Passport for Space

The thought that I might be gay - before knowing the meaning of words like "gay" and "sex". At nine years old, I was the new kid in a new district. I had one friend, and this friend was so damn cool. Older, more athletic, owned a PS2 - it was mind-blowing. Today I know that I have compulsive obsessions. All I knew then was that this guy was god.

Marion by Moonlight is a summertime community picnic-style event, where families congregate in the town’s grassy square and can buy foods from local vendors. We went every summer while I was nine in an attempt to integrate into our new community. As the sun slipped beneath the town’s surface, a thought dawned on a little me. I realized that I felt an attraction to my friend. The attraction tasted familiar, like how I felt toward my female compatriots at school. I felt an immense wave of anxiety that twisted my chest, stomach and intestines. Someone was trying to mangle me. I couldn't breath. I was hyperventilating into the meltdown zone.

I talked myself down, eventually. It became an event I forgot and buried along with my other childhood panic attacks. As I confronted my own sexuality that night resurfaced. I remembered the intense fear and sadness. I have compassionate parents whose religious convictions (though sturdy and “given” to us kids) were never disparaging to homosexuality. My mother is a compassionate school psychologist, and my father grew up with a gay brother who had a hard time growing up. I have a feeling this informed their lack of bigotry. We even attended my uncle’s wedding when I was seven (of course legally it was a civil union ceremony.)

Perspective helped me realize that without explicit instruction I’d been programmed to fear homosexuality and being homosexual. Other moments infused in my brain came into brilliant clarity. A crisp recall of when I was 5 and the feminine older boy at my day care was picked on by his peers played in my head. He had had an interest in barbies. That wasn’t okay. Before becoming conscious of the media I consumed, it had enforced a strict heteronormative understanding of social norms - mommies and daddies and cowboys and belles. When that binary understanding was contested I panicked as if the world and its structures were collapsing around me. I understood these things prior to my mini-revelation in a very heady, cerebral way. From then I began to understand the power such marketing and experience has on our emotions.

I have to imagine that this panic is felt by many, and for longer than my evening foray into terror. I can't imagine holding on to that terror, the feeling that your identity is wrong. I’ve become comfortable with my own sexuality. I check in from time to time, but I’ve stayed consistent. I know that could change, and that uncertainty is scary. Fear and hatred are just tinder and flame.

When I sit down to write, a chill races up my spine and doesn't stop till it hits my brain.  I fear a lot in my life, but not many things are as terrifying as the blank page, the empty canvas, or the dormant keyboard.  

There is also nothing more exciting.

Fear and excitement, I contend, are two sides of the same coin.  Or maybe a better way of putting it is that there is a fine line between the two.  For example, before taking the stage, it is hard for me to determine whether I am exhilarated or mortified. 

Art is a thing that I believe is inherently scary, because it can never be fully understood in every aspect.  Things that we don't understand, especially things that can't be understood, are fearsome and awe-inspiring (see: Religion).

Sometimes all the mind needs to find its way to acceptance of fear (and excitement for the moment) is a little self-administered reassurance.  

One thought in particular feels like lowering yourself into a steaming bath, where the suds caress you and the world melts away.  Just because one person could never create the greatest photograph, music number, poem, book, and performance doesn't mean we should ever feel discouraged from trying to achieve as many as we can.

You know how people say, "it's like x meets y" when talking about movies? The same can be said for all art.  

Art is an interpretation and combination of two or more previous creations.

Until someone comes along and adds that one percent of legitimately never seen, heard, or thought of touch to their art.  That is when the game is changed for everyone.

Because everyone now has another block to work with.  Art is a set of building blocks.  When you start to mix genres and mediums, you create exciting spaces for people to inhabit and enjoy.

Excitement that can be turned to fear.  So many of the "greats" were never fully appreciated in their time because of fear.  

The idea that everyone, including our favorite artists in all mediums, are simply using the wealth that is humanity to build their own art, brick by brick, is comforting to me.

It becomes less about proving yourself, and more about exploring the possibilities.

It also seems more tangible, because it is hard to idolize the act of building when we all have the tools and material.  Da Vinci, Handel or Thoreau, every one of them are construction workers in their respective fields.

When that brain freeze comes surging up my spine, I find a warm, soapy bath to defrost my mind.  Our predecessors were not Gods.  The world is at our fingertips, waiting to be built upon, construed and reinterpreted.

While driving home tonight, the wind picked up a layer of snow and cast it out over the road.  It looked like clouds.

I wear a coat around the house.  A nice faux wool peacoat whose buttons are never quite secure.  Unfastened as it may be, it is essential to survival in the bitter tundra that is my house.  

Coats are great.  I got to thinking about our history (the coat and mine).  I realized that a coat is only a coat in the third person.  The first seems more to me like a companion.  Unyielding, flawed, loyal, the whole shabang.

With my train of thought racing I cruised into the realm of the abstract.  The coat makes for an excellent, and therefore hackneyed, metaphor.  The thing about cliches is that they are cliches for a reason.

It feels foreign to wear my coat in my home because I feel like I should be comfortable here, and I'm not.  Temperature or otherwise.  It is more than that though.  The coat represents someone on the outside, that happens to exist as me.  He is so entirely different from a coatless Jacob.  

Which one is real?  Are they equal? Do they exist?  What is the outside but a reflection of the inside?  Stop right there, I'll answer that with another question.  What is the outside but a reflection of one possible inside?  Is the external face that exists for other's sake an idealized self?  Can the internal really idealize a self when it, by that logic, does not believe itself is enough?

Convoluted? Yes. Juvenile? Yeah. Impractical? Maybe.  Tying your mind up in knots all day is an efficient way to never set sail.