Questioning Myself

You're a man.

You're a straight man.

This is all just circumstance, just chance.

You've done a lot, yes, but you can still come back from the edge.

Don't let him have that.

Don't let him have you like that.

Don't you have any pride?

What kind of man are you?

Every single one of those statements is false. False because they're untrue. False because they're not what I want.

Right now I'm more comfortable and happy than I've ever been before, and maybe because of that some small and broken part of myself can't help but feel like the other shoe is bound to drop.

And when it does I'll wind up back in my old life and my old body and I'll need some kind of an excuse for what I did. I'll need to be able to say, even if only to myself, that there were lines that I didn't cross and so I have not fundamentally changed.

Being gay came with such a panic when I was a kid. So many people thinking that it was an utterly negative thing, an insult more than anything else. And though my own feelings on the matter were progressive as far as societies standards at the time were concerned, they were still miles away from where we wound up.

So there is a part of me that is still very uncomfortable at the idea of being gay. I don't like that part of me, but it is real. And as crazy as all that sounds right now, it's true.

The fact is that right now everything I do with Rachel falls under that classification, if you want to make that distinction. And since I have no intention of stopping that, nor do I see any problem with it, I know that I am absolutely a hypocrite.

Still I have these feelings, these fears. And still I know where they come from.

I hate that they did this to me, that they made me like this. I hate them and god I don't wish **** on many people, but I wish it on them.

I want to spit in the face of every weak person who was so afraid of their own sexuality that they dressed up the perfectly normal desires of people as something to regard as the worst kind of sin. I want to grab them by the ears and pull them close and scream, an inch away from their face, that they were so terrified of their own sexuality that they punished others for theirs. I want to drag them down and show them a fraction of what I've felt and tell them, cradling them in the aftermath, that if they just opened themselves up they'd be a whole lot happier.

But maybe that's a lesson I need to learn myself first, even now.

Because I've had fun. I've even come close to accepting the fact that I am far different than I'd always believed myself to be. Begun to realize that I too could open myself up to new experiences, could let go and that being free would be better than binding myself with chains to the idea of what I ought to be, rather than the reality of what I really want.

And if I take that lesson to heart, I know that the panicky little voice in my head really doesn't have any power.

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