in a room with about five other boys who were laughing at whatever teenage boys draw on whiteboards to amuse themselves. 

Then one boy smiled at me and came over. He asked me if this was my first time in a “place like this.” I nodded. The next thing he asked was if I was gay or straight?

From Big Red Book to Bright Blue Screen - Who Am I? (Part 1)

So I was a very inquisitive child. I wanted to know how everything worked. My parents, both incredibly smart in their own right, but also incredibly busy and not always readily available, soon answered every question the same: Look it up. Now this was before the internet was a thing so I looked everything up in this big red dictionary with a nice hard cover and glossy gilded pages and little indents on the side for each letter, the perfect size for my little fingers. Fast forward a few years and I’m like 10 or 11.

The internet is now a thing, and the answers to all of my questions have moved from the big red book to the computer screen which used to be just for educational video games. Now it’s extremely educational in a whole new way. I’m a preteen, starting puberty pretty early for a boy, loaded with questions, and I’m already programmed to skip people and go straight to the text. And that was the closest thing I ever had to “the talk.” This is also how I figured out I was gay. It started with me innocently looking up information on my changing body, and then I was like whoa I like what I’m seeing and how it’s making me feel.

I was already slightly struggling with my gender identity since I had more in common with girls than boys and some other issues that I'll discuss later. So I’m not even in middle school yet and I was already significantly different than everyone I could ever know in my airtight conservative Christian life bubble. So just barely starting the second decade of life and I started to question if I wanted to continue.

10 Things Christians Have Said to Me About Being Gay

This sums up my coming out experience in high school in 10 quotes. I plan on sharing some of those stories more in depth.

Soul Sharing: I'm not straight, but I'm also not gay

So yeah, this poem is basically my way of coming out as asexual after having already been out as gay. Not much more to say about that, so here's my coming out video.

Coming out as Pan-kAce (Panromantic-Asexual)

(pronounced "pancake")

Artistic Tips: Word Selection

Last week I talked about the basic structure of a poem (meter) and how it's not as important to follow those rules. This week I want to talk about the most obvious and important thing about poetry: words.  You can't have poetry without words, but you can have words without it being poetry. The structural difference is poetry consists of rhythm, meter, and rhyme while prose for the most part does not. The difference is in format, but they both require proper word selection. Prose is limited by the audience of what words are appropriate and recognizable. In an ethics paper, you probably wouldn't debate the economic benefits of distributing mass quantities of two hydrogen atoms covalently bonded to a single oxygen atom to the needy. In poetry you can. Well, maybe not exactly like in that example. Poetry uses considerably fewer words than prose which means every word should be carefully considered. This is where a thesaurus comes in handy.

You don't just want to find the right word, you want to find the best word. You want words that can have multiple meanings or certain connotations And then you want those words to be in synch with the words around them. You want them to either compliment each other (easily done with alliteration) or contrast each other to make them stand out or make people do a double take (like seemingly oxymoronic phrases). You want words that you can repeat and that can have a slightly or drastic different meaning depending on the words around it. Most importantly you want to be clever. You want to come up with a new or different take on how words are usually used, something that makes it uniquely yours. From there you can build your metaphors, and of course you should use puns and other poetic literally devices which I'll explore more in another poem, but if you want a head start on those, there's a link under Poetry Resources labeled Literary Devices.

So now I'm going to go through and highlight some of the word choices I made in this poem.

Poetry Performance: "What the F*ck is sex?"

Poetry: "What the F*ck Is Sex?"

Just to help you read the poem on your own and formulate your own initial thoughts and interpretations, I'll post my performance video tomorrow. Speaking of, feel free to comment your thoughts or questions on this poem in the comments, and I'll address them in the following posts this week.

"What the F*ck Is This Sex You Speak Of?"
By David Wright

I think girls are pretty and guys are hot,
But I don't really think about sex a lot.
Sure I had crushes on girls and guys,
But girlfriends and boyfriends felt like lies.

The straight default just felt straight up wrong.
I felt I had to hide the alternative gay behind genderless love songs.
So I didn't know if I was gay or straight or something in between.
I didn't even know what sex was. No one really tells us when we're teens.
It's this abstract concept that's suppose to be so great.
But they except us to wait.
To wait for a life time to pass us by,
Before we get to awkwardly try.

Sex is placed up there with drugs and drinks.
Things that alter and inhibit our ability to think.
If virginity is sacred, then losing it is either taboo
Or something only the cool kids get to do.

Sexy is cool. Sexy is intimacy. But I'm cool with just a high five.
Sex is money. Sex sells cars. But I don't really want to drive.

I still have crushes on guys and girls.
But that's as far as it goes in my world.
I wouldn't say no to a boyfriend or a girlfriend,
Since I could still fall in love for the first time or again.

So what the f*ck is sex? It took me a while to figure out, and I’m clever.
Sex is something I don’t want. Not now and maybe not ever.

It’s more than just sexual abstinence.
There’s no sexual attraction, not an ounce.
Maybe some day there will be.
I’m not 100% committed to celibacy.
And whether it be a woman or a man,
I’ll be ready if I know it’s God’s plan.