My Year Of Becoming The Men I Want To Be
But it goes deeper than that. The trip to
Japan was kind of my rock bottom. I think I needed to get there to really
realise what was going on and who had put me there. I had lost control. I
wasn’t doing any of it for any good reason, I was just letting my emotions rule
me and fuck my shit up. I had forgotten, somehow, that you can’t just
experience all of your emotions at full force all the time all over everyone. I
feel like I regressed. That’s what children do. That’s why they cry and throw
tantrums, they’ve just experienced a really strong and possibly brand new
feeling and they don’t know what to do with it, so they go into meltdown. So
much of growing up is learning how to deal with that. To not be afraid of the
new feelings, to not give in to them, to control them appropriately and at the
right times. I had let my depression eat away at all that training; all of what
I had learned by the time I was four.
I spoke earlier about my admiration for Johnny Depp in his interview
with Graham Norton. I think I gravitated to that, because even though I
didn’t realise it, here was someone personifying all the emotional control I
didn’t have. I’ve always loved people and characters like that. Incredibly
astute, tantalisingly reticent. James Spader and pretty much every character he
has ever played are great examples of that type. Alan Shore and Raymond Reddington do it for me on so many levels. The sheer intellectual acuity, and
the way that feeds into my sapioromanticism, the refinement and urbane manner,
the perfect hint of debauchery overlaid with such sexual confidence as to be
blasé, the unorthodox yet considered sense of morality, the distinct style, the
predisposition for worldly and unexpected anecdotes, the black and witty sense
of humour and the absurd, and eloquent and cutting speech delivered in deep and
rolling tones.
What’s that sound? It’s the sound of me
throwing my underwear across the room.
This list makes it almost immodestly clear
what I am attracted to in every sense, and so you’ll find many of the people I
like and surround myself with fit this mould. It should come as no surprise
that Dorian is this type (and is flattered to hear that I see these traits in
him.) Russell Brand is also this type, but he possesses a certain kind of
exuberant mania which links into that Amanda
Palmer “no-one will ever care to see what I don’t show” attitude I also
find so appealing, and creates a confusing push and pull with the reticence I
find so admirable.
But this is not just a list of traits that
I am attracted to. It’s something that I want to be. If you re-read the
list you’ll see it’s not just something I look for in others, but something I
seek to project myself.
- Intellectual acuity
- Refinement and urbane manner
- Hint of debauchery
- Blasé sexual confidence
- Unorthodox yet considered sense of morality
- Distinct style
- Worldly and unexpected anecdotes
- Black and witty sense of humour and the absurd
- Eloquent and cutting speech delivered in deep and rolling tones
I spend a lot of time on my appearance. I
love make up and beauty products and clothes and dressing up. I’ve recently
even been embracing my vanity as a hobby and allowing myself a good few hours
to potter around the house putting on false eyelashes and hair extensions and
getting everything just right before a night of goth clubbing. Admitting my
vanity to myself and allowing myself time to enjoy the ritual of getting
dressed up has done wonders for my stress levels. But I often disdain how I
look in photos.
Every woman wants to look her absolute best
on her wedding day; a veritable paragon of feminine beauty who will outshine
the inevitably outdated style of her gown in the photos she shows to her
children. My wedding photos did not capture this. Dorian and I went through the
photos with the photographer friend of ours who took them the night he brought
them over. Dorian looked utterly stunning and composed in every single one. As
did many of the guests. I did not. I was utterly horrified by the faces I was
pulling. But we were also laughing our arses off. And I was torn; I looked
ugly, and I wanted to be sad and disappointed by that, but I also looked funny,
and it amused my friends. The sheer amount of photos in which I looked utterly
undignified really struck me, and when the time came to put them on Facebook I
realised that I had a choice. I could continue to feel bad about how I looked,
and point it out to my friends, “Look at my craggy teeth!” “Look at my jowly
face!” and hear their fished-for reassurances that I looked fine, forever
colouring their perceptions of me, highlighting my low self-esteem, showing them
flaws they may have never noticed, and just generally bringing everyone down.
Or I could point out how funny I looked, and embrace the fact that I have a
characterful and amusing face that has strong and unpredictable reactions to
things. I could seize the initiative to laugh at my funny expressions, and lead
people in thinking I was comical and blithe rather than dispirited by my lack
of beauty and grace. In this way I could choose how people saw me. And I
realised that this is what is going on with a lot of the gender divide
surrounding appealing characteristics. Women are being given a certain measure,
and are measuring themselves by it. And it’s very hard to break free of that
and tell someone by what measure to
value you, especially if it’s outside the norm. Men would laugh at their stupid
expressions if they were funny. No-one would expect them to look beatific and
serene all day. Men who make idiotic faces can still be regarded as attractive
on the whole. So I made my gurning wedding photos into a collage of meme
comparisons and stuck them on Facebook, and people laughed and admired my gall,
because fuck it, I’m reclaiming “characterful” one unabashed facial contortion
at a time.
My face evoking various memes at my wedding
***
Two friends of mine have been going through
particularly hard times of late. I shan’t go into details, but suffice to say
they’ve both been incredibly down, and down on themselves. They’ve been sharing
their feelings with me quite unreservedly, and I’ve been trying to help them as
best as I can. Many times have I sat beside each of them as they related to me
with incredible vehemence and resignation the ways in which they were flawed
and their situations untenable. The ways in which they hated themselves and
were depressed. I identified with them and gave counsel, I talked through
things and provided refuge and hugs and distractions.
But privately, being there for them did
take a toll on me. There were times where I threw up my hands and thought, but
what am I meant to do with the weight of their troubles? It was a difficult
thing to navigate and I felt like I might not be helping at all. I was happy to
be there for them, but as someone who is only just crawling out from under the
dark cloud of depression, I was worried that I might end up back in the worst
of it. It’s a fine line to tread, between wanting to be a good friend and share
experience, and yet needing to undertake the self-care to prevent myself from
getting bogged down in things that could be a downer for me. But I really don’t
want them to feel worse for having leaned on me, because I was glad to be in a
place where they could, and I would do it all again. I am glad to have friends
that I trust, and that trust me.
After the storm passed for both of them I
was grateful, grateful they had achieved greater peace, and grateful for what I
had seen in myself. I realised, as I gave that advice and related to those
feelings and attitudes and problems, that most of the time, I was talking about
my past. A lot of the lessons I’d learned were very recent, and some things I
was still struggling with, but I saw a way forward and through. I saw through
their eyes how I projected this sage placidity, and they were surprised and
consoled when I said I had those same flaws and had experienced similar
upheaval. When I was giving guidance, it wasn’t just things that I supposed; it
was things that I had conceived, put into practice and achieved results with –
which I was now recommending. I stop short of saying that I now have
aspirations of being a counsellor – but it’s nice to have valuable
perspectives, and to see how far I’ve come. The mental spaces that they were in
were spaces that I was very familiar with, but that I was no longer in. I
was the annoyingly positive friend suggesting courses of action to be rebuffed
with unswerving pessimism, not the dour soul being unsuccessfully cheered.
I couldn’t believe it. What a reversal. How did I even get here? But I knew
how. Through talking my own advice. It had worked. I wasn’t in that place
anymore. What did that even mean? Did it mean I wasn’t depressed anymore?
I haven’t really had a ‘bad day’ since the
start of the year. I haven’t apologised in the way I described in ‘I’m Not Saying Sorry Anymore’ and I haven’t dissolved into nihilism like I wrote about
in ‘Resolve.’ I haven’t had a vitriolic outburst of self-loathing or defeat
either. ‘Bildungsroman’ was a hard blog for me, not so much because of the
content (I’d come to terms with that as much as I could) but because of
discussing it with Dorian. There were a few things in that blog where we came
to a bit of an impasse about privacy and realised we were very different people.
I had a bit of a freak out about how we clashed, how someone so private could
have wanted to be with someone so public as myself, but mainly how I was meant
to continue my art, my writing, in a way that was true to myself and helped me
process things, without betraying Dorian’s confidences. In the end I wrote the
full breadth of story, and then I replaced it with something much simpler and
more artful for the published version. I got the impact I needed without the
details Dorian didn’t. But what most freaked me out in the course of writing
‘Bildunsgroman’ wasn’t that Dorian and I had different views, it was that I got
upset. I was upset about the events in the blog, about the integrity of the
story I was trying to tell, about the future of my art, about what this issue meant
for how we conducted our relationship – but mostly I was upset about being
upset. I think I had literally gone all year without crying. Which at that
stage was about four months. And here I was bawling about all these issues. I’d
ruined my streak. I’d shown I wasn’t really fine. I wasn’t cured and I wasn’t
strong enough. I was devastated. Here was my weakness once again. And it did
what it always does, we had a really long arduous conversation where I sobbed
and wailed until the day/evening got away from us and all the fun things we
were going to do had been replaced by my torment. I swore if I was going to get
rid of one thing in my depression it was dragging Dorian into those episodes. I
could live with the private melancholia, but I didn’t want to subject him to
those dissertations on sorrow. He said no-one was ever going to not get upset
about anything. I countered that he’s never upset to the extent that I am. But
I’m doing a lot better. One episode in four months is better than one every
four days.
One of my primary school teachers once told
me that I always made a big show of not being able to do something, but in the
end I always did it. She said it was a flaw that I needed to understand about
myself: I was fatalistic and underestimated my capabilities. I’d gotten it from
my mother of course, who was also very capable, but depressed and devoid of
self-esteem. The teacher and I warred with each other a lot, my mother kept
telling me it was because we were so similar. I don’t know if that was true. I
think maybe the teacher herself saw us more similar than we were, and assumed a
lot of things based on that instead of allowing me my own path. It was
difficult with so many kids. I respected her, but she had very particular ways
that I often disagreed with. She was very perceptive in her observation though,
and I remember begrudging her the truth of her comments at the time. I still
see those traits in myself to this day, every time I’m given a deadline or have
to do the dishes. And I see it here, in my depression.
The moment I resolved, I
also gave up. The moment I decided what needed to be done, I also expounded on
why it was impossible. But in the end, I did it. I beat my depression. I beat
it in the sense of winning a major battle against a perpetually invading army.
But on my decent days, I’m not sure a diagnosis of depression would stick, and
I have a lot of decent days. I might occasionally become distressed, but that
shouldn’t nullify my improvement. I was actually resolute. I took back control
of my emotions. I decided I wasn’t going to be that howling mess any more, and
so I wasn’t. I knew I had it in me. And in that way I finally got to use that
reserve of strength I spoke of, sadly not to elevate myself to even greater
heights, but to pull myself out of the muck. In that endeavour I have proved I
can do just about anything. Ascending to even greater heights comes later.
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