Alone and Unobserved

I’ve been wretchedly bad at updating this blog lately. We’re coming to the end of the semester, and the amount of final projects I’m putting off is poisoning everything I do. Whether I’m reading a book or soaking in the tub or helping library patrons at work or watching TV or getting drunk at a party, there’s that niggling little itch in the back of my mind that says, “You should be doing homework! Stop having fun and work on your assignments!” It’s really cramping my style.

One of the first things that goes when I’m stressed, overtired or out of sorts is my creativity. Not only can I no longer write, I no long even feel the urge to, which is such a bizarre loss that it always catches me completely unprepared. Even worse, I become utterly uncreative and inflexible in my day-to-day life as well, which means I find it harder simply to deal with things. You might not realize how much creativity you use in making mundane decisions, but believe me, you’d miss it if it were gone. Suddenly my mind can only recognize a single way of doing things. In my head, every problem only has one solution, every interaction only one acceptable path to success, which makes dealing with library patrons—who are endlessly creative in thinking up ways to baffle and bemuse me when I’m at my best—almost impossible.

Well, hopefully the end of the semester will herald a brief period of peace, tranquility and (fingers crossed) creativity, before the summer term arrives to crush all my dreams again.

In the meantime, go have fun reading the archives of Mis/adventures in Bookland, where Suffering Silently blogs about dealing with bookstore customers in a small-town bookshop in Canada. I could swear some of her customers also visit my library.

At my birthday party last night—YES, IT WAS AWESOME—I got into a conversation with a friend about belief, atheism, and leaving Mormonism. Both of us have resigned from the Mormon church, and both of us have had to break that news to our parents, and we compared stories of how our mothers had reacted to the news.

That conversation made me remember the I wrote to my parents when I resigned, and I realized I hadn’t looked at it since I sent it three years ago, and that I only had a hazy idea of what I had actually put in it. Turns out it was pretty long and detailed! It also turns out that it does not at all resemble the kind of letter (or blog post) I would write today if someone asked me to explain why I am no longer Mormon. But I’m glad I still have it, because the guy who wrote it three years ago was in a very hard place, and that letter (as well as the earliest posts in this blog) keep me from forgetting that he existed.

And then it occurred to me that I had never posted that letter on my blog for the whole world to peruse! So here it is. (Be kind. I was only twenty-four—the merest child.)

Dear Mom and Dad,

This letter is for you. Once you’ve read it you can decide how much of it you want to share with the kids, but I wrote it to you.

I want to tell you something you may not know about me. As I was growing up, starting when I was fairly young (about five or six), I suffered from mild-to-severe depression and anxiety. This continued all through my teenage years and into my mission. On my mission the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive elements became so strong that I began to have panic attacks, and almost decided to go home multiple times. When I asked for help, I was told that a good missionary would be able to overcome such problems with prayer. Things did get better, for whatever reason, and I was able to complete my mission.

After my mission things quickly became much worse. Even though I was praying and fasting and reading my scriptures, my depression, anxiety and self-hate continued to grow stronger, to the point where I even considered suicide. I saw a therapist, but that didn’t help—in fact, it made it worse. I saw a doctor, and he prescribed medication, which did help. Unfortunately, the side effects were so intolerable that I decided I had to learn to function without drugs.

When I asked myself why I was so depressed, I realized it was because I hated myself. I really, truly did. When I asked why, I realized it was because I was torn between my own nature and the teachings of the LDS church. I told you several years ago that I was attracted to men, but I’m not sure either of you understood how pervasive and fundamental a thing that is in a person’s life. I grew up being told that I was supposed to fall in love with and marry a woman, but that was something that only puzzled and horrified me. On the other hand, the idea of falling in love with a man was completely familiar and attractive to me from an very young age. When I really thought about it, I realized that I completely disagreed with the teachings of the LDS church on this subject: I did not think that homosexuality or homosexual relationships were any less valid than heterosexuality or heterosexual relationships.

I realized that I had always been afraid to question my beliefs; in fact, a great deal of my obsessions and compulsions centered around religious matters and making sure that I never wavered in my “faith.” As I began to hold my beliefs up to the light and seriously ask myself if I still accepted them, one by one they turned out to be nothing more than determination to believe, instead of actual belief. When I questioned them honestly they vanished, instead of growing stronger as I was always told true faith will.

This went on for a while. The short of it is, I now consider myself an atheist. I no longer hold any religious beliefs whatever. I accept myself as a gay man. I no longer hate myself, and no longer suffer from serious depression or anxiety. My obsessions and compulsions are now almost gone. I see this as a positive step, and think I have a happy, fulfilling life ahead of me.

I am dating men. All the things that were lacking in my interactions with women are available to me with men—mutual attraction, love, and devotion. I am interested in gay marriage rights, and am considering becoming politically active in the push for marriage equality in America.

As I no longer believe in the LDS church, and am in fact actively opposed to many of its teachings, I am drafting an letter officially resigning my membership. I plan on sending it right after I send you this letter. I know you asked me to only write you about uplifting stuff, but I figured you would want to hear this from me rather than from someone else.

I love you, Mom and Dad, and hope you will understand. If you don’t (and I know this is hard to swallow all in one bite) think it over carefully, and then call me if you have any questions. One thing I’ve missed a lot is a close relationship with you, and I hope we can take this opportunity to be honest with each other and grow even closer. I don’t expect you to agree with my decisions, and I respect that. I hope you can respect my right to make such decisions anyway.

With love,
Your son
Sean

P.S. Call me even if you don’t have any questions.

When I was growing up I was often called names. It kind of comes with the territory—I was effeminate, geeky, introverted, awkward, unattractive and unpopular, and terribly insecure about it all to boot. I was an easy target, so I was often targeted.

That was years ago, and I thought I was totally over it. This turns out not to be the case!

Yesterday a well-dressed, clean-cut man approached the reference desk and (in accented English) asked for books on Balzac in Spanish. From the first moment, his attitude was hostile, condescending, even contemptuous, and as I searched our database and failed to find any of the Spanish-language materials he was looking for, first on Balzac and then on the Marquis de Sade, his behavior descended to open mocking. When I asked him to please be more civil he (in an even worse tone) asked to see my manager. As I got up to find someone to talk to him, he continued to openly mock and ridicule me, so I informed him I would simply be calling security.

His response: “Yeah! Call them! Fucking maricón de mierda.”

Then, instead of waiting to speak with security, he got on the elevator, leaving me shaking, speechless and on the verge of tears.

This is the first time I’ve been called an actual nasty name at the library. Patrons have been rude, irrational, unreasonable, profane, angry and loud, but in the three years I’ve worked here, this is the first time anyone has descended to name-calling. And it really threw me. This is a complete cliché, but in the few minutes I had to deal with that patron it felt like I was suddenly that awkward, oily-faced fifteen-year-old again, and I was stammering and flushing and trembling and completely falling apart. Just like I used to.

In case you don’t know how to insult people in Spanish, “maricón” is (among other things) a homosexual slur. And once he used it, his earlier unexplained antipathy suddenly seemed very clear: He was rude to me because he realized I was gay. In fact, apparently he felt my being gay gave him license to be the most completely over-the-top asshole I’ve ever dealt with as an adult.

I’m feeling very off-balance right now. Since that encounter, I’ve been intensely aware at all times that I am a gay man and—while I’m not what I think of as flamboyant—it’s usually pretty obvious to people (even over the phone). When I interact with patrons now, I constantly wonder if they’ve figured it out, what they think, and whether they are going to take it as license to be rude or disrespectful. I haven’t felt this raw and vulnerable in a long time—again, probably not since I was a teenager.

Ugh. If I wanted to re-live my youth I would do what Dooce has done and post angsty teen-era journal entries for all the world to see.

As anyone who has spent much time on this blog knows, I was raised Mormon in a very conservative, very Mormon household. I went to church every Sunday, unless I was deathly ill or was able to convincingly fake being so. I attended early-morning youth religion classes every school day for four years. I received the “priesthood” (authority to act in the name of God given to every Mormon male over the age of twelve) and participated every Sunday in performing the rites associated with the “sacrament” services. Twice a year, I went with my family to view broadcasts of the general church conference.

When I was nineteen I went on a two-year proselyting mission in Italy, where I spent approximately sixty-five hours a week actively looking for, teaching and (if I was lucky) baptizing converts. I went to Brigham Young University for four years, where I took the required religion classes, attended campus devotionals, participated in my student congregation’s worship services and weekday activities. For most of my life I was what you might call devout.

And then, when I was twenty-three, I came out publicly as an atheist and formally resigned my membership in the Mormon church.

How could the underpinnings of my religious belief have disintegrated so quickly and completely? When I think back, it seems that the linchpin holding it all together was not my belief in deity, but my belief in spirituality—or rather, my belief in the validity of religious experience. Ironically, it was this very belief that started me on this journey in the first place.

Imagine that you have spent your whole life being trained to listen for and recognize “the whisperings of the Spirit,” a subtle confluence of physical and emotional sensations sent by God to comfort you, to confirm truth and to guide you on the correct path in life. Some of the most formative experiences of your life have involved “the Spirit,” whether you were at church singing or worshiping, or sharing a special moment with your family, or by yourself reading the holy scriptures or praying.

As a Mormon missionary, you spent hours each day praying and reading the scriptures, either alone or with your fellow missionaries. While proselyting, your main goal was to help the people you met feel “the Spirit,” either by preaching, bearing witness, praying or singing with them, and then to teach them what “the Spirit” was and how it could transform their lives for the better. And, more specifically, how “the Spirit” would confirm the truth of the message you taught them. You challenged them to read the Book of Mormon and pray to know it was true. You challenged them to pray to know if they should be baptized. You challenged them to pray to know if they should pay tithing, give up coffee or cigarettes, attend church, and on and on.

And it worked. Not for everyone (because not everyone is ready, or faithful enough, you told yourself), but for many. And you had faith that it would work for anyone (anyone!) who really put it to the test. Because you had done it, and it had worked for you. You see, you didn’t just think the Mormon church was the true church of Jesus Christ restored to the earth, you knew it was, because you had prayed, and God had told you himself. Through “the Spirit.”

Now you’re a young Mormon priesthood holder fresh of your mission, and it’s time for the next step. You’ve been taught all your life what happens now (although it didn’t work out quite that way for your mom or dad, but let’s forget about them for a second): you are supposed begin searching for a wife. You are supposed to find her as quickly as possible, pray to know that she’s the right one, and marry her in a Mormon temple in a ceremony so sacred you can’t describe it to anyone who hasn’t witnessed it. And then you are supposed to have as many children as possible, as soon as possible, because that is your solemn duty.

But!—and there is a very large ‘but’—you have a secret. A secret so secret and so shameful and so terrible that you went years and years and YEARS before you even mentioned it to anyone; a secret so damning and destructive that you denied it existed even as it began to get too big to ignore.

You see, you have no desire to marry a woman, let alone impregnate one. Ever since you can remember you’ve been attracted to men. You had little crushes on boys when you were a boy, you had bigger crushes on other guys when you were a teenager, and now you are an adult(!) and you are having trouble not becoming infatuated with every attractive man you meet.

For a while you do the right thing. You try to date girls, you read up on “same-sex attraction,” you attend counseling sessions with Mormon therapists, and you deny! deny! deny! and you repress! repress! repress! And you are on antidepressants within a year.

“What’s wrong?” you think. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. I pray, I fast, I read the scriptures, I attend church and I’m chaste and virtuous. Why hasn’t God taken away my attraction to men?” At this point you would almost accept being celibate and asexual for the rest of your life if you just didn’t have this terrible, terrible affliction to weigh you down anymore.

And then gradually something changes. You begin to realize that, deep down, you simply do not believe that being attracted to attractive men is wrong. And the moment you finally accept this, all the weight and crushing despair leave you and you are left feeling better than you have in a long, long time. In fact, it’s like “the Spirit” is whispering to you, almost like God Himself is telling you that it’s okay. It’s okay.

In the end I realized that this was not a spiritual experience. I’m sure my Mormon bishop at the time would have agreed that it was completely physical and emotional: just an emotional weight lifted, just a few million synapses firing, just a surge of endorphins, just a chemical process. But here’s the thing: it was as convincing a “spiritual experience” as any I had had in my life. What’s more, as I’m sitting here at my desk, an atheist writing about his deconversion from Mormonism, I’m having an equally convincing “spiritual experience.”

It took a while, but that’s why I stopped believing in any of it. Because I discovered that the unique way of knowing I had been taught as a child—the burning in the bosom, the ineffable certainty, the transports of joy—were all either indistinguishable from physical processes, or were simply physical processes. And either way they were useless as ways of determining truth, or guiding my life, and I had (and have) no more patience for them.

Travel makes me nervous. Especially traveling on my own. I’m a natural worrier, and the idea of being trapped by myself in an unfamiliar place pushes me to the verge of a panic attack. On the other hand, traveling with another person—even with someone helpless that I would have to look after the whole time—sounds completely doable. Um, sometimes I don’t make sense.

I have three trips coming up in the next month, starting with my little day-jaunt to Kansas tomorrow. I’ve booked my airport shuttle, printed off my itinerary (along with the maps I’ll need when my rental car breaks down on the Kansas-Missouri border and I have to describe my location to search parties), looked up the weather forecasts for the greater Kansas City area and given some serious thought to how many changes of clothes I’ll need for a two-day trip. Fortunately there are still almost twenty-four hours left in which to cram more restless sleep, over-planning and obsessive worrying. No trip is complete without a full quota of anxiety and gray hairs.

I go through periodic slumps (maybe I’m dysthymic?) and periodic stretches of frenzied activity (hypomania, anybody?). Right now, I’m in a slump that has lasted for the past two or three months. The symptoms are all there: my house is a disaster, I’m behind in all my homework, and I’ve been eating everything in sight and avoiding exercise and social interaction. I don’t have the attention span for reading new books, watching new movies or sitting through any kind of TV. I haven’t been cooking, and I haven’t been writing.

But there’s hope. I’ve started doing my homework, and turning it in more or less on time (I know! shades of freshman year, anyone?); I’ve started being proactive and energetic at work again; and I’m starting to feel the urge to write, and cook, and exercise. Battlestar Galactica is back(!!!!!), and I watched the whole episode in one sitting. I sat through an hour of television! It’s a breakthrough, people.

Over the past couple of weeks, as I’ve started meandering back to the surface of things from the mucky depths I had subsided to, I’ve started feeling an itch to read. But I couldn’t read new books—I craved familiar, unthreatening tastes: Anne McCaffrey, Weis & Hickman, Susan Cooper, Robin McKinley. And let me tell you, it is really sad when you go back to your long-remembered teen favorites and discover how hollow and unsatisfying they are. McCaffrey is an awful writer. Weis & Hickman are funny, but they can’t do serious believably, and they have an odd idea of what real human relationships are like. Susan Cooper’s apocalyptic novels are much too Britain-centric. Shattered illusions like these are the cost of growing up, I suspect.

But Robin McKinley’s Sunshine will never pall. It’s axiomatic.

I changed medications a week ago, and I have definitely noticed some changes. I have a lot more energy in general—instead of slumping at the reference desk all day at work, I fidget, or get up and wander, or dance a jig or a polka (I am NOT kidding about the dancing), or smile helpfully and hopefully at every patron who walks by. But I’ve noticed that I suddenly have a lot less interest in certain things. Like blogging, and writing in general. Has my muse vanished with my angst and lethargy? Must I choose between a life as a frustrated, stymied human being and a life as a frustrated, stymied artist?

I’ve been getting some quality reading time in, though. Right now I’m working my way through Patricia A. McKillip’s oeuvre (see here and here), though I also find time for the odd article on feminist fantasy and science fiction. My living room floor is covered in library books and printouts from EBSCOhost and Wilson Web, and somewhere under all the mess is my work proximity card, without which I can’t get into the staff areas at the library.

Last week I needed a boost, so I went to the dentist, where the hygienists cooed over my flawless, plaque- and tartar-free teeth. I have my parents to thank for this: my mother instilled in me an obsession with dental health, and my father passed on his genes for titanium-grade dental enamel. Bacteria and caries need not apply.

My Aunt Daisy and I have started to compile a blog in memoriam of my grandfather Glen “B” Dial, who died when my mother was fifteen and Daisy was six, but who is fondly remembered by all who knew him. You can see the beginnings of the blog at glenbdial.blogspot.com.

And lastly, over the past week, I’ve listened to Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day”—a song about young love, loss, and faith—approximately 1,001 times. It has lodged itself deep inside me for some reason, even though I am an atheist who has never lost the girl he loved to bone cancer, and when I am not listening to its simple, calm lyrics I am singing them to myself in the shower. Badly.

I’ll try to be better about updating my blog. As you can see, it’s not that I don’t have anything the write about—or rather, it’s not that I have less to write about than I ever had. Anyone who is really, really hurting to hear about my life now has an abundance of nutritious RSS-based fodder to choose from. As you can see, I’ve added several feeds to the sidebar, including several different flavors of mashups that I concocted in Yahoo! Pipes, for your feeding pleasure.

I’ve been taking antidepressants for the past several months, but to be honest, I haven’t noticed a huge difference. After I started taking them I wasn’t depressed, but I hadn’t been horribly depressed before, either—I was anxious, which is why I went to the shrink in the first place. And the meds didn’t seem to help with the anxiety at all.

Well, now I think I’m depressed again, despite any medication I may or may not be taking. To be more precise, I think I have been depressed for some time and just didn’t realize it. The symptoms? Lethargy; listlessness; lack of interest in doing anything, even things that I used to enjoy; feeling like simple tasks, such as cleaning my house, are just too monumental to tackle; decreased appetite; etc.

Of course, there is only so much concerted “not cleaning” that can go on before The Mess begins to push back. My house, it was a disaster. Out of consideration for my readers’ stomachs, I won’t try to describe the horrific nadir of shocking squalor I descended to, or to qualify the length of time that had elapsed since I cleaned the last time, although I will note that I use the words “horrific,” “nadir,” “shocking” and “squalor” advisedly, and that “It’s been a good, long while since I last cleaned” would be something of an understatement in this context.

Anyway, on Monday I looked around at the sty I was wallowing in, and lo, it was not good. The living room wasn’t good and the bedroom wasn’t good and the bathroom wasn’t good, and let’s not even talk about the kitchen, which really wasn’t good. The hallway was passable, at least in the literal sense, but the rest was a disgrace. This time, though, instead of collapsing limply on the couch in defeat, as I had been doing for the past, er, “good, long while” every time The Mess confronted me, I grabbed a sponge and started cleaning.

Last night, after two days of sweeping, spraying, scrubbing and sweating, I had made a respectable dent in the Herculean task I had created for myself (where are the Alpheus and Peneus when you need them?). Aching and twitching, I fell into bed. Sadly, instead of falling asleep, I lay there for what in this new context could again be called “a good, long while” (despite encompassing a much shorter amount of time in the absolute sense) and panted feebly for air.

At about four in the morning, it finally dawned on me that it was hot in my room. After a bit of online reconnaissance, I have discovered that it was probably in the mid-forties outside; whence, then, the oppressive blanket of heat that smothered my bedroom with a heavy hand last night? That’s right: my landlord has once again turned on the boiler, given control of the thermostat over to the lady in the freezing basement apartment, and left us all to bake.

Lying in bed and broiling got boring after a while, so this morning at six I got up and started cleaning the bathroom. At eight I had an unhurried breakfast, drank a gallon of coffee, and went to work at nine. And even though I was exhausted and in pain all day, there was one thing I didn’t feel: depressed.

When I made the decision to enter graduate school in mathematics, I was motivated by fear. What could I possibly have been afraid of, you ask, that would have been worse than grad school? A list might be instructive (feel free to laugh at my crazy, mixed-up backwardness). I was afraid:

1. Of being unable to deal with the real world, and consequently dying penniless on the street
2. That I was unemployable with just a bachelor’s degree in math and that I would die penniless on the street
3. That I would be too lazy to take care of myself, to the point that I would end up dying penniless on the street
4. Of leaving the state and starting over somewhere new, and dying penniless on the street in some city I didn’t even know

. . . and of many, many more things that end “and thus dying penniless on the street” (Are you noticing a pattern? Turns out I’m not alone—Dooce’s personal fear history reads similarly.) In any case, going into graduate school for the wrong reasons is BAD. DO NOT DO IT. But the bright side is, I apparently have completed all the requirements for my degree, so I guess that’s it. I’m just wondering how the postman is going to fit my diploma in my microscopic mailbox . . .

I have a bizarre . . . phobia? I’m not sure you can call it a fear. But something that makes me want to vomit and run away screaming and curl up into a ball and jump up and down flapping my hands, all at the same time. Something that grosses me out so thoroughly that just thinking about it is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat, let alone seeing a picture of it o god o god o god get it away!!!

Ahem.

It’s easier to show than to tell in this case. This image from the MSN Encarta article “Cross Section of a Bone” really creeps me out. As does this entire article on the structure of plants. Likewise this lithograph of the inside of a spleen from Grey’s Anatomy. And this picture of a mammal liver gives me the willies and the chills at the same time.

Put succinctly: why does all living matter have to look like it was either gnawed at by termites or infested by worms? That’s just not right.

The reason I bring this up is that I was just assaulted by perhaps the most horrifying picture (along these lines) that I’ve ever seen. You can find it here, at Snopes.com.

It doesn’t matter that this is a composite picture of a person’s fingers and lamprey mouths. Because how comforting are lamprey mouths, whether they’re attached to fingers or to actual, slimy, worm-like lampreys? Not at all comforting, thank you very much.

At this point, I think it’s clear that the only way I’ll sleep tonight is if I drink myself into insensibility. Guess I’d better get started on that, then.