Other

Potentially revisiting an old topic here, but it's just something that's been playing on my mind recently.

One thing I will never understand in the apparent quarrels, and even fears, that some gay people have at the ideas of anything "hetero-normative"; basically, conventions or other standards and ideals that are upheld in a generally 'straight' community.

I don't think it's a bad thing that the general community has these 'straight' values; after all, they are a majority in the people.

But also, I think it's kind of narrow-minded to think of these values as inherently straight at all.

Especially from a group of people who seemingly want equality and tolerance among the broad scope of sexual orientation.

There's no denying that there is a rich and complex variety of colourful people in the gay community.

You've got drag queens, leather daddies, dykes on bikes, lipstick lesbians, underage twinks, fetish guys with more piercings than you can shake a dick at; huge variety of people who lead crazy lifestyles that deviate substantially from the perceived 'norm'.

However, it would be a mistake to think that the ability to lead such potentially wild and hedonistic lifestyles stem from the fact that they are queer-identifiying.

There are just as many straight people who have fucked up lives full of extraordinary events that don't commonly happen in everyday life.

I had a guy say to me once: "Don't be all normal and boring, like the hetero's".

At the time I laughed and shook the comment off, but the more I think about it, the more infuriating it becomes.

The notion that all hetero's are "boring and conventional" is almost as stupid and narrow-minded as the idea that all gay people are crazy sex freaks who are incapable of leading lives with any degree or 'normality'.

Because for some people, there's nothing that special about being gay; it's a minor facet of the bigger picture, and they don't put much emphasis on it.

Although normality is such a subjective term that that argument almost means next to nothing.

I'm all for recognising differences, but they're not the things that we should be focusing on.

This process of Othering between sexual orientation does nothing for any equality movements.

I'm proud to be gay, and I do have some pretty crazy fucked up life experiences.

Some of them happened as a direct result of my homosexuality, but that doesn't mean I don't a crave a little bit of conventional normality every now and then too.

And any gay person who thinks that their purpose in life is to be the antithesis of heterosexuality seriously needs to re-evaluate their priorities.

Freedom

There's always a calm before a storm.

But in the words of Katy Perry, "after a hurricane comes a rainbow."

Not that my life doesn't resemble the personification of a rainbow in most cases.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for soul mates and eternal happiness with the one you love.

But I think there's a part of you that you lose when you're in a relationship.

Maybe when you find "the one", that part is replaced with the matching piece of your partner.

But if that's not the case, breaking up and re-discovering that lost piece is absolutely amazing.

I still feel the heartache of breaking up, and probably always will, whenever it happens.

But every cloud has silver lining, and pulling myself out of that rut to see the sunshine of freedom is such an intense feeling of liberation.

I would much rather get on with being that guy turning multiple heads (and kissing them too) in the club, which I've really always been, instead of wasting time being the desperate soul who sits around banging on about "What if...", "Why me?" and "What the Hell went wrong?"

So what are you waiting for? If your glass is even so much as half-empty, grab that vodka or bourbon or a damn martini and fill it the fuck back up!

"so if you're too school for cool

and you treat me like a fool

you can choose to let it go

we can always party on our own..

so raise your glass if you are wrong

in all the right ways" - P!nk

Love

First and foremost, I believe in love.

You'd probably be right if you called me crazy, or said I was a dreamer.

I listen to my heart before my head, and more often then not I'll make my decisions based on a feeling rather than any rational logic.

It might seem self-interested and hedonistic, but I can assure you that such wild and fantastical thinking incurs just as much pain as it does pleasure.

How could something, or someone, that fills you with so much joy and happiness, also inadvertently break your heart into tiny little pieces?

That, I believe, is the great paradox of love.

Some would say I fell hard and fast, and maybe there is some truth in that.

But I think it's hard for anyone but myself to see the caution I exercised when approaching this love.

Shame on you if you fool me once, shame on me if you fool me twice: that kind of thing.

Every time Kingdom Hearts is shattered into rubble, I build the walls up twice as high and doubly thick.

But sometimes there's something, or someone, worth the risk, and for once I find myself breaking down the walls, letting someone in.

And I fell in love; at least I thought I did.

But in the words of Gretchen Weiners: "You could be wrong".

It's not that he didn't love me at all; simply that he didn't love me in the same way.

And truth is one of the most important ingredients in the elixir of love.

Is it wrong to suggest that an unequal, unreciprocated love is tantamount to no love at all?

Were my feelings wasted on a chemistry that never came to boil?

Was I ever in love if I was only ever, in that sense, by myself?

I'll never know the answers to these questions, though if someone asked me if I've ever been in love, now I would most likely answer 'yes'.

For all I've come to believe in, to aspire to, and to know; for all intents and purposes, I would say that I have loved.

Or at the very least, that what I did, the choices I made, the risks I took, the joys I cherished and the losses I suffered: they were all in the name of a greater good.

In the hope that one day, truly, I may fall in love.

"won't forget, can't regret what I did for love" - A Chorus Line

Drowning

Sometimes, I feel like enlightenment is a curse.

It's crossed my mind whether there's really a quantifiable difference between believing a lie, and simply not knowing the truth.

Maybe I was wrong; perhaps ignorance is bliss.

I'm sitting here in a library; a place of knowledge, filled with so much factual text, information and intelligence, and people studying these volumes and presumably bringing themselves to some of elevated awareness, higher and intelligent.

And it's dawned on me that I've never felt so out of place.

I live my life in a sort of limbo.

Some people find that purpose they have in life, no matter how mundane, and they do it.

They work, they play, they have fun; they don't tend to venture beyond the boundaries or their normal existence, but that's okay with them.

They're content with their lot in life. They're all set.

Then there are people who, similarly, feel they have some goal in life, yet conversely have to spend years of their life immersing themselves in some chosen aspect, vastly broadening their horizons so they can achieve their ultimate passion.

I know for a fact that I'm neither.

I stepped into the outer world, into the waters of intellect and skill.

I just don't know how to swim.

I don't have a purpose. I don't have a passion. I don't have a goal.

I'm struggling to stay afloat, and the shore's nowhere in sight.

What if this was all a big mistake?

There's so much in my life that I don't understand, but I feel like I would have been happier if I'd never known it was there.

Like not being able to not see the trick to an optical illusion, things will never look the same to me. I don't know how it will ever be like it was before, yet I still struggle to make sense of what it is now.

Worst of all is I feel as though I'm wasting my time. I'm stuck in this strange place where I obviously don't belong.

And there's no way out.

"I've watched you fly on paper wings, halfway around the world

until they burned up in the atmosphere, sent you spiralling down

landing somewhere far from here with no one else around" - Rise Against

Confessions

I've always been an advocate for the truth.

There's nothing I hate than master class deception, and sometimes I even let little white lies get the better of my temperament.

Sometimes a lie is told out of malice and spite; the worst kind.

Sometimes it's told out of fear of the consequences of the truth.

A little more understandable, but in the long run the impact is probably much the same.

Yet concealment, no matter how big or small, leads to confession; an act which in itself can be very liberating and empowering.

I know form experience that certain confessions are extremely difficult.

My breathing gets all out of whack, and I feel my chest get so heavy because I've apparently forgotten to exhale.

But when you finally spit it out, there is a consequence, a react, and the ball starts rolling.

But what of self-confession?

Something you know, deep-down in your heart, but something that you can't bear to acknowledge.

Something you'd rather bury than accept.

No matter how difficult it might be to verbalise my most clandestine feelings, it's confronting myself with my deepest, darkest fears that is the hardest part of any confession.

Because they're usually the things you don't want to hear.

They're usually about the things you pretended weren't real.

And they usually come with the terrifying aspect that everything as you know it could change.

However, as terrifying as they are, these kinds of confessions tend to be the most fulfilling.

They bring with them the degree of acceptance that lets you "move on".

I've written many a blog on change, and how ultimately it can be a positive force. You shouldn't try to stand in it's way.

But sometimes, it's gentle, and waits for your permission.

All you have to do is say the word.

A simple confession is all it takes.

"guess I'm wish my life away

with these things I'll never say" - Avril Lavigne

Worry

Last night, I fell asleep clutching a Worry Doll.

Tradition dictates the after you finish telling it all your troubles, you put it under your pillow and the doll takes care of them for you, so you can sleep well.

Instead, I woke up in the middle of the night, quite unsure of the reason.

But there, now only loosely clutched in my fingers, was my Worry Doll, staring back at me.

Maybe I didn't realise how many subconscious fears I actually have.

Maybe I didn't have enough time to get them all out before the veil of night washed over me and I fell asleep.

I couldn't let the doll out of my grasp, and I somehow woke up with an unparalleled sense of dread.

I have a friend who used to ask me if they worried too much.

I replied: "I don't think you can worry too much. It just means that you care, and that makes you a good person."

The reasoning seems to satisfy us both at the time, but a few years on, I'm suddenly not so sure.

In the event of someone worrying too much, is there the possibility one could care too much?

Similar to someone worrying or stressing about things which they cannot change, which they have no control over, is it possible for someone to care too much about any particular thing, to have too many hopes or dreams riding on something that could potentially prove quite temporary?

I'm no advocate for apathy: I believe passion is the driving force behind everyone's true nature.

It's important to care about a lot of things, but is there a limit?

Putting too much faith in one thing, or being so passionate that it comes to the verge of fanaticism, unable to accept anything else.

Caring too much because of everything you've invested, with far too much at stake.

Or maybe the two terms aren't as synonymous as I've come to view them as.

Caring is about maintaining the positive, aiming for an optimistic end point.

Worry, on the other hand, seems like a constant stream of pessimism, with a deep focus on all the possible negatives.

It's okay to be nervous, and it's okay to care.

All you need is a little bit of hope.

And leave the worrying to the doll under your pillow.

"I'm just as nervous as you

but last night I took one look at you

and I got the feeling you're the right one" - Plain White T's

Thought

It's common knowledge that I think too much.

What's worse is that I typically don't think about anything too productive.

If I put as much energy into thinking up a cure for world poverty as I do into deliberating pointless topics and scenarios that don't even affect me... well, we would be living in a land of plenty, to say the least.

The worst of all is that most of the time, I'm completely lacking of an original thought.

Sometimes it's as though my entire stream of consciousness is just a plagiaristic re-hash of my daily intake of mass media.

Even when I try to buck the trend and deviate from mainstream opinion, I find I'm just extending further someone else's left-wing argument.

Conforming to non-conformity, if you will.

This discovering is disappointing - to say the least.

It would appear to me that when making an argument, rationality tends to escape me.

I am a very passionate person. Whether I choose vivid or subtle means of expressing it, I find I'm always plagued with some excess of emotion.

And the thing I love about emotion is that no one can tell you that it's wrong.

Despite all concepts of rational thought, I don't believe anyone can ever tell you the correct way to 'feel'.

Hence, having such passionate and personal justification to an argument would render it unfalsifiable.

Which leaves you at an epistemological dead end; a stalemate.

I'm not afraid of being wrong; in fact, I've come to expect that most of the time.

I guess my passion has given me a sort of blind faith in my own ideas.

I don't see the point in pressing my arguments incessantly, if I believe them, and they make sense to me, then I am - for the most part - satisfied.

However, it's when my own thoughts are undermined, and I feel forced to back up my passion with logic...

Well, that's when I come to a typical conclusion of "thinking is over-rated".

Self-condemned, my heart is going to rule my head.

Every time.

"now it feels like I'm losing my mind, I used to think all the time

now thinking hurts, and feeling is worse

I liked reality better when it was a dream" - Bayside