storyteller.
After a fire, it is human nature to sit, to drape a blanket around our shoulders and stare out and ponder, to consider the days and weeks and months leading in. How did I get here, we ask ourselves, our faces charred by black smoke, our organs recoiling from the flames remembered. We inhale; we exhale. We are never more present in our bodies than when we are healing.
It’s in my nature, I suppose, to pause at the milestones and try to make meaning of the journey freshly fading. So it was with 25, and so it shall be with 26. Born on the 26th, I awaited 26, my golden year, for a long time. Who would I be? How would I live?
As I welcome 27, I think I can shed some light onto these questions.
I read my first Matthew Quick novel – The Good Luck of Right Now – during a summer 2015 week in New York City. Suggested by a Buzzfeed article, the story captured me quickly with its compelling narrative (each chapter is a letter to Richard Gere) and interesting, deeply human characters. When my brother read Love May Fail, he quickly directed me to read it as well. Bringing it with me to New York City this summer, I finished it in an Astoria coffee shop, my eyes stained with tears.
No lengthy preamble this time. Instead, let’s cut to it: Here are a few scattered thoughts on projecting light in the world.
In college, as part of my English degree, I took a class on writing and reading poetry. I approached the course the way a lot of young people approach poetry: with a mix of skepticism, uncertainty, and reluctance. I knew enough of poetry, I suppose, to know that it didn’t need to have a rhyme scheme, but I favored rhyming poems nonetheless.
The first poem I wrote for the course compared writing to running, both of them liberating and capable of breaking through internal barriers, both of them about untying knots. The first line was ‘Writing is a lot like running.’ The class’s response was clear: I had good ideas, but it didn’t move them.
1 year. Nearly a year ago, the Supreme Court made its ruling on marriage equality, and celebration erupted. Facebook burst into rainbows, emotional declarations of love and pride, and a door seemed to have opened. Inspired and stoked to action, I published an entry called ‘into existence,’ in which I spoke myself out loud. Finally, I thought, I had the courage (and a safe enough world) to be myself, fully and authentically.
2 days. Two days ago, I made my way to Indianapolis Pride. I donned a rainbow headband, hugged my people, and celebrated beneath a gorgeous summer sky. What a vital, important thing, I thought, to celebrate the wild courage we’ve found. Held hands, wide smiles, drag queens in 95 degree weather. An utter expression of freedom.
1 day. Waking up to news of the Orlando shooting, a massacre that cut short the lives of fifty – fifty – human beings, was a punch in the gut. Throughout the day, updates grew increasingly grim. What a stain, this massacre. I held my breath; I waited for words from my family. But none came.
–
The cost of coming out. A year ago, I found the courage to profess myself, to speak myself into existence. I am often quick to endorse authenticity, but it is perhaps also important to lay out the costs. The things we give up. What must we leave behind to move forward as ourselves?
–
What I think people most misconstrue about LGBT+ people. Pride is, in and of itself, a wild celebration. It is a declaration of the self, and it is the long-restrained exclamation of a people often urged to repress, to silence, to hide. The images of Pride, I think, are often society’s default images of LGBT+ people: men thrusting on floats in Speedos, drag queens kicking and pirouetting on stages, rainbow paint and confetti and balloons, condoms thrown onto the streets.
I’m not here to denounce Pride celebrations; in fact, I think they are essential to the survival of a deeply human group of people. We are so often told to silence our declarations of self, or perhaps just to whisper them behind walls, that the annual opportunity to profess ourselves with an exclamation point is freeing, validating, liberating.
But who we are cannot be reduced to confetti and rainbows and floats on the street. We are not simply The Golden Girls and bitchy one-liners and drag shows and gay best friends. We are more than sex, pulse music, and diversity presentations. To see us this way, in two dimensions, is to deny us the reality of our authentic, deep humanity.
We are brothers and sisters, daughters and sons. We aspire to love and be loved. We are poets, accountants, scientists, and dental assistants. We pray and we struggle and we look at the stars at night, just like you, and we wonder at the universe we’re a part of. When we find love, we can’t believe it, because we thought for so many years that we’d always feel alone. We hold one another in long, tender hugs, resting in each other’s arms and helping one another through challenging times. Our hearts break and they heal, and we dream of building families and watching our dreams become realities. We grow older, we grow braver, and we continue working to unravel the mystery of ourselves. We are spectacular collections of stardust, given life and the absurd miracle of humanity, and we aspire to leave our handprint on the world we inhabit. This is it, our human dimension.
Don’t you dare reduce us to anything lesser.
–
A reminder. It is not the mark of love nor wisdom to react to a tragedy by reducing an entire group of people to the actions of one. The Orlando shooter was a radical, yes, and he would have been likely to attribute his actions to Islam.
Blood donations have been sorely needed in Orlando since the incident, and lines have appeared out the door. Lest we forget, gay men are still prohibited from donating blood (unless we are willing to claim celibacy for a year), opening an old wound as a community tends to a new one.
A group of young Muslims stepped forward to donate blood, denouncing the actions of the shooter and giving literal life blood to a community in need.
That is what it looks like to push light into the darkness, to paint over hatred with love. That is what love looks like in action.
–
Love letters. The shooting in Orlando brought to death fifty people, cutting short their deeply human stories and hindering the greater collective story of humankind. These people were killed, by all accounts, for being who they were.
I wonder, of those fifty, how many of them remained a mystery to the people in their lives. How many parents are now regretting squandering the opportunity to know their children? To fully embrace them? Before they died, did they regret their courage? Their authenticity?
It is my philosophy that, whether we want them to or not, our lives will ultimately serve as love letters to one thing or another. When we die, and others gather to reflect on our lives, the true nature of our love letters is often revealed. He lived for his family, perhaps, or She loved nothing more than to see communities improve. Faith, love, addiction, travel, adventure… there are many candidates for love letter reception.
If ever it comes to pass that I am killed for being who I am, I want my life to serve as a love letter to courage, authenticity, and love itself. I want to live so that others around me are emboldened to be themselves, to reach new heights, and to know and feel love.
Everything, Everything was an Amazon recommendation. I’m not sure, actually, what I purchased to bring about the suggestion, but the cover art drew me in, and the synopsis seemed promising. I did what we’ve been told not to do – I judged a book by its cover – and I added it to my Amazon cart.
“As a girl, I shunned everything I was supposed to like. I had no time for pink, for dolls, or for makeup. I was busy wading through creek waters searching for frogs or playing catch with my dad. According to my gay friends, this is the earliest and clearest sign of knowing. Maybe they’re right, but I’ve got another one.
“When I was seventeen, I used a fake ID to get into a townie bar with a boy. It was open mic night, and a girl with long limbs and a shy smile took the stage. As she strummed guitar strings, she sung a Sara Bareilles song, and I felt something stirring inside my chest. Afterwards, I talked to her at the bar, and she agreed to hang out.
“She liked pink. When I told her I didn’t, she argued with me. She promised to show me the importance of pink. As I fell for her, I fell for the way she saw the world. I think that’s my ‘when-I-knew.’ I think it’s the day a girl stopped me in my tracks and convinced me to look at all the things nobody else could.“
– S.
We’re all dreamers, to an extent. It is perhaps the tendency to dream – to look beyond what is and to build a vision of what could be – that most separates humankind from the other animals. As we move into our twenties, departing our childhoods and undergoing the orientation to long-awaited ‘real world,’ we often find ourselves pushed toward pragmatism and efficiency.
In your mid-twenties, provided you’re lucky enough to find employment, you’ll probably have colleagues ranging across a few phases of life, and you’re likely to sit in the same meetings, engage in the same work culture, and dissect the same day-to-day happenings. If you come in dreaming wildly, it’s more than likely you’ll hear it: I remember when I used to say things like that. More often than not, the tone is acidic; you are being ridiculed.
But, take every person in that office, and look at their inner world, and you’ll find a long history of dreams: Air guitar solos in teenage bedrooms, daydreams of being met by a roar of applause, imagined adventures in exotic settings, love that robbed them of sleep and they didn’t mind it one bit. The snidest, most rigid co-worker you know has dreamt like this. It is the human condition.
I think it’s true that dreams, when set aside, nag at us. They pull at our heartstrings, our streams of thought, perhaps chiding us not to forget our calling. And, when we’re opting to ignore them, they sour our perspectives a bit. Dreams are for fools, we tell ourselves, relieved to have found a means of justifying our choices. Soon, if we don’t watch for it, we are the ones telling dreamers, I remember when I used to say things like that.
But, at least for the true dreamers among us, dreams are worth defending. Part of growing up, of moving through the twenties, is to learn how to channel dreams well. We are in our years of doing, and there are a lot of commitments competing for our time, but we must not shelve the things that matter most to us.
Here’s what I know: In a room of people, the dreamers will find the other dreamers. They will build one another up, they will whisper to one another messages of belief, and they will light the way for one another. Don’t mind the pebbles; follow your magic and fly.
A little over a year ago, following the announcement that the Supreme Court had ruled bans on same-sex marriages unconstitutional, I felt myself emboldened enough to publish a blog post in which I professed myself gay to my social media network. The act, inspired by a moment of reluctance to accept the rainbow profile picture filter, took a bit of wild courage, but it was a wildly liberating and important step.
Almost instantly, the post gathered a social media response. Kind messages, likes, and private messages ranging from support to challenge, all intended out of love. What I hadn’t expected, however, were the moments of outreach from people facing their own struggle. How’d you do it? some asked, How’d you say it in front of everybody?
I learned, from that experience, the power of sharing our stories. When we speak to the struggles we’ve faced, we light the way for others to know they aren’t alone in theirs, and possibly open ourselves up to connect and help one another through.
Here’s another thing I know: We twenty-somethings all have a story. Everybody has a struggle they’re carrying around, and – no matter how much anybody pretends to ‘have it together’ – we’re all trying to figure it out. Like I said in entry 2, nobody’s immune from the mess.
Empathy reconnects us, and it invigorates us to rejoin the climb of life. Whenever I’ve felt like a mess, I’ve had friends who’ve shared recent struggles, and the knowledge that I haven’t been alone in my confusion has lit the path. Somebody out there needs your story, twenty-somethings, so speak up.
michael king 