When I was asked to write my story, I first thought that it was impossible. I always thought that I did not have a story because I’m nobody. This is what happens to you when you begin to dissect the atoms of reality. The result is a cold, mechanical vision of the world.
Who am I ? The answer to this question can be easily found when we have a well-defined place in society and the environment in which we grew up. But when we are excluded from the societal norm, this answer is more difficult to obtain.
Since childhood, I never knew who I was because I was forced to forget myself and to erase myself. My mother being sick I took care of her, while it was not my role. My father was not very present, violent and impulsive, just like my brother, with whom, moreover, I have never been able to create a bond. Since then, my place in my family has never been defined. Even today, at family dinner, it feels like watching a play, in which I’m just a viewer.
The world around me, appears to me the same way. Society is like a station, where people come and go, everyone is passing through. Prisoner of this place, I’m standing there without doing anything, I’m contemplating and I’m trying to understand.
Very soon, I realized that I was not in the societal norm. I had unconsciously learned that loving and desiring someone of the same sex as you was not something “normal”. So I pretended, I created a character and I lived in the lie throughout my childhood and adolescence. It was for me a crime, an abomination, a secret that would go with me into my grave. I was 12 years old when I realized that I was different, but deep inside I knew it from the beginning.
When I begun to become aware of my sexual orientation, I done everything to hide it, to my family, at school, at sport, to myself. I became someone else, in order to fit into the mold. I deconstructed myself gradually, I depersonalised myself, I forgot myself, I faded away.
I have just been and adult when I had my first sexual relationship, I wanted to be sure. There was no love, only desire and primitive impulses. It was like if, admitting that we could have feelings was a truth, a truth that I did not want to assume : I consume, so I am. It was easier like that, I was living into denial and into an absolute lie.
But when the barriers fall, when the mirror breaks and we lose control over it; the denial ended. This is what happened to me when I met this boy, after having consumed aimless relationships. It was my first kiss and the first time I felt my heart beating in my chest, that I felt alive. It was the first time that I allowed myself to get out from my mental prison, to get out from my lie; the one I had created from A to Z.
Thanks to him, I have learned a lot about myself. Before that, the world seemed to me like a set of atoms governed by rules of physics, in which conscious beings would have appeared, thrown by a blind and dramatically determining reality. A reality in which they would have developed an impression of illusory free will. Feelings, faith, good, evil, freedom and of course love; it all seemed like a mirage to me. Except that when we taste this illusion we just cannot live without it. A boy opened my heart to put some love and poetry in it.
Unfortunately this story could not last because I had to leave my country for my studies. And perhaps, deep inside me, in order to write a new story, the one I had chosen. Leaving my country was like leaving my prison, an opportunity to do no longer live in denial, to become who I really was. But the fear of the unknown decided otherwise. Gradually, without him, I started to live in this lie again, I began to deconstruct myself. I consumed aimless relationships in exchange for a little attention, self-esteem that I could not give myself; and also, to forget a boy who had to belong to the past.
When I have arrived here, I have had a hard time making friends, because I felt like I was replacing the people I considered as my friends, those of my home country. Even though I had been someone else with them, even though I had lied to myself and to the others, I have still had affection for them. At the faculty, I met a boy, I knew he had the same sexual orientation as me, I felt it but I was not sure, until I saw his profile on a dating application. From then on, I was scared, and I’ve uninstalled everything; I was afraid that we could discover my double life. My social life was based on a lie, if the truth would broke out, all the reality, this illusion that I have had created, everything would collapse and me too.
A day I will never forget is when during classes, someone asked me if it was me on a screenshot of a gay dating application. When we build all our life on a lie and the reality explodes in your face, the time slows down and then stops and finally everything collapses around you.
First of all, we do everything to make sure nothing happens, but when you see your profile on a social network, in a group of several thousand people, from a good part of which is part of your faculty, it’s a wasted effort. Madness wins you, when the person you having the same sexual orientation as you, take advantage of the moment to create a private discussion bringing together all your circle of “friends” on which it can lead all the hate on you ; all this for the purpose of personal valorisation and consolidation of his own lie, the one in which you used to live.
Then, you try to disconnect your brain, because it’s the least psychologically painful option, an easy solution, thinking that all of this is an illusion and nothing is true : “I I’m going to wake up, it’s nothing but a nightmare. ” Deep inside me, all I wanted was to forget having felt that, hoping that it could be forgotten, hoping to be able to disappear, forever. Finally, we ignore hatred, contempt, mockery and we try to understand the why and how. After this event, I started to erase myself and detach myself from reality. Things and beings have begun to appear to me naked, as they really are, like a bunch of atoms devoid of meaning and essence. I then developed a metaphysical doubt about my own existence.
At that moment all my emotions and feelings vanished. If it happens that I had to feel joy or pain it’s as if it does not concern me anymore. It was as if I had been detached from reality, that it no longer concerned me. It was like I was an anomaly in the big equation of life, the universe and everything else.
I have always been passionate about science, sociology, philosophy and psychology; because that’s what helped me deal with this reality. It is thanks to this, by reading a lot of articles that I accepted myself as a part of who I am, as a gay. I found out homosexuality could be epigenetic and could have a role in the socialization, perpetuation and development of species. The problem is that this almost permanent introspection on my sexual orientation that has shifted to an existential concern was obsessional. Everything had to be understood, calculated and analysed. This permanent intellectual approach is a strength but also my greatest weakness. With it I could justify my own existence, but everything had lost its beauty. The world seen in a materialistic and deterministic way is profoundly absurd. Only sensations and feelings colour it and give it meaning.
After this episode I met another boy that I flirted with. At first I did not feel anything for him but he looked different and we had a good time together. But there is this twin, the one that accompanies me everywhere. This permanent self-analysis which puts in abyss all my acts and all my thoughts. As doubt is a part of me, I started to destroy my barriers, which had the effect of awakening my true personality, the one who feel things. When I have been feeling something for him, he wanted to have sex, but he did not told me before doing it. But sex is nothing but envy, love is a need that was not his desire. I never saw this boy again. Alone, I suffered, in silence. In your cell no one can hear you scream.
I still have trouble colouring my life, everything seems dull and deterministic. A boy had succeeded in putting colour in my heart, but when he took my hand for the first time and revived the flame, I first preferred to stay in my silence and my prison. It was as if one had managed to make me forget for a moment that my mind works on the memory of coherence and artificially fills it with intellectual constructions. But when I decided to destroy the walls of this prison again, when I wanted to read in his heart, it was already too late.
Today I’m trying to rebuild myself, I have now found my place in this world, but not completely in this society, as a gay yes, but not as an individual. I came out as gay to my parents who took it very well. The rational and scientific explanations have probably helped my own acceptance and my parents’ one, even if, deep down, I hope that love has something to do with this.
I have always tried to understand, as an obsession. Understand why and how. My biggest fear is having discovered the deep reality of the world. But deep inside I would not want to know what is true or not. I just want to forget that I have felt it this way, hoping it can be forgotten.
I’m contemplating a sunset, I know that the world is beautiful, but I do not feel like it anymore