An Open Letter

N asked what love feels like, and I said the answers I have already thought of. But on my drive home I thought a bit more and I think love is the absence in your heart once it’s gone. I think you really feel love when you finally are faced with potentially losing it. But maybe that’s an unhealthy view of it. Am I saying I think love is when you don’t want to let something go? Because sometimes when you love you let them go for their sake. Maybe the pain is how you know you loved.

I think it’s not a brave thing to bottle things up. There’s a really weird notion that masculinity is the refusal to ask others for help or to reach out when struggling. But when I think about it, I think that’s the cowards approach, to afraid to be hurt from admitting you want help and someone saying no. It’s admitting that you would like someone else to be a part of your life. It’s admitting that someone matters to you and that they help. And I think that’s a terrifying thing for a lot of people, and so I think it’s very brave when people are willing to put themselves in harms way. I think it’s the same bravery that I feel proud of myself for, I’ve been abrasive and I’ve been myself and I’ve been weird and I’ve done my best to be unapologetic about it, and that authenticity has helped so much. But I don’t think I’m fully authentic, because when it gets late I feel this crash emotionally, and suddenly the little things get to me. Two people walking on ahead and I think about how I am the outsider and I am the first to go, and there is not a safe place for me where I know I am wanted. And I know that I’m wrong, and I know that it’s insecurity and delusion and it’s issues from childhood that I can do nothing but give myself sympathy for right now. And I guess I can also remind myself that it’s not true. But it sticks with me.

N asked me if I felt bad when people said I was big, and I told her that I never think that I’m big. How funny that is given my username, and I guess domain name lol. But I told her how I feel good about myself in the mirror when I feel happy, but then I put on clothing and I think I’m again just a small boy. I look around and I see men, and I see people with large arms and taller than me, and it doesn’t feel like they have to posture up or convince others that they should not be fucked with. But then I look at myself and I feel like I’m fighting and working so hard to fall short of what other people have by default. I’m doing so much to try to convince the world that I am a man. And so I kind of resigned to it, and so I take solace in the fact that I’m not really a man in the common eyes of society, and this gives me the freedom to be weird and feminine and strange. Look at this blog as an example. I wear stupid pieces of clothing, and I have very pronounced mannerisms and I’m very expressive. I don’t do this from full freedom though, I do this because I’ve kind of accepted that I’m not winning any performance, and so I have the freedom of losing. You’re not afraid to do things when you’ve already lost. And I don’t think that I’m someone that is easy to love, and I’m a little bit afraid for if I think that I am. Let’s say someone convinces me that I’m not that hard to love, then that means that I have a chance and then I’m afraid to fail the performance. And so there’s a kind of comfort in this thought.