to be me is to want what i want
The reduction in my anxiety and PTSD symptoms that is coming from taking my SSRI is coming along with a sadness for my younger self that never got to experience this. It's a feeling of loss for a me that never got to be.
So much of me that I thought was just my own personality was actually anxiety or trauma responses to my harsh conditions. They were just survival mechanisms. They were justifications made aloud by my most terrified self to an unhearing and cruel world that wasn't capable of letting the real me exist. And so I had to contort into something, anything that would do.
I remember deciding in 8th grade that I would ditch my elementary and middle school friends and become friends with all of the cool kids in high school. "Cool kids". I chose who I wanted to be friends with solely on criteria that I would not consider now. I wanted to be friends because of how successful and smart and popular you were. That's why I became friends with them, and now they are all doctors and own homes and are highly successful people. It's because I purposely weaseled my way into that friend group as opposed to genuinely acquainting myself with people who I liked. I was trying to assimilate into what I thought would be the in-group most likely to shield me from being thought of as less-than. I didn't even experience the sensation of genuinely "liking" at all. My sensitivity to my true internal sensations of like and dislike were so suppressed, so dissociated, such that what I erroneously thought was "liking", was in actuality, an affinity towards situations that minimized my feelings of intense and painful shame.
I feel now a peculiar combination of bitter grief for the little Ben who never got to move through life as themself, and a serious resolve to start doing that now. It's a sadness for the state of the world that allows a child or a young person to experience such spiritual injustice as the inability to be in one's truth, to exist as one comes. It's also a sense of relief, that I've come to a point, through such agonizing trial and error, frenzied, desperate attempts to remedy the discomfort in my own skin that I refused to accept.
O God, it feels like I am the first gay and Korean person to have ever existed, and I am living life for the first time, with no one to tell me who to be, no one to tell me what to do. I am no more capable of living a life well lived than the infant who emerges from the warm before. Yet as the child born has no choice but to open his mouth and suck in the cold, dry air to pierce through the amniotic boundary and become a member of the world, to assert himself in the universe as something that is now fully alive, I too must occupy the real space in the world that I do, and say what I need to say, and be who I need to be, who is who I am.
To ask who am I? Is that not the most noble question to ask? One that can never be truly answered? A question that is a trick, a sly way to keep revealing a new corner just as you round the first one, expecting something to emerge, and instead shown with that which defies expectation.
Am I too self-obsessed? Might my time be better spent focusing on something other than myself? These concerns are countered by the intoxicating, complex feeling of a curiosity that is assuaged. What's a better feeling than to piece together the puzzle that is me? Sometimes, the relief of doing so is so powerful that I want to scream, and cry. And at the same time, delightful. Like peeling off your shoes after a long day. Massaging your toes with your own hands. You are the provider of your own comfort and healing. I am whole when I am with me.
I think these remaining concerns of being "too self-obsessed" are in fact, survival responses to trauma as well. The excessive concern about being "a good person" is another thing that I used to mistake as an inherent part of my identity, but were actually masks I adopted in order to protect myself from the imagined threat of rejection, hatred, dehumanization, that could result from me not being morally perfect. I thought I was just naturally selfless and giving and understanding. In reality, I am selfless but also selfish. I am giving and also a taker. I am understanding and also dismissive. I am capable of being all these things, and they are not indicative of who I am, because who I am gets to be decided by me. I get to choose who I am, and if that makes me self-obsessed, then it's a descriptor I must accept.
The me that I want to be, in the sense of the me that is already here, that I already am, that merely needs to be uncovered, rather than arrived at, is the me that is led my values and my desires. I think. Well, maybe "led" is the wrong word. In IFS, there's a useful concept of the "Self", which is similar to the "neutral observer" of Zen meditation, both of which I like as a way of conceptualizing the "me" that is "leading". However, it's almost as if the "leadership" is nonetheless guided by a certain set of principles, or tendencies, for how to live life, that are emergent, and not prescribed, but rather plotlines of my life I can only draw patterns from in hindsight. And one of those principles seems to be that of exploring my true, genuine desires.
What is a desire? What does it feel like to want something?
When I recall the earliest times I've had this feeling, it's hard for me to even answer, because the feeling had always come with the counterpoint, the sister feeling of a want-denied. To want felt like a pitiful, sad hope, because of the deeper knowing that the want would not be realized. I think, for most of my life, I thought that this is what it meant to want something. To be disappointed.
In May of 2011, I was in my senior year of high school and I had just come out of the closet. It's hard to describe the high of this experience, but you can imagine what it's like, when you have spent an entire childhood and adolescence denying any sort of sexuality to yourself and then to have that released all in the second semester of high school after you had already gotten into college and had a future in the big city all set up for you, combined with teenage bravado and hormones. It was an exhilarating confidence that bled straight into the first semester of college later that year.
Until I started college, the very few times I encountered an openly gay or queer person in real life was experienced with fear or distance. Obviously this made sense since I was still closeted, but it was also just a fact that the gay people in Orange County were weird and boring and ugly. In college, for the first time in my life, I was in an environment where there were too many cool, hot, and interesting gay people my age for me to count. It was this, the introduction into a social world that WAS queer, that was the true liminal moment for me, as opposed to the first time I came out to someone in my hometown. Being gay inside of a gay world made me gay.
I met a classmate through the whirlwind of this aforementioned gay social world, I mean, out of the dozens and dozens of gay freshmen we were all meeting, he was one of many, but I thought he was so good-looking from the moment I met him. I remember thinking he looked like Ryan Reynolds, but if Ryan Reynolds was a hippie.
This classmate's name was Ian Davies, and for the first time in my life, and to this day one of the few times in my life, I felt what I now know was the actual feeling of desire, which felt completely different from the past feeling of want-disappointment which I had mistaken for desire, because this, the actual feeling of desire, was an almost quiet, completely resolute and matter-of-fact sensation of inevitability.
It was the feeling that: I want this person, and I am going to have this person. It was an internal knowledge that felt so true, such that its certainty brought comfort, as opposed to the fear of rejection.
For the first time in my life, a dimension of who I am became visible. One that I had not seen before. It was an answer to the question of who am I, made through another. It was through my desire to be with another, that a part of me was revealed. Through Ian, in that moment, and from then on, a core principle of how I must live would begin to be revealed.
Beneath all of the layers of me I've mistaken for who I am, who I am drawn to, who I put my love into, who I choose, defines me. To answer the question of who I am, I merely need to look to who is with me.
I am the first gay and Korean person to have ever existed but through the sacred magic of desiring, I am made.
To write the story of me means to know that what I want to come into existence will do so and it is to know that my truth lies inside of my dreams.
It is to know that a me that wants is not self-obsessed or selfish, but is good for the world, O God.
It is to know that through wanting, I create me, and that me is true and good.