Just a heads up: In this post I am going to be talking about queerness, about God, and about my own emotional/mental health experience in relation to those subjects. There will also be some C.S. Lewis.
I want to get back to blogging regularly. I am not going to promise that that will happen but it might. One thing that has been in the way of frequent posting over the last few years was the fact that I was not out about my identity. I have known I was trans since mid 2017 or so but for three and a half years I had this idea that I could just know that I am a woman but continue to live a life pretending to be a man. There were reasons I tried to do that, but it didn't work. During that time though, I did not think of trans-ness as a bad thing, and certainly not as something sinful or evil, mostly I think I just thought of it as excessively inconvenient to the life I wanted to have. The result was that I had a lot of thoughts about how transness and queerness interacted with or shone light on the rest of my life and the ideas I was playing around with. I tried to write some of those thoughts into blog posts but I just couldn't bring myself to write as though I were removed or detached from them. So mostly I didn't write them at all.
And now I am out and there is nothing really stopping me from getting to work on this backlog of ideas and thoughts I have been kicking around for four years. So here we go:
In his sermon The Weight of Glory Lewis (without using the term) describes the experience of sehnsucht:
In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.
Now in The Weight of Glory, as well as in the many other parts of his writing where Lewis explores this experience, Lewis identifies it with the desire for God and usually ties it to an apologetic argument. In fact I find the use of sehnsucht as a broader theological fact far more interesting than as a bit of apologetics. Still, sehnsucht does an admirable job of describing a certain invaluable facet of my experience of God.
But theology, much less Christian apologetics, is not really what I want to write about today. I promised queer content and I intend to deliver.
Ashley and I watched a movie a few weeks ago. It was Tick Tick Boom and for the purposes of this story I only need to say that it is a musical about Jonathan Larson, the man who wrote Rent, and that the AIDS epidemic features heavily as the context for the musical. After the movie we started getting ready for bed. I wandered into the bathroom and, still discussing the movie but intertwined with other parts of our lives in that way that we do after a compelling film, Ashley commented to me "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer". It staggered me—literally. To my recollection I have never physically staggered just from hearing something before, I had always though it was more of a metaphor. That night those words made my knees go loose for a second and I had to catch the towel bar to keep from falling.
It actually took a few minutes for my mind to catch up with my body (my subconscious). My immediate response was something along the lines of "wow that is definitely true...wow" but as we kept talking I realized I was grinning like a fool. Then I was feeling overwhelmed. I started to brush my teeth but just as I was putting toothpaste on my brush a great, indistinct something came rushing towards a barrier in my mind that I hadn't known existed. For a second I saw it looming and gasped "Oh..it's going to happen" then it hit and I shattered.
I have mentioned this before but I grew up Evangelical. That means a lot of things for who I am and how I experience the world, and one of those things is that I grew up believing that queerness is sinful. It was a nebulous belief at first. I didn't know what "gay" meant until I was accused of being it at a summer camp once—I had been sitting with my legs crossed in a way that I only later found is associated with femininity in US culture—but somewhere around middle school my Christian education ensured that I found out about homosexuality and that it was sinful.
At the same time I was starting to notice a particular note that would appear in certain stories, or around some people. In Surprised by Joy Lewis, again discussing sehsucht, says that one of his early experiences of it was the longing for something he called "northernness":
Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity… and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. …And with that plunge back into my own past, there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country, and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together in a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss
That thrill was something I started to treasure and to look for and for a while it existed in me together with the evangelical belief about the sinfulness of queerness without the two meeting... for a while. It couldn't last though; the draw I felt towards queerness—the fascination or longing—eventually showed itself to be too often present in the company of the homosexuality I had learned to call sin. Now this was confusing at first; Evangelical children are not, as a rule, taught about umbrella concepts or the nuanced and complicated ways in which trans identities overlap and differ from sexual orientation. I knew I wanted to be a girl and I knew I wasn't into guys, and I knew homosexuality was sinful and I knew I was drawn to this thing and knew that the thing often showed up around homosexuality and it was all just very confusing. The result though was that I distanced myself from that longing. I told myself it was sinful, or at least that it would lead to sin, and I worked hard to mimic the reactions to of those around me. "This—This thing," I told myself "is not for me, it is not about me, it is bad for me".
A friend of mine posted recently that post-Evangelicals have a complicated relationship with our own desires because we are taught that we need to reject our desires and replace them with God's desires. It takes a long time to figure out—and longer to integrate—that what that has often meant is that we need to replace the desires God has actually given us with the desires that straight white male Church leaders have for us. I think about that a lot.
Eventually I stopped believing that queerness is sinful.
For a while I thought that it might be a sort of tragedy that befell some people, but that didn't last long. I came to think, then accept, then believe, and now I know, that queerness is beautiful and holy.
But the thing about growing up, the thing about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop believing that queerness is sinful without remembering why I had decided that it is not for me, not about me. Queerness was beautiful but I was not queer. And of course that is the other thing: I could decide as a 12 year old that queerness was not about me but I was never able to stop the longing for queerness. The soul broken off from itself cannot stop wanting to be made whole no matter how well we bandage it.
I was magnetically drawn to queerness but I was a cis-het dude; there was no way for me to connect. Not that I didn't try; I read books about queer people and queer theory, I studied LGBTQ+ history, I sponsored my high school's GSA, I made friends with LGBTQ+ people, I advocated, I watched movies, I went to pride parades, I volunteered, I debated with people online, I wrote blog posts, I got kicked out of my church. And it was all satisfying—sort of; it all scratched at an itch—but though a heavy coat. Anyway though, it didn't matter; here was a community that was on my heart—a community whose holiness I could see even if so many Christians around me couldn't seem to—and I was going to atone for my past and, far more importantly, I was going to be towards them the way we all should. I wanted to badly to be a good ally. I think about that a lot.
Eventually I stopped believing that I was cis or het.
For three and a half years I lived in this in-between space: publicly a cis-het guy and knowing myself to be a trans lesbian. But see the thing about how we develop as people, about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop thinking I was a straight man without remembering, or at least without knowing what that meant for who I am. I wanted to be part of the trans community; "You are valid" is a phrase I saw applied to me and to people like me all the time. And it was true, and it is true, and every trans person is who they are and I could still struggle to ever really feel like that was true.
That was the stage in my life where I stopped crying. I have never been a really big crier, but I haven't worked to avoid it either. There is this thing that happens when people think you are a boy. From the time you are little you get told in a million loud and quiet ways that growing up means getting control of your emotions; you need to master them. Then if you are the sort of person that most people tend to assume is a boy, in you teens you get these floods of testosterone. My experience on testosterone (and I have heard similar things from other people who have been on the hormone, both voluntarily and involuntarily) is that it makes your anger super accessible. I have seen this overstated as though T turns people into hulk-esque rage-beasts but it is really more like anger is one book on your shelf of emotions and T just pushes it out a little so that it's easier to grab. But, you see, this becomes kind of a whole thing for people who believe we have to master our emotions because now the consequences of not mastering them is that people get hurt, maybe people we like or even love. There is a reason that self-control is a virtue and it isn't a bad reason. And I did have a temper and I did have to learn to control it.
Anyway I got good at controlling my anger. Then I learned a neat trick. It turns out that if you try, you can turn nearly any negative emotion into anger. Sadness, depression, shame, and embarrassment can all be turned into anger. I developed a go-to method for handling negative emotions: turn them into anger and then control the anger. During those three years I would sing the virtue of my method. "Anger," I would say " is the only negative emotion that moves you forward. I turn my sadness into anger because it drives me to change the circumstances that made me sad."
I am now convinced that this is a perspective which is really only available to the sort of white men who can comfortably assume that their own channeled anger will result in positive change in their circumstances; it often doesn't work like that for the rest of us. I mean let's be real, it didn't work that way for me. I had plenty to be angry about and I channeled it into doing all sorts of good things but nothing I was willing to do was going to change the pain of not being myself.
The thing nobody warned me about (I mean culture sort of warned me about it but not in that "this applies to you" sort of way that might have worked) is that turning your negative emotions into something else is called numbing; really that's any form of trying to not experience your negative emotions. And you can't selectively numb.
So I stopped crying. Then I stopped really laughing. I really missed it too. I would think about it a lot.
Eventually I stopped believing I could save the life I had built by pretending to be something I wasn't. Eventually I realized that the attempt to be him was going to destroy everything I wanted for him.
And I told my wife that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told my family that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told the world that I am trans—I am a woman. I started laughing again about three months after I told Ashley. But I still didn't cry; I still couldn't cry.
See the thing about healing, the thing about growing, the thing about sewing back on the chunk of your soul that got torn away the day you realized that you couldn't be—weren't—the girl you knew you were* is that it takes time. Imagine sewing a hand back on after it has been severed for 39 years. You can connect things back together—the skin, the bones, the muscles, the blood vessels—but until the nerves connect, you aren't going to be feeling much from that hand. But what if those nerves heal too? What if they grown back together. What if your wife says from the other room "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer"?
And then your body knows that you are queer and that you are healing a step before you conscious mind does. And then you are about to integrate with your own experience—the experiences you were always having and never letting yourself have because you couldn't only now you could and now you did and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. And then the toothbrush clatters into the sink and then you are crumpled up on the bathroom floor sobbing and you don't know why yet but you are starting to know why and you already always have known but you are also about to find out. And then there is snot and there are tears and your wife is holding you while you shake and you weep because life cannot be this good, and your own self cannot contain this much beauty. But it does and it already always has and now you know that—only it isn't that you know that, it is that you are knowing it right now.
And then I was breathing and laughing and crying a little less and I wanted to tell Ashley how good this was and how grateful I am and we moved from the bathroom floor to the couch and she grabbed some tissues on the way and I opened my mouth and then the next wave hit and I was always already queer and I was always already everything that I had only known from behind glass and under the gauze that I had wrapped around my mind and then there was no them in queerness there was us. And every emotion I had had about them were altogether in one moment emotions I had already had/was having/will have about us. And of course I am sobbing again, I am shattered but I am born and breathing and held and whole.
So anyway yes. Sehnsucht. That is a little bit what I think it means to yearn for being united with God.
 |
| I am me now. |
No comments:
Post a Comment