Craziness

Back when I was young, in high school, as difficult an experience as that was, life made sense. There were pretty straightforward rules and everyone pretty much knew where they belonged and where they stood in the scheme of things. You knew the rules of relationship – to whom you could speak and where you could go. This didn’t change much in college, except that those years were marked with an increasing struggle for self-identity. As my life history attests, I chose to create an identity that was not authentic. But that’s another topic.

After college, as my world continued to expand, those old rules seemed to break down. Life became more fluid and confusing in a way. Freer actually. But freedom can involve fear. Rules, even if you don’t like them, are clear. Freedom is not. It was the death of my mother, far too young, in my early adulthood, that upended my understanding of the way the world worked. I found everything I believed about family, relationships, God, purpose, everything, completely challenged. And I grew a great deal during that time. I came to see things more clearly for what they were and less what the world and other people said they were. I learned to define more earnestly for myself what was important. My coming out, 14 years later, was a sort of end point of that process. Not that I don’t continue to challenge myself to authenticity, but that was a watershed moment unlike any other.

I find myself now at a point of new craziness. Someone very close to me calls it a time of things undefined. I’m happy to have resolved issues around this very significant relationship, but only to bring up others. At moments things seem so clear and at others not so much. I could do with a transfiguration moment. The bright light, shining clothes and faces, the voice from heaven. No mistaking what was going on there. I would like to know what I am looking at. But I don’t. I don’t want to get hurt, and yet there is some hurt. And honest relationship can’t exist without that risk. It involves giving a part of yourself into the keeping of another. That’s true no matter what the relationship, but especially where romantic feeling or love are concerned. I can only go forward in honesty, but at times it is hard to so expose myself. I have to trust in my own love for myself and another and know that no matter what, all will be well.

-David