#I bet whitney houston knew so many gay men when she was alive | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jack-jupiter · 7 years ago

Text

I was twenty, the first time I hurt someone. I was coming out of the mall, clutching a bag of comicbooks, when I heard my least favorite word thrown at me, like a knive in my back. “Psh. Fruitcake.” I stopped on the sidewalk, but I didn’t dare turn around. I hate using the word “thug”. As a black man, it hurts my spirit. The word crawls, mettallic, over my skin. It gives me goosebumps. But that’s what they were. Not quite “fresh” from high school, but not yet seasoned in life. Twenty year olds, like me, but they wore the clothes of the social elite, the watchdogs of performative masculinity. They noticed that I had froze. And just when I was about to continue on and cross, the same voice cackled. “Nigga, I bet when you shit, fruit loops come out!” My ears began to ring. I became hot. In my homosexual hyperviligance, I tuned into my surroundings. There were two families sitting at nearby tables, watching, not intervening. And why would they? Again, I froze. I was crushing the binding to my new purchases. Anger feels like sleeper pods that were planted throughout your body, suddenly all coming alive, at once. I was losing control of myself. So what did I do? I disassociated. I hovered over my body, feeling nothing, dreaming, and in that dream-like haze, I watched my body turn around.... "What?” he shouted. I don’t remember how I got on top of him. In my astral state, it took me a while to register what was truly going on. But I was breaking his jaw open with the edge of fist, until finally it shattered into three pieces. I don’t know if it was shock that kept his friend at bay, but when my body had finished mashing his disfigured face into spittle, I kept his head forced on the cement with my wet hand and went to town on his ribs -- pounding, pounding, pounding -- waiting for something to break beneath me, to shatter, when the security guard pulled me off. That’s when I learned about the three pieces. He would have to get his jaw wired back together, just like my aunt had. The security guard was talking and I was compliant, but I was still dreaming, wondering if this made me as bad as my uncle, because the feeling of bones breaking beneath my knuckles felt too good. It was too satisfying. I had never harmed someone like that in my life. I was the nice child. The responsible child. The artist. My dad paid whatever was on the guard’s slip, and eerily, he seemed happy about it, like I had finally made a man out of myself. My whole childhood, I wasn’t allowed to cry. I couldn’t sing Whitney Houston songs without changing the pronouns. And when I came out, he tried to buy me a sex worker, to prove it was “just a phase”. (I was still a teenager.) So when even that proved futile, he resigned himself to the same sentence, the only damn sentence he would say if my homosexuality came up: “If you were really gay, you wouldn’t need my approval....” Just like that, I was crucified, and now here he was, jolly that I’d broken some kid’s jaw in three pieces. My father wasn’t a stranger to domestic abuse, just like my uncle. He’d struck my stepmother while she was still pregnant, and it wasn’t really that long ago. It made washing the blood off my knuckles feel weird, like I had joined some ancestral mass karma; but I quickly withdrew back to my apartment, back to dreaming. But then, a few years later, someone turned their back on me. I turned them around, forcing them to face me, then after a breath, I punched them in the mouth. I found out that though I had resigned myself to feeling unreal, my violent alter-ego deeply resented being ignored. I didn’t dislodge any teeth, to my comfort and dismay, but I was satisfied. They knew never to ignore me again. I was a rational person. It’s not like I go around pummeling strangers for nothing. I was just making things fair. It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I knew I had a problem. I was uncovering all my childhood trauma, and truly unearthing how deeply my childhood emotional neglect had affected my life. I had never had sex with a man. I could count how many men I’d kissed on one hand. I had slept through my own urges, because I didn’t trust anyone with my body. I found myself fantasizing about Paul, wishing to return to simpler times where my sexuality wasn’t so confusing. But the older I got, the more complex I discovered my psyche was. And what was worse, I was getting triggered everywhere I went. I was triggered when people ignored me. I was triggered when men tried to touch me. I was triggered by police brutality. I was triggered by homophobia. I was triggered by any racial discussions, and it was frightening how much rage ebbed beneath my disassociative reflex. When words would crawl over my skin, I could feel my alter-ego being aroused, waiting. So I created a room inside my mind, locked him inside, and became a “nice person” again. I nurtured my relationships, ignored my impulses, and steadied rocked boats like my life depended on it. I had grown wise among my peers for my self-control, but the more I ignored the anger writhing in that room, the more I lost my sense of self. I didn’t know that our anger provided clarity to definitively set boundaries, or that anger gave one agency to make changes in one’s life. I was too frightened to release my alter-ego. I feared what my new family of friends would think. It felt more righteous to suppress such raw, unpleasant emotions in favor of harmonizing the social equilibrium. But it did not help. The rage found its escape from behind my eyes. My gaze became hypnotic and arresting. “It’s like you’re looking into my soul,” they would say. But what I was looking for, were threats. I was projecting the very intensity that I was trying to mask. But if I wasn’t hypervigilant, someone might rouse the other me. So I pre-emptively scanned and scrutinized everyone in my aura, to protect them -- and myself -- from my own other self. When taking over my eyes didn’t work, I started getting tremors and digestive problems. It was as if there was a force inside, thrashing to get out, and sometimes I would forget the cause and wonder why. I tried to fix it with vitamins and exercise. I would soak in epsom salt tanks and get massages. But no matter what I did, everyone would still ask, “Why so tense? You’re usually so laidback.” And that was the secret to my laidback effervescence: it was devoid of polarity. My personality was a half-truth. But even with my alter-ego locked up in my body, there were still coincidences. The co-worker who took my parking spot would suddenly become ill. The restaurant with the racist waitress was forced to close down. Once, while a friend and I were walking toward a supermarket, in the dark, my shoulder collided with someone leaving. “Watch where yer goin’!” he shouted as he continued toward the parking lot. I took a deep breath and kept walking, and before my friend could make a snide comment, the man behind me had doubled over. He was vomiting. My friends began to catch on that bad things happen to people who mess with me, and honestly, I liked the rush. My shadow was protecting me, even within the confines of my mental prison. I had developed a spunky but righteously passive persona, so it gave me a newfound feeling of dignity. Until, I had an argument with my uncle, about Trump, on the internet. I let myself get upset but concluded that I should just block him. What should I expect from my white uncle? When I saw him next, I righteously apologized, but then we argued again, about the US colonizing Mexican land. I decided I just can’t talk about politics with my uncle. It would just end badly. Next time I saw him, I’d just tailor the conversation away from any landmines. But... I never saw him again. He died of a heart attack. To this day, I don’t believe I killed my uncle, but the thought frightened me beneath my bones. I wasn’t close to my uncle, but I still had regrets about our last encounter. I wished that things were different. It wasn’t until my grandma died that I really became afraid. I used to be my grandmother’s favorite, but I had put some distance between us. I was upset as an adult by how abusive and one-sided our relationship was. So I moved to Oakland and rarely visited. When she called for Thanksgiving, I didn’t call her back. I had gone to the woods, alone. Holidays brought up a lot of trauma for me, so I thought I was practicing self-care by putting myself first.... But Grandma ended up in the hospital, and later died that Christmas. I never got a chance to apologize. She was in a coma throughout her stay at the hospital. After her death, my tremors got worse. My panic attacks became more frequent, forcing me to find private corners to cry in. With my new awareness around mortality, I thought my body was failing me. I thought I was going to die. In a panic, I’d jog around my block, just to make sure my heart kept pumping. I could feel something thrashing inside of me but I’d forgotten what it was. I thought I was alone. So when I turned my jog into a brisk walk, I looked up at the sky, and I cursed God. I demanded answers. While I was walking in the city’s darkness, cursing under my breath, people would walk behind me, friends laughing and making jokes, interrupting my concentration. “Would y’all shut up,” I hissed silently. Then I heard a loud smack, and the rustling of cardboard. They had dropped their box of donuts all over the sidewalk. I kept walking. “So I’m not allowed to get angry, huh?” I seethed toward the night’s sky. “I’m just not allowed to feel anything?” Suddenly, a car’s tire bursted on the other side of the road. The pop echoed through the street like a gunshot. I flinched, then clenched my fists. It was unfair. What kind of life was this, if I’m not allowed to feel anything? I returned to my car, and I broke the handle... Now, I’d had enough. I stormed back down the street, re-entering the night. I was going to get answers. I shouted at the sky angrily. “And tell me in a way that I can understand!” I demanded. “Why is my life so terrible?” What happened next, I can’t really explain. It happened so fast, and there was no threshold for the event, just the clear blue streak of recognition. In that moment, I saw myself. The other me.... I was angry. But I was beautiful. And in that moment, for the first time in years, I felt whole. The door to the room must have come open, for within my psyche, I was confronted with the truth of who I was; and though it was wild, it was also comforting. His eyes were direct and piercing, just like mine. I knew that if I stared too long, I would be hypnotized, that eventually I would be able to see into his world, a world of vengeance and magic. Within him was held all the agency that I had denied for myself. Within him, within me, between us, was true power. In that moment, I felt real; and I realized that by denying my anger, I had not only lost myself, but I had hidden the wounds in my heart from my loved ones, and from all the men who had tried to love me. I was scared to show this new side of myself to people. I was so laidback, wise, and charming to be around. Integrating my shadow side would make me more decisive, more dominate, more mysterious and difficult to read. It meant I wouldn’t be putting up with half the bullshit I dealt with now. Ultimately, my shadow was unsettling. He disrupted all the harmony of the social membrane, and he rocked the boats that I was always so desperately trying to settle. It meant saying what I really felt, doing what I truly wanted to do, and ignoring the rest. It meant committing to myself and the continuity of my story. It meant remaining real. And beyond that, there were secrets, secrets that my shadow side knew, about the world, about people, and about magic. Do I dare? So I began to work with my shadow, but in solitude. The two of us together discussed current events, made art, and deeply harnessed the powers of the occult. As we became one, all my symptoms of illness went away, though the coincidences continued for anyone who crossed me. I felt dangerous, but oddly more whole. In truth, I had always been dangerous. The danger had just been locked in a room. Over time, I was taught how to contact and make peace with my grandma, and with my uncle. I could finally feel a semblance of peace. I hadn’t revealed my shadow to any of my friends, and definitely not to my family, but I was doing my best, and my shadow understood. Some traumas were healed. Some triggers simply went away. But I was still stuck within certain patterns that I couldn’t escape. I hadn’t hurt anyone, but I wasn’t living the life that I wanted. The dire economic realities of this world were really starting to affect me. I knew that I couldn’t reach my full potential without some kind of stability. And there was the issue of romance. I was nearly thirty, and even without some of the blockages I had cleared, love and sex still seemed elusive. I knew I wouldn’t be able to forge much farther alone. I was going to need a teacher.

8 notes · View notes