antecoitus

I’m a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, a very happy gay man indeed. This is something my very witty (and fabulous) coven of gay men and women has figured out about me some x years ago, I do not even remember how, yet the tag and its implication follows me around, too much.

I am a very happy gay man in a woman’s body, and sometimes I think it’s a curse. Probably I was born with prozac and lithium in my blood, I have an overdose of optimism and yes, after keeping mum for some time about it, I finally admit that sometimes it really gets to me when people associate depressive states and dark personalities to profundity. It seems that insightfulness and complexity can only be borne out of a dismal state. I beg to differ. It’s equivalent to saying that only suicidal types of people get to be deep, mysterious and multi-faceted. Please don’t get me wrong, I am no member of the Brady Bunch and I certainly don’t have the disposition of a Happy Tree Friend who comes back all hopeful and giggly after being cut up to pieces in one episode. I’m not saying I’m right, I’m just… saying.

When I look back to high school with all those hormones flying around, when our hobbies include letter writing (oh, god I think I’m the only who did not get into it – I cannot explain it to you clearly, but I assure you it was) and identity crises, I realize that I did not have so many issues. Either that or maybe I just never wallowed in them. High school was supposed to be the time when your all ‘who I am’ episode gets up to your ears and your hormones tell you why getting angry can actually be well… cool. I did not go through it while everyone else seems to have. Growing up in an all-girl catholic school, we always had spiritual recollection seminars. We had it almost every year, I think. Those spiritual seminars were fine with me, you get to sleep some place else with your friends and get to be out of the school routine. However, there is one part that I dread the most — sharing — when you have that little candle right in front of you along with expectant candle lit faces of 20 high school girls waiting for a sob story and your supposed to say something about yourself that is equally tear jerking as the person who just finished. Sharing meant getting your heart out in the open; it also means crying your tear glands dry. I always thought that it was, maybe helpful to some, but to me, it was just dreadful. I could never match other people, because my stories always eventually turn up like something from a “chicken soup for the soul” book. I once said at the end, “But hey, everything’s fine, so what if I’m getting my spinal operation tomorrow, it still means I get off from school and I have one cool story to tell.” I feel guilty that I might be trivializing their pain, I mean stories about broken families and my-friends-hate-me-thus-I- hate-myself seem to be the bestsellers. I am not trivializing anything, because it is supposed to be a very deep and serious discussion of feelings. Plus, we definitely don’t have a perfect family either, I have my insecurities and sometimes I wish I had bigger boobs (well I still have that wish now). It’s just that when you have rose-colored glasses stuck 90% of the time to the bridge of your nose like a permanent wart, it’s just so difficult to get depressed for long periods of time, to be depressed for too much tears and to be depressed enough to manage to take someone down with you unconsciously. Misery anyway really does love company.

People say that one can make the best poems when one’s heart has just been broken or when it is yearning. I say, that the best poems are made because people have been in love. It is good to feel the pain of a heart break, to let it sink, but it is always madness if you allow it to consume you and wallow in it too long that you forget about the fact that first you have to define love before you can shed oceans for it. But then, love has never been defined so precisely by anyone. Only the bible was able to say something really close, which anyway equates to: If you really love him, get a life… and let him have his.

Maybe the reason why they say that people in depressive states are wise and complex is because of an experience, nonetheless, my respect can only be given to them if I have seen how brilliantly they bounced back and took over their life. And how much time it took them to work on it. Otherwise, they can just shove their wisdom way up… there … somewhere.

Every year I get to this reevaluation of my life and the challenge that I perennially face is that I do not see obstacles, only opportunities. Thus I cannot truly, extensively get intense. When it comes to melancholy I have the attention span of a two year old. I bitch and I get hurt but my tantrums have never permanently become a fully mature wound. Not even a bad love life, the threat of being unemployed nor the couple of major operations in my life had made me miserable for more than a day. I cannot hold real grudges, I trust, I forgive and I absolutely can forget, and luckily for those who have hurt me, the chances I give are real although measured of course (c’mon you cannot be that lucky). My philosophy in life stems from this simple fact: you are STILL alive and you CAN be dead tomorrow.

I cry when I want to for no reason at all or for all the reasons I have forgotten to cry for. For people who left, for the people who came back and for the people who appeared in my life, most especially. I am not frugal with tears because my idea of strength is not very shallow. (Note: trying hard to not cry does not make you tough and deep neither; you just end up looking like a motorcycle bike dude who lost the big-breasted girl riding behind him on the highway, but that’s another essay). Things have got to be taken advantage of because time is really a bitch. He does not care about your issues; he will just go about his business.

Overt and extreme optimism can be both a trap and an escape. Nonetheless, it is my way of dealing though I did not consciously choose it. I am not saying I am right, I am just… saying. J

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2005 at 2:31 am and is filed under live and get entertained (issues). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.