Entering the fall of one’s life is not something that usually happens without incident or reflection, and finding myself not-so-suddenly at the age of 48, I realize that there are probably more days behind me than are ahead of me. Cresting over this hump of middle age is, somewhat strangely, not something that has caused much consternation or worry. In a number of distinct ways, the overriding feeling is one of gratitude. Honestly, I never thought I’d make it past thirty – there were so many moments fraught with willful self-annihilation, so many times when I gave up on myself, when I actually set out to destroy the young man I couldn’t quite stop myself from becoming.
A song then, on the piano, for the boy I used to be. (All those years of piano lessons, and still I could never play like this.) A song, too, for the man I’ve somehow become, in spite of my weaker efforts, and because of my strongest.
One doesn’t reach a place of gratitude from mindfulness or meditation alone, or from the luck of leading a very charmed and privileged life. One has to suffer a bit, go through a few things, build some character, and maybe approach oblivion couple of times. The debilitating struggle of not feeling like you belong, of not feeling wanted, of not being understood at the most basic level – those things chips away at the innocence and exuberance of childhood. If you’ve only ever felt you were at the margins of life when you were a kid, you never really quite feel like you belong anywhere – at least, you don’t until you can find yourself, and find your own worth. It’s that shaky and unsteady ground that many gay people feel themselves on at one point or another – that moment when coming out might cost you friendship or love or life.
Such a strange thing, that unsteadiness, and the dizzying lack of some feeling of belonging – and then of thinking you don’t belong anywhere unless you’re there at the center of it all, marching in some grand parade, embraced and hoisted on the shoulders not because different, but because you’re just like everyone else. You belong.
Everyone’s eyes are on the spectacle of it – the music and the pomp and the majesty of a march – and we lose ourselves in watching it go by, not looking around to see all the people next to us – eyes only on the chosen few, missing the real connections, the true threads of life running through our journey. I thought I wanted to be in that parade. I thought that would make me belong.
So I made myself into my own parade – a grotesque, ridiculous, carnival of outlandish proportion compared to my trifling lot in life. It was but one of the many demons I conjured in the name of survival. A celebration of me to mask the utter lack of believing I deserved one.
There came a time when all those demons became my friends, when they stopped fighting me and turned their formidable powers against the outer world. Suddenly I could charge ahead with a battalion behind me, a support system the likes of which I never knew or got when I was growing up.
Like all demons, however, they proved problematic, deceptive in their perceived power, and ultimately deserting me when I needed them the most. Empty shells and vaporous ghosts, the scariest forms of imagined life, they were all in my head, all made-up and false crutches to get me through. Sometimes they did, but in the end they couldn’t do what I needed them to do.
The parade marched onward, and I watched it go…
