jonathanox

thoughts on being broken

so this past week i came upon someone who shared with me thoughts and feelings about her past. she had grown up with an imaginary older brother with the hopes of him swooping in one day and saving her from a tumultuous childhood. then one day when she was twelve she found out she actually did have an older brother and went through a roller coaster of emotions trying to decide what role he was to play in her life. before meeting him she imagined him to be like her imaginary friend, but the closer she got to meeting actuality, the more she realized it wasn’t really his role to save or protect her and she had no right projecting that onto him. she had a deep seeded desire to take on that role herself with the rest of her siblings and protect them from whatever collective past they shared and somehow keep them from falling apart, but she realized even within herself she didn’t have the strength to do that on her own. even now as an adult she struggles with how she will deal with that from day to day.

this hit me hard. most of my life i’ve had this desire to protect family. not only my own, but also that of others. my problems comes when i don’t know where to begin. in my own life i don’t know how to form a greater bond with my parents. i don’t know how to call them up on the phone and just say “hi.” part of me wishes we could tell each other anything without judgement, but another part of me shows the reality of how different and polarized we are. how does a liberal, queer son enter the house of a conservative, religious parent without causing bombs to go off?

i try to enter their space with an open mind. i tell myself they have chosen this way of life and they are happy with it so it’s not my job to try and change them. i accept the fact they think and act differently than i do. the problem comes when my queerness tells them i am destined for hell. they believe wholeheartedly i am on the wrong path and it is their duty to inform me of this. if they were to neglect this fact, they would be ignoring their god-given duty as parents to protect their children from evil. so this forces me to step back from them and hide my life since i am agreeing to disagree have nothing to say in return to them but, “i still love you.”

they still love me too, i know this. we just have different ideas of love. while the distance we have created between us in our life hurts deeply, i know we both still hold out with the hope that one day we will be able to heal the brokenness between us. that may be a long time in coming, but at least that love is there between us and we haven’t burned that bridge. 

i am from…

“i am from a universe full of different experiences— cold michigan winters, dry new mexico summers and sweaty thailand afternoons.

i am from vanilla candles, dried sage and incense.

i am from church bells on a sunday morning, my father’s voice from the pulpit and my mother’s fingers on the organ keys.

i am from that shady place under the tree where i learned how to loose myself in books, images and imagination.

i am from the harmonious melodies of strong women with a voice— amy ray and emily saliers, the butchies, ani difranco, melissa etheridge, sara macclaughlan, tegan and sara.

i am from a queer, bizarre family of confident and confused persons seemingly unattached to the familiar, but connected through their differences.”

-written by myself in an exercise during an icebreaker for my job training.

i am not myself these days

“i had spent so much of my time growing up being afraid of being either too cool or too uncool. fear eventually took over and became my default emotion. if i tried to be cool, i was afraid of disappointing my teachers and parents. if i stuck with the nerd kids, i had a nagging fear that i was missing out on something. i learned to become exactly what whomever i was with at the time expected me to be. mostly i was afraid that if i didn’t become what they wanted, then they would realize what i really was… it was an exhausting dance.” —i am not myself these days, josh kilmer

today i went to the central seattle library and drowned myself in the queer section. i ended up picking out four different books with intriguing titles. the riddle of gender: science, activism and transgender rights. reclaiming sodom. the mythology of transgression: homosexuality as metaphor. i am not myself these days; a memoir. the last book i ended up getting as a bit of light reading in between the more serious topics in the previous three. the quote above comes from the end of the second chapter of said book and i was thinking to myself, “YES! this is what i’ve felt for YEARS!”

i grew up being so afraid of disappointing those in authority that i learned how to meld with those to get by since i wasn’t yet able to control the choices in my own life. it was only when i reached college and moved out on my own that i was able to finally come into myself and express the suppression that had been building up for years. i’m not saying my upbringing was negative to my development, in fact, i think it helped me in so many ways to be a more intellectual explorer of the human condition than if i had grown up feeling like i were able to comfortably live the way i imagined in my head.

while i’ve come a long way and experienced more than my wide-eyed eighteen year old self could imagine, i still feel that way deep down inside. everything is still just as new and confusing as ever, but in some ways that’s the way i want it to stay. i want to continue pushing the boundary— peeking behind the next open door looking for an answer to the organized chaos of life, but reveling in the beauty of comfortable confusion.

<3

(Source: )