I came across this article in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/02/AR2007060201025.html and it struck a real nerve with me and made me recall my straight life in my upper middle class neighborhood in Virginia Beach (the photo is of my former 5 bedroom 3.5 bath home which apparently is just back on the market). This paragraph of the article in particular struck home:
It's not just suburban life that can leave people feeling like each day brings more of the same: commuting, work, errands, chores, pressure to pay the bills. The quest for more and bigger can breed isolation and stress, leaving some in the region to question their lifestyles.
So much of the focus in that neighborhood was on bigger and more luxurious homes, multiple expensive cars, in-ground pools – in short a quest for “things” to make ones’s life complete. Meanwhile, many of the residents were what my therapist calls “sleep walkers,” going through the motions of life, but not really living life. People worried more about insignificant PTA events, children’s sports or gossip at the neighborhood pool that on the state of politics and/or the direction of the country. Or they worried about things years in the future, forgetting to live life in the present. Few if any of them were Bad people. They just had been hypnotized by societal expectations.
I will admit that for a long time I was to some extent one of the sleep walkers. I do not think I was as zoned out as most - I have always been interested in current events, news and politics. Hence, I do not believe I was ever as oblivious to things as many of those around me. Don’t get me wrong. In many ways it was a great place to raise kids in terms of a safe neighborhood. However, it was very homogenous, with an underlying, unstated message to conform. Perhaps being in the closet and being ever on guard to hide my secret I was more in tune to perceiving these things.
I do know that since (A) coming out of the closet, (B) moving to a much more diverse neighborhood (the b/f and I rehabbed a house in a marginal, but up and coming area), and (C) having to come to self-acceptance while not conforming to straight society's rules, I have met more truly alive and genuine people. True, it may not be the outwardly “perfect” world of my old life, but it is much more interesting and real. Moreover, I have learned that things do not lead to happiness. The real secret is to be who you really are and not feel need to apoligize to any one for being you.
6 comments:
I once posted that the Boggart in my closet (Harry Potter reference if you don't know it) would be someone coming up and telling me I had to move back to suburbia. I just...couldn't. Not again. As you said, they aren't Bad people. It just never felt as if they were very Real, either.
You hit my thoughts exactly - it's like they are Disney creations that have limited programing. I do not intend to sound mean, but that's my view.
Or perhaps Stepford Wives?
We used to get such a laugh out of it all when we lived outside of the city. One person on the street would get a new car... suddenly new cars showed up all over the subdivision, each one more grand or bigger than the previous one. Then one house suddenly had a boat out front. Mom said, if they keep this up, you'll see the Queen Mary at the end of the street by the weekend. One VP I worked for in the concrete jungle called it "the bigger dick syndrome".
And the gossip was unbelievable! No wonder we kept the drapes drawn as much as we did back then! Perhaps that is why in the apartment building we've lived in for the past 30 years, we maybe know the residents of two apartments. Once we cross the threshold and close the door, we just want to be left to live our lives in our own way and not to hear any of the tenants' association latest round of gossip. It's like living in high school some days. When we moved to a smaller apartment a few years back, one of the ladies in the tenants' association just wandered right on in while we were moving furniture (and me being in a stereotypical moment, was busy staging everything from my floor plans), and if my jaw hadn't hit the floor about the nerve of this woman, I wouldn't have been responsible for what I was going to say. Talk about nosy!
Michael,
You distinguish between your "old" and your "new" life in this post; is not life cut of whole cloth?
My question is not frivolous. Usually, although not always, we go through life's stages, ages of man, phases, evolving, development, etc. (See, for example, http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/time-marches-on-but-does-man.html)
When individuals bifurcate their conceptions of life into "old" and "new," usually, not always, it's to repudiate part, or all, of one's past. Words like "reborn," "recovered," "clean," etc. are often used to demarcate the moment of transition.
I urge you to reconsider the use of this language, however popular and "innocuous" it may seem. It may not apply to you, but some, perhaps many, individuals use this language to deny or repudiate aspects of their life they may have wished were otherwise. To do that, though, one has to deny that one's current life is not an organic whole, when it most certainly is. It's one thing to regret past choices, wish other options had availed, etc., but they remain your best choices and options at the time. Like most of us, I trust we learn from our choices and grow organically and develop integrally accordingly.
One clearly transitions from one phase of life to another (see, post), without "breaking" from one's past, or "distancing" one's future. We usually call it "growing up" and then "growing old," but it's always and ever -- growing.
Making fundamental changes in our lives is itself a part of that organic growth, and while you appear to be happier and more integrated in these latter times that previously, it might be a terrible mistake to disown what clearly is a chapter (or even chapters) of life in a book already written that has led you to this moment. It may be "past," but some of it, however residual, still persists in the present, and to bifurcate "yous" rather than evolve organically tends to leave a sense of fragmentation, rather than integration, as a individual's motif.
Just food for thought.
Gay Species,
Your comments are duly noted. Hence forth I will refer to it as my "former married phase" or "closet phase."
Cool.
Some other options:
When I was "bi," .. .
When being gay was so deplored . . .
During the transition from teens to now . . .
Words do color our world views (at least to the degree of weak social constructionism shows). But also, the objective is to integrate oneself, not to fragment it again by divisions that seem innocuous, but nag at our psyches. (We have enough "conflicts" without throwing word fire on our flames.)
Finding our center and balance must always be "retooled," and integrated anew, but it will significantly more difficult if words we use color our perception, and "old" and "new" is often too separatist (black-and-white), when it is more scales of the rainbow.
Cheers of Pride!
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