Feed Me Truth

A little calmed down

2006-07-11T04:50:00.000+04:00

Ok, I've had all day to cool off and I'm not nearly so pissed. As I said, I'm not really an angry person, and along with that goes the fact that I can't stay angry for long. I read my last post and my eyelids start smoking from the heat of it... guess I was really pissed.

I am still not ready to see anyone in my family(most of all my dad and older brother) so I am hanging out here at the library until they kick me out, then I'll drive around until everyone is asleep before going home. I'm trying to see that my family is doing this out of love, but I keep feeling that when they look at me all they see is the gay, as if that is the most important part. In the end it will work out, I hope. If it doesn't, well, I'll be at college in less than three months. I just have to keep from doing something self-destructive just to hurt them. Deep breaths, Jason, deep breaths.

I'm pissed, and I don't mean drunk

2006-07-10T21:34:00.000+04:00

First of all, thanks all people who have left comments... They mean a ton and are really encouraging. I appreciate all of them.

I am not an angry person. No, really, I'm not. People would try to piss me off at school but they never could. The one time they did see me get pissed was when they weren't even trying: I went to the bathroom and came back to find that a kid had dug around in my books and pulled out my journal. I almost killed him right then and there. The only thing that makes me really angry is an invasion of my privacy. Today, I found out it was majorly breached, in more ways than one.

My dad told me he wanted to have a talk with me. Fine. I didn't really want to talk to him because the only time he ever wants to talk with me is when he has something to say about my sexuality, but I figure that since he is my father, I should talk to him.

We make the obligatory smalltalk(you know, where we talk about pointless stuff until I want to scream) and he says something along the lines of, "I was searching through the glovebox of your truck and I found something." Shit. That is my only place to keep anything private: right now I am living in a one bedroom apartment with my dad and brother. He had found my journal and the first entry just happened to be basically what I talked about in this post, except much more raw. He of course saw nothing wrong with it("As a father it would have been irresponsable of me to put it down once I had read the first line"). He then went on to say that he had talked to my older brother to see if I had had any conversations with him(which I had) and see what I said.

Am I not supposed to be pissed here? He didn't understand why I refused to look at him when I see that basically anytime I let out what is in my heart and head he automatically requisitions it. And it gets worse. He wants me to go to a Christian therapist that he picked out who will report everything I say to him. Fuck no. I'm not gonna pour out all my deepest secrets(like the fact that I think Adrian Grenier is a total hottie) just so they can be reiterated to my parents.

In an attempt to perform what I call Parental-psycho-fucknalasis my dad asks me "Tell me who you are" and I tell him point blank i am not playing that game where he basically uses everything I say to tell me how fucked up I am and how much help I need. Then of course he throws out that origonal line, "We only do this because we love you." Bull. Since when does love demand that someone else change? I show people I love them by listening to them and discovering what their passion is and spending time with them. My parents show love by trying to turn me straight. They have never once asked me what my passion is. They don't ask about my dreams and aspirations. The only time my dad has ever wanted to do something with just me it was so we could talk about the fact that I am a fucking fag. They say they want to get to know me but that isn't true, otherwise they would focus on something other than the fact that guys make me horny.

What right does my dad have to even bring up my sexuality? He is the one who was too much of a fucking pussy to even have the sex talk with me(ooh, is that some of my latent anger towards my father that caused me to be a fag?). They say that we all failed to talk in this last year(in which they knew I liked guys but we never talked about it). Bull. They made one attempt to talk to me about it. It seems to me that love doesn't give up that easily. The people I care about know I love them, because I have always been there for them. Where were my parents when I was beat up for being American? Where were they when I was spit on because I was white? Where were they when I sat in school every day, carving bloody shapes into my arm with a pencil. Where were they when I didn't have a knife, so I ripped a nickel-sized chunk of flesh out of my hand with my fingernails? All those times when it should have been obvious that something was wrong, they weren't there. Apparantly those things weren't important enough for them to get to know me, to find out what was wrong. I guess I have to get off on guys fucking before that happens.

I have to go now, I left my dad sitting at the park because I wasn't willing to ride home with him, and I am writing this at the library. My time is up and someone is waiting behind me.

The cruelest of cruelties

2006-07-01T22:12:00.000+04:00

I must seem like the most confused, undecisive person on this planet. A week ago I was so totally ready to spend the rest of my life attracted to guys, for better or for worse. I feel like I'm on some kind of pendulum that is going faster and faster: it used to take weeks or even months for it to go from one side to the other now it seems to take only days or even hours. Gaah!

I can deal with my older brother thinking that I had given up in trying to become straight: he has no inkling of what I am dealing with and what I have gone through because he has never dealt with it. But what if I met someone(in real life... sorry to all my internet peeps but it just isn't the same) who was dealing with the same things I am? I read what people have to say online and it is easy for me to only see the things I want to see: I find myself reading almost exclusively things written by Christians who are gay. Sometimes I see myself easily accepting what people who I agree with(gay Christians) have to say while discounting the other(ex-gay) side. I have to ask myself, am I doing this because God has given me discernment or because I am happy where I am now, and don't want to change?

The reason all these questions are popping up right now is that yesterday I got to talking with someone I had hung out with a few times. We talked about God and things in his past and different stuff and something he kept saying really struck me. He said, "I have basically gone through everything a guy can go through." To me this either made him an idiot who didn't realize that homosexuality was something some guys deal with, or he had actually gone through it. He didn't seem like an idiot and he said that phrase enough times that it seemed like he was trying to tell me without telling me... i.e. it was something I would only notice if I was looking out for it.

We start talking about trust and then for a while I get real silent and he asks why. I tell him that I am deciding whether or not I can trust him. So finally I realize that besides the possibility of him telling others(which didn't seem very likely) the only thing I could lose by telling him was our friendship, which was new and therefore easy to risk.

So in my very blunt, direct way(sarcasm here) I tell him, "Well, I am not really attracted to girls." If he hadn't got what I was saying or was like "what do you mean?" I think I would have screamed, or possibly my head would have exploded. There is nothing worse(and I have had this happen) then telling someone one of the hardest things in the world and them not getting it. I think my biggest fear is telling someone I am gay and them thinking I am joking.

His response was something along the line of, "Yeah, I used to be attracted to gusy too." Forgive me for saying this, but at this point I was so happy I about creamed my pants. Finally, a real person who knew what I was going through. Woohoo! But part of his phrase struck me, used to??? When I had hoped to meet a Christian who knew what I was dealing with, I always assumed that being gay was part of the deal. Grr.

So we had a really good talk(which my next post will be all about) but the end result is that, gosh dang it, he sparked something in me that I thought was long gone. Something that I remember tearing my life apart. Sometimes I wonder how cruel God can be, playing all these tricks on me. What he gave me is much more sinister than shame or self-hatred. He gave me Hope.

Screw hope. I was happy with who I was.

Expectations

2006-06-29T23:52:00.000+04:00

Right now I am feeling much more stable than I was yesterday. I can't let every little bump in my path upset me this much... although for me my brother is a big bump. Because I love my brother so much I haven't set any boundaries and I take everything he says to heart; I trust him implicitly and tend to assume that he is right and that I am in the wrong.

My brother is an intense person; he focusses on his ministry and not much else, anything that doesn't align with that is unimportant. While it makes him a great minister it can make him lousy at relationships. Despite our differences, I know he is a man of God, and has gone through a lot to get there. Yesterday I realized that he expects everyone to come to the same conclusions he has, to reach where he is at without the intervening years of experience. I cannot and will not let those expectations be placed on me; I am where I am at today because God has brought me here, if God wants me to come to the conclusions my brother is at He will bring me there. My job is to follow follow God, not to "become" anything.

Expectations have nearly torn me apart before and I won't let it happen again. No man can say where God will take me and no one has a right to. The only expectation I will live up to is seeking God first in all things. In the end He makes the decisions, not me, my brother or anyone else. If I am doing what I think God wants then I won't beat myself up when I make a mistake. If God wants me to become straight then He will bring me to the place where I believe that to be His will. Is self-deception possible? Yes, but I will not let it force me into inaction.

Does any of this clear up any confusion for me? Not really, but it calms the turmoil in my heart. I can sleep easy knowing that God won't lead me wrong.

More fragile than I thought...

2006-06-28T20:39:00.000+04:00

I haven't written in awhile, I know. I've just made a move halfway across the world and had to say farewell to many people forever. I'm kind of in limbo right now, staying in a town I once lived in, but it isn't and will never be my home. In two and a half months I am off to university and, even though I like seeing my family and old friends, I can't wait.

Right now I am in a bit of a funk. The past two years, and especially the past six months have been all about coming to terms with who I am. These months have been the happest, ever. For the first time I bared my soul and allowed myself to feel. When someone said they loved me I felt it inside of me, instead of just thinking, "Yeah, right. Not if they knew." When someone hugged me instead of recoiling at their touch because I was unclean, I hugged them back, thinking that maybe, just maybe I deserved to be loved. I actually had some real conversations with my parents. I showed them my heart, who I really was and even though they may disagree my relationship with them is better than ever. And best of all, I really discovered who God was. I discovered that I don't need to change for him to love me. I can be gay and Christian. It was like all my efforts to change were preventing him from working in me. Now I feel like all of that is slipping away.

When I arrived here in the US, I was so sure of myself. I could say I was gay and not cringe. The other night I had a long talk with my older brother. I love him so much. He is a real man of God and has always been there for me. So we are talking and he wants to know what's up with me, and I tell him(he already knew I was "struggling with homosexuality(he was the first I had told)") that I have accepted the fact that I am gay and may never change. First of all he made sure I knew that he loved me. Than he responds, in his most loving manner(he can be fairly blunt at times and tends to steamroll the opposition), saying that it seems like I've given up because I am afraid of failing. He talked a bit about being decieved and says I am putting myself in bondage, because if I choose to be gay and celibate(I am not sure what I believe about that yet) that I will be fighting it my whole life and will be putting myself in bondage to homosexuality. I try to explain that having my life revolve around homosexuality by trying to get rid of it is bondage but he doesn't understand. He goes on to use a cancer analogy and says that if he had cancer wouldn't I want him to get treatment, even if the success rate was very low?

I tried to explain what I felt, what has happened to me over the last six months but I just can't get it across. It seems like all that is irrelevant. I am starting to wonder; is it? Was the last six months a lie? Was my conviction that I am doing the right thing really just deception? I don't know what to do. My brother said that the way I was last summer, when I was fighting it, is better. Last summer I hated myself. I looked in the mirror and wanted to throw up. I would lie in bed thinking about running a knife down my chest, then thrusting it in just below the sternum. Or maybe drawing it across my arms, and watching the blood well and begin to pour as my life seeps out of me in a crimson cascade. I've thought a lot about it. Last night I was looking at the knives, and wondering, is that it for me? I set the phone down beside me and prayed that God would send help, that someone, anyone would call. If he can do miracles why can't he make someone pick up the phone and rescue me? It seems like I am losing myself. Do I have to resign myself to a life of deception or a life of self-hatred? Should I just end it? I don't want to have to go back to the way I was, but if what I have gotten over the last six months is all a lie I don't want that either. I don't want any of it.

My Labels - Christian and gay

2006-06-10T15:18:00.000+04:00

These last two labels are the hardest to write about. I can't write about one without mentioning the other, so here they are:

Jason the gay Christian
I was in first grade when I began to realize that I wasn't the same as the other kids, but I didn't really think anything of it. As I grew older I found that most of my friends were girls. The other guys would talk about who they had a crush on, but I never had one. At least not on a girl. Even though I was too young to even know the word “gay” or all its connotations, I knew that I had to keep it a secret.

By eleven I had gotten the idea that there was something horribly wrong with me. The attitudes I saw in my small, Western town had made this abundantly clear to me. I tried to ignore it and, for the most part, I succeeded. Little realizing the damage I was doing to myself, I made sure to keep it hidden and act like the perfect child.

When i was twelve my family moved to the Middle East. At first life in the was an adventure. It was exciting and I loved the newness of it all. That lasted for about three months. Tensions ran high in our home as my older sister made sure that everyone knew how much she hated living there. My little brother followed suit. When I saw how stressed my parents were I didn't want to add to their burden, so I kept my dislike, and eventual hatred, of my new home to myself. This set me on a path of withdrawing from everybody. No one suspected that I wasn't a perfectly happy twelve year-old boy.

In reality I was extremely unhappy. I was at a British school where it seemed like I would never fit in. The teachers were mocking and overbearing. I remember a teacher shouting at me on my first day of class for making a joke, and being failed in assignments because my “presentation” was bad. Through three years and five different schools life just got worse. I was hated and attacked for being American, and even though my bruises faded, the pain and the loneliness only got worse. My attraction to other guys became stronger as time passed, and I hated myself because of it. I was so ashamed of myself; even looking in the mirror made me sick to my stomach. Sometimes the pain and the loneliness was too much and I would take pencils and carve in my arm till it bled. When the blood dried I would carve again.

Relief was nowhere in sight. Out of necessity I became numb: I turned off my emotions because they were too painful. Although it made life seem less painful, it cut me off from all the good emotions too. Joy. Happiness. Love. At this point I couldn't feel any of these. I couldn't make other people feel them either. My life was an empty shell, a human carapace with a void inside.

In the summer of 2003 I was vacationing in the States, staying in the little Western town I grew up in. One of my sister-in-laws came to me and asked whether I wanted to join a small group of Christian youth that she led. I declined; being forced to go to church once a week was bad enough. She asked again. I still refused. Insistent, she asked until I gave in. What the heck, I thought, if I don't like it I don't have to stay. I remember every detail of that first day.

I walked into the store-converted-church prepared to bolt if I didn't like it. No one noticed me; I stood unobtrusively in the corner while they, seventeen youth sitting in a circle around my sister-in-law on faded brown carpet, talked. Instead of listening I watched them. I looked at their faces and at how they interacted. All of them were smiling. One of them began talking and started crying. The others reached out and touched her. Those nearest hugged her tightly. A dam burst within me. All the emotions I had held at bay came flooding back. I wanted to go over and tell them my story, so I could be touched. So I could be hugged. So I could be loved. Instead I stayed in the shadows.

As I watched them with a wonder bordering on awe, I saw joy in the way they talked and moved and the expressions on their faces. It was such a contrast to the feelings of worthlessness, of self-hatred and shame that filled me. I wondered how they could feel that way. The people sitting in that circle weren't strangers: I had grown up with many of them. One was an orphan, another had a father in prison for murder and another was an illegal immigrant who knew she could be taken out of the country at any time. Most had similar stories, yet there they were, smiling. I couldn't remember the last time I had really smiled.

I spent the next couple of weeks becoming part of the group. When I talked to the other youth I discovered that all had one thing in common: the focus of their life was Jesus. Technically I knew who he was; I had grown up going to church and hearing stories from the Bible. But as they talked about him I discovered that, to them, he was more than someone who lived and died 2000 years ago. He was their reason for living. I knew that I had to see if this was real. If it was, I wanted it.

I started looking through the Bible(something I had usually avoided at all costs) and discovered something incredible. I am loved, or rather, God loves me. Although I had heard a lot of this before it had never really registered. I found passages that said things like “We love Him because He first loved us” or “Whether we are high above the sky or in the deepest ocean, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” If true, this was beyond amazing. How could God love me? I didn't even love myself. I looked back at some of the things I had done and wondered how anyone who knew everything about me could look on me with anything but revulsion. It says in the Bible that Jesus died for us, to save us. But did that really include me? My shame and self-hatred said no, but this book, the Bible, said otherwise.

This filled me with hope, but also with fear. I wanted to believe it was true, but what if it wasn't? I wasn't sure whether I was ready to risk it. But then I began to ask myself whether I could live the rest of my life this way: drowning alone in a sea of self-hatred.

Lying in my bed with tears streaming down my face I asked for help. Desperately hoping that this God was listening I told him that I needed him, that I couldn't live another moment the way I was. I was ready to do whatever it took to experience the love that I had read about, the love I saw in the lives of those around me. Something changed inside me and I began to feel different. I felt like I had been dragging around this enormous weight and someone had come and taken it away.

The rest of that summer was fantastic. My cry for help hadn't gone unanswered and I found a friend who loved me unconditionally. I loved quiet times of reading my Bible and talking to God, and I loved hanging out with the other youth. I learned more about what the Bible calls sin, things that are wrong in God's eyes, and decided to make sure not to do those things.

When I got back to the Middle East I was pumped: my life had changed radically over the summer and I thought everything would be perfect. It wasn't. After a couple months life got harder again. School was tough and I was becoming more attracted to guys. I would look at the Bible and see verses that spoke against homosexuality and wonder what it meant for me. "Christian" and "gay" seemed to be two mutually exclusive words. I started praying to God to make it go away. He didn't. I thought that if I only prayed harder things would change. They didn't.

For the next two and a half I felt like there were these forces tearing me apart. I had found God, and I knew that the love I had felt from him was real, yet how could he make me gay if it was a sin? I struggled so hard. Every time I messed up, whether it was looking at pornography or lusting or even just looking at a guy and thinking “he's cute” I would feel horrible and dirty. I started hating myself again because I couldn't change. Life became a perpetual series of ups and downs. I would have “gay thoughts” and go into a depression because I had “failed” at changing. Obviously I hadn't prayed hard enough. Then I would ask God to forgive me and feel like this time I could really make it. Then I would mess up again. Sometimes I spent hours begging God to change me.

I began wondering how a God who loved me, one whose love that I experienced, could let me be like this. It was like he made this mold that I was supposed to fit, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't.

About six months ago I reached the lowest low of my life. It was the last night of a four day youth conference and I felt like I was being torn apart. I had prayed for God to make me straight, but he didn't. Everything I had seen told me that being gay and being Christian were incompatible. I thought that either God was mocking me, giving me a desire to serve him while making it impossible, or that he was deaf to my cries. I begged for a sign that he heard my prayers, but none came.

From that point on I turned my back on God. I felt like I had done everything, like I had fulfilled my side of the bargain, but he didn't make me straight. It was like I gave him my heart, and he broke it into pieces. About a month passed and life was just horrible. My life felt emptier than ever before but I refused to go back to a God who acted to cruelly.

Then one night I lay in my bed miserable and crying and the most amazing realization of my life seemed to seep over me: God loves me. Period. Everything else in my life, including being gay, is secondary. I had felt like a failure because I had been judging myself, not because God had. Being gay had nothing to do with God's love for me, and nothing to do with how much I could love him. By hating myself for being gay I had stopped feeling God's love for me, and replaced it with some supposed condemnation.

I don't know where my life is headed, and I'm not betting on ever being straight. Despite that, I stand now more assured then ever of God's boundless love for me. For me, the words "Christian" and "gay" are no longer mutually exclusive.

My Labels - polyglot

2006-06-09T15:16:00.000+04:00

So, here I am: a white American third culture kid, ready to take on some more labels.

Jason the Polyglot:
Ok, I call myself a polyglot more out of pride than anything else. A more accurate term is tri(ish)lingual(English, Arabic and some Latin) with a smattering of other languages thrown in. I spent time learning Arabic(and eventually Latin) and picked up phrases of other languages. Now I kind of have a "love affair" with languages; I love learning new phrases and can spend hours looking up obscure grammatical rules. Not much else to say here, except this only made me even less “American” culture-wise.

My Labels - white, American and TCK

2006-06-06T23:57:00.000+04:00

Jason the White Boy:
I am white. Not much to say there except that I can't dance and I like rock music. Incidentally, at about the same time that I made my first appearance as a white person(well, more red than white) I also became:

Jason the American:
I am American. Or, to be more precise, I was born in America. Most of my first 12 years were spent in a small Western town. I remember doing "American" things like celebrating the Fourth of July, eating hot-dogs and singing the national anthem(which, as I discovered recently, is not God Bless America. I should be ashamed that a Canadian had to tell me). That, along with always supporting the Republican party, never questioning the government, going to church on Sundays and making sure our lawn was well-manicured seems to be what being an American is all about.

Oh, and our lawn really wasn't all that well manicured.
We had a really big yard
I didn't like mowing.
Neither did my siblings.

So that's what being an American was to me. Of course it is inaccurate, incomplete, incongruous and any other “in” word you can think of, but when my life changed radically at the age of twelve, the memory of those hot-dogs and the melody of the song I happened to think of as my national anthem was about all I had left to make me “American.” In 2000, I moved to the Middle East, and I don't mean Missouri. This led to a dramatic makeover and my new appearance as:

Jason the TCK:
Life there(which for now is “here”) was different from anything I had ever known. It involved lots of changes and being “American” came to mean that I had a passport that said “US Department of something” on it. Oh, it also meant I was disliked. For those of you who may not now, being a timid little white American boy in an Arab country when the label “American” was associated with “infidel,” “imperialist” and “Israeli supporter” is not a good thing. I had bruises to prove it. Fortunately I never got any bones broken.

After tensions calmed down and bruises healed I became part of a culture that was neither American nor Arab. My friends, neighbors and classmates were from over 40 countries. I absorbed some customs and lost others. I learned new meanings for old words such as “respect” and discovered that some people actually considered their aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents as close family; close enough to share a home with them. All in all I changed. My passport still said “American” but my heart didn't. I could claim no culture as my own and later learned the label to describe me: Third Culture Kid.

My Labels - an introduction to me

2006-06-06T23:55:00.000+04:00

I always have trouble when people ask me to describe myself. Do they want my current state of mind? What about what I am feeling? Do they want my past? My goals for the future? Are they really ready to listen, or do they just want some nice easy labels so they can make snap judgments?

For those who like the labels here they are: I am white. I am an American. I am a Third Culture Kid. I am a polyglot. I am Christian. I am gay.

If these six labels are enough to tell you all you need to know about me then fine, stop reading. If not, I hope that my story will show you a small part of who I am. As I have grown and changed most of my labels stayed the same, yet their meanings change daily. I have struggled against most of these labels, except perhaps being white. There is no denying it. I am whiter than wonder bread.

In the following posts I will attempt to explain myself beyond these labels.