I'm fucking exhausted. It's not just the sickness thing, although that's a huge part of it. Imagine feeling at your absolute lowest, and a doctor tells you that you will never feel like this again if you remove one specific thing from your life. You remove that specific thing, and it doesn't work. You feel at your worst time and time again, and it doesn't seem to stop. You'd feel betrayed, wouldn't you?
I know medical science doesn't know everything, and that there are many mysteries that may never get solved. But I'm hurting. I feel betrayed. I trusted them with this thing, and they just take a look at me, go whoopsy, and let's move on.
I can't move on. There's so much more going on in my life right now, and I usually tell you everything. There are a few things I've been holding back on. Two, to be specific. One of them I will never tell you about. The other? I almost decided to write about that tonight. But it's unspeakable, even for me. I can't. Not yet, at least.
It took all my ability to not cry on my drive home from work. That's very unusual for me because up until maybe five years ago, I thought I'd lost the ability to cry. The last time I cried was when I was a child.
It was pretty easy to stop me back then. My stepfather gave me a sharp crack across the face and said, "Boys don't cry." And he stared at me, like he was imposing his will on me. And he was.
Much to my surprise I found myself crying when my mom died. I cried when my dad died. I cried when my grandparents died. And now it seems like it's in my soul again. I can watch something sad or harrowing, and I can feel my eyes tear up. But to suddenly need to cry while I was driving? That was out of the fucking blue for me. And then for me to force myself not to cry? It was like feeling that slap across the face again from across the decades. I felt chastised.
Men are told they have to be a certain way, or they're not men. For the record, I recognize that this is the same for women and nonbinary people, too, but I can only speak of my own personal experience. The indoctrination begins almost at birth when they give you a blue blanket and talk about how one day all the ladies will swoon at your feet. That's taking a lot for granted. Hell, these days it starts with the gender reveal. Gotta have your blue smoke or your pink balloons or what have you, or you think you're not going to be a caring parent.
We focus too much on details. Can't we just be happy that we have a healthy baby? We have to foist gender norms on them before they even know what the earth's air tastes like?
Be a man. Love sports. Fuck all the girls. It's OK if they're not on the same page with you. Bully them until they'll put your dick in their mouth. It's consensual that way. But even if you go beyond that, it's OK. It's just boys roughhousing. Besides, she shouldn't have dressed that way. Gives men all sorts of ideas . . .
But you'd better want your dick in that woman's mouth. If you like other men? You're not a man.
I did not like all the kinds of things men are supposed to like. I always found comfort in books and playing with my toys. Making up my own stories. Getting lost in my thoughts. But I also had my cousin, Erik, so I was able to pretend to like that other stuff by modeling myself after him. It kept my stepfather off my back, and he was the one who wanted me to be a man.
It was odd. My father accepted my ways as manly, or at least boyish, and he didn't seem concerned with beating the shit out of me so I'd fit some kind of mold. Dad was always easy-going, and he often found it was more important to be funny than anything else, sometimes to his own detriment. I'll bet that sounds pretty familiar to a lot of people who know what I value more than most things, sometimes to my own detriment.
Yet despite that, my stepfather was the stronger influence because he had boots on the ground at all times. And I don't like admitting this part much, but some of the blame does go to my grandfather. He wanted to make sure I was a man who liked manly things. He didn't want to beat me into it, but he shamed me often. He'd take me out to ballgames, which I found as an adult weren't that bad, especially if you had whiskey with you. He got me a subscription to Playboy when I turned 18, I think because he was afraid I was gay. Gramps, too, used to say, "Boys don't cry."
I think I would have been a lot better off if my stepfather had accidentally killed me during a beating. I wouldn't have grown up into this thing that feels like the world is slipping away constantly, and I'm losing all of my battles, and I'm not even having fun making up my own stories anymore, and that was the one thing that kept me alive and sane when I was a kid.
I've spent my life trying to just get by. I was advised as a very young boy that it was best to bottle your shit up. Keep bottling it up until it becomes unbearable, then take it out on some poor prick. His offense doesn't have to be that bad, just enough to break the camel's back. And when it's done, go back to bottling it up until next time. I do bottle a lot of things up. I completely get it when Bruce Banner says, "I'm always angry." Because I fucking am. The world is unfair. I've known that longer than most people I grew up with. But as an adult I've always fought for the world to be fair. For people to stop taking advantage of others. Every time you see me rant and rave about the dipshits and fuckfaces taking advantage of us all, that's me trying to bring some balance to the world. I can't make the changes. I can only make people aware. If enough of us are aware, maybe we can gang up on the bastards.
But I can't lash out. I can't take it out on some poor prick. Because I know what I'm like when the rage has taken me over. Instead I self-immolate. I take it out on myself, because if I took it out on someone else, I'm certain I would go to prison for a very long time, and rightfully so.
And that's a man's greatest achievement, isn't it? Destroy yourself before someone else has the chance to. As much as I tried to avoid the manly lessons, I adopted the most horrifying one of them all.
Doesn't it say something that the manliest man of my youth, Arnold Swarzenegger, is on a mission to help young men find real lessons instead of the toxic bullshit that's been handed down for centuries?
I listen to him. I try. I want to be a better person, but holy fuck, I got a raw deal nearly from the start. There's shit in the DNA of my mind that will never come out, no matter how much I twist and turn the knot. I don't think Alexander the Great could cut this fucking thing.
We do so much damage to our children in the name of wanting them to be good people that we will never understand our own destructive natures. Every time I see some asshole saying something stupid on TV or, more likely, in the House of Representatives, I remind myself that they were children once. That someone visited this horror on them, and they have no idea how bad their problem is. They think they're normal. They think it's OK to boobytrap the Rio Grande, and when some kid gets hurt or even killed, fuck 'em. Because they're not Americans, dammit. Only Americans are people.
I think I've worn myself out. I'm going to post one more GF before my hiatus. It will probably be on Thursday, and I'm going to try to not be my own subject. It seems like every time I write something these days it's about me and my problems. I did some good tonight. I no longer feel the despair I started with. I feel like I made a few good points to myself, things to work on. But something's got to give. I can't see myself continuing like this for another ten, twenty, thirty years. I hope I'll find a way to shed this thing (and the two others I won't mention). It would be nice to make it to 50 without burning out like a supernova.
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