Surprised By Love

It seems ridiculous now, but before my godchild was born, I was genuinely worried that I would hate him.

He wasn't my godchild then, of course. He was the imminent spawn of two of my best friends, and while I was legitimately excited for them, I also had a lot of concerns. I'd never been around babies much before, and what I knew about them didn't sound promising. They cried a lot. They pooped a lot. They consumed their parents' time, thoughts, and lives. One time when I was nine I held my neighbor's newborn and accidentally hit her head against the edge of the dining room table, and I was terrified of ever holding a baby again in case I broke it. My friends would be obsessed with their youngling, and I would be unable to participate. Was this tiny human going to ruin two of the best friendships I've ever had?

A week or two before the baby's birth, I was a jerk to my friends. It wasn't premeditated jerkiness – it was just thoughtlessly being a shitty friend – but it's the last thing you need when you're freaking out about your first child's impending entrance to the world. Subconsciously, I think it was a preemptive strike against the baby: you're going to ruin my friendship? Screw you, I'll ruin it on my terms. I'd also had more than enough of being around pregnant people, which is a massive dysphoria trigger for me. Regardless of my reasons, it was a lousy thing to do.

So I was doubly nervous as I made my way to the hospital on December 11^th. Not only was I going to meet a day-old newborn who, as far as I could tell from the Facebook pictures, looked and smelled and sounded exactly as bad as any other day-old newborn, but there was also the lingering tension of my as-yet-unatoned-for shitty behavior.

I was lucky. I got two reconciliations that day. The first was apology and forgiveness over lunch with the baby's father. The second was the moment I took that tiny, sleeping person in my arms.

I hate to be such a cliché, but meeting the person who would be my godchild really did change everything. Leaving the hospital, I felt as though the whole world was a little sparklier, a little more special, a little more awe-inspiring. Before long, I was doing all the things I swore I'd never do: changing diapers, shrugging off spit-up, talking incessantly about the wondrousness of the baby. The most amazing thing to me is just how much I love him.

I've spent much of the past year contemplating this love. It's incredible, and it's frightening. I would throw myself under a bus for my godchild in a heartbeat. I would wrestle spiders for him. I would forgive him if he murdered my whole family in front of my eyes. My love for him is vast, and it is unconditional, and it makes no sense. Why do I love him so? What has he done to merit such love? The answer: nothing, and because he has done nothing to earn my love, there is nothing in all of creation that can separate him from it.

I believe strongly that, in the words of Les Mis, “to love another person is to see the face of God.” I believe that anyone who teaches you a new way to love is revealing to you another glimpse, another facet, of the divine. My godchild has taught me something I didn't know about grace: love that is unearned, unconditional, yet in no way cheap.

I had no idea I was capable of a love like this, and I believe that it is the work of God within me. My love for my godchild has opened me to new loves I had thought beyond me, manifest most recently in romantic love and in the first steps of self-reconciliation. If you'd asked me a year ago, I'd have denied that I had the capacity for godparental love, romantic love, or self-reconciliation, but all of these loves are or will be part of the ever-expanding, dizzyingly vast cosmic Love I have only just begun to explore.

Happy birthday, Jay. I love you with all the love God has graced me to give.

How I Would Like To Live

I am not at all a long-term thinker – on some level, I'm surprised every time I wake up and the world is still here, trundling on as usual, and hasn't become a post-apocalyptic wasteland – but I think I have figured out the living arrangement I would like to have once I am no longer in dorms.

I would like to live with between two and five other people. We would be the most important people in each other's lives. I would not be romantically involved with any of these people; they could be involved with each other in any configuration they chose, but nobody would want or have children. We would just be a little chosen family of three to six adults who wanted to hang out with each other pretty much all the time.

I realize this is a very, very unlikely scenario, because it involves finding a group of Best Friends who also think this is a good idea. Still, in an ideal world, this is how I would like to live.

I want this to be my life, is basically what I am saying.

Why Do *You* Believe In God?

It's interesting to me that several people – both Christian and non-Christian – have told me recently that they believe in God because of the natural world or because of existence itself. It interests me because that is absolutely not why I myself believe in God.

Let me state off the bat that I mean no value judgment: I don't think one reason for believing in God is somehow more or less valid than another. (Frankly, I think all God-belief is to some extent irrational – that's why it demands the logic-defying leap we call “faith.”) Everything that follows is my own personal belief, feeling, and experience, and I hope it doesn't come across as denying or discrediting anyone else's belief, feeling, or experience of God.

As a matter of fact, I think it is monumentally important to give credit to other people's experience of God most especially when it differs from your own. If you declare your own experience of God to be the only true or valid one, you are confining God to your tiny mind-box and denying the vast, multifaceted, ineffable divine. Giving ear and credence to experiences of God that differ from your own is a matter of humility, of recognizing that God is much much bigger than you are, of acknowledging the divine mystery that God is able to bring billions of unique human individuals into unity without erasing our individuality.

I am rather overwhelmingly preoccupied with the concept of a unity that does not erase individuality – in fact I'm convinced that it is the foundational philosophical conundrum of our time – and that is why I am so interested in ideas about God that do not resonate with me personally. Natural beauty, clearly, is a powerful witness of God to many people; which makes me wonder, why is it not one for me?

For a start, I think, it's because of the emphasis on science throughout my childhood. As far back as I can remember, my brothers and I were encouraged to be interested evolution and natural history and astronomy. Even though I did grow up going to church as well, I never saw God as a necessary factor in the natural world. My schema of the origins and development of the universe was complete in itself; your cosmological argument never made a great deal of sense to me.

Moreover, I am not a big nature person. Like, it's pretty and all, but that's about as far as it goes for me. I'm the world's biggest townie: a picture of the New York skyline makes my heart leap into my throat in a way that, say, one of Everest just doesn't. The closest I get to a religious experience in nature is when I look up at the night sky (somewhere out there an alternate universe version of me is a very happy astrophysicist). I have seen many a breathtaking sunset or waterfall in my lifetime, but those are not the things that stay with me. Maybe my childhood, surrounded by some of the most astonishing natural beauty on the planet, caused me to take it for granted.

The moments that do stay with me – the things I absolutely cannot take for granted – are the ones that give me what I lacked in childhood: namely, friendship. The natural world may not speak to me of God's goodness and love, but I find that goodness and love attested to in overwhelming abundance every time another human invites me to spend time with em, tells me ey cares about me, demonstrates that ey values my presence in eir life.

Creative and artistic works also bear witness to me of God. A book I love so much it hurts; a favorite TV show; “Spirit of Radio” or a Brandenburg Concerto – I can't not believe in God when I experience these things.

And yet, though friendship and creativity both witness to me of God, neither of them is the reason I believe in God. The reason, I'm afraid, is very much a product of my time among the evangelicals, and it comes down to this:

sola Jesu.

I believe in God through and because of (to, for, by, with, from, in, on) Jesus Christ. I can't go into detail, because my relationship with him is very very personal, but to me he is the grounding of everything. Throughout all of my consideration of lofty theological conundrums; in all of the ways that my first year of graduate theological studies has exploded my every attempt at understanding God into a million pieces; whenever I am so lost in deconstruction and postmodernism that I don't know which way is up – it all, in the end, brings me back to him.

If it wasn't for Jesus – for his life as recorded in the Gospels, for the countless theological and creative works interpreting that life, for the transformative encounter I had with him four years ago (whilst reading a passage in Mere Christianity on, of all things, penal substitution!) – I would still be an atheist-leaning agnostic, finding meaning in friendship and in creativity, but not God as such. He is the logic-defying leap for me, the inexplicable that transfigures “meaning” into “God.”

Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome

There's this messed-up thing my brain does sometimes, usually when I'm lying in bed at night hoping to switch off (though sometimes in the middle of my daily life, which is scarier). Typically I'll have been engaging in one of my favorite meditative practices, wherein I enumerate the people who mean a lot to me. I take a moment to think about each of them in turn, expressing my gratefulness for their presence in my life and asking for God's blessing on them.

And that's when my brain suddenly sabotages itself, unleashing a scenario where I learn that a parent, sibling, or best friend of mine has died (almost always in an auto accident). Now I'm careening down the path of emotional responses to the terrible news: my chest tightens, pain wells in my abdomen, and I'm picturing a future where I never get to see this individual again. Just like that, they're gone. I try to rein in the morbid fantasy as quickly as I can, but sometimes I get as far as composing a full-blown eulogy, and quite often tears are making themselves known before I manage to get the vision under control.

I can think of a couple of psychological explanations for these little episodes. I think they have an apotropaic function: like, if I can make myself experience the emotional distress of losing a dear friend, this will somehow convince the universe to leave all my friends alive (because The Universe, as a conscious being bent on dispensing suffering to all humans without discrimination, will see my distress, assume it's already killed someone I love, and therefore move on to murdering the loved ones of someone who hasn't experienced this distress? Hey, these are rationalizations, not rational thoughts). I also suspect, though I'm a little ashamed to admit this, that they're kind of practice – just checking, for the inevitable day when I will lose someone I love, that my emotion circuits are correctly wired and I am in fact capable of having the “right” emotional response.

What I want to know is: is this normal? Do other people experience little horror-fantasies like these, bubbling up unbidden in the silence of the night or in a moment of unguarded thought, or is there something wrong with me?

Nobel Prizes vs. Friends

“How can I be in the top 1%? I don't study that much. I mean, are the kids in Michigan schools that stupid?”

– Lindsay Weir, Freaks & Geeks episode 18, “Discos & Dragons”

“You're a good student, right? Do you ever think how powerful you could be if you never watched TV?”

– My friend Tyler

I always thought that one day someone would find me out. Surely my final high school exams would reveal the truth. University had to unmask me. At grad school they'd see right through me.

I'm starting to think they never will.

For as long as I can remember, people have been telling me I'm brainy. I vividly recall the other kids in kindergarten saying I should skip first grade (as it turned out, I skipped what would have been second grade). I topped the class throughout school, and over the years I've amassed a not inconsiderable collection of scholarships and academic prizes.

And the whole time I've been waiting, just waiting, for someone to point out the emperor's nudity. For me to max out my academic prowess. For my grades to reflect the amount of work I put in, not the vast ability to intellectually BS I was apparently born with.

I'm starting to think it will never happen.

I haven't always carried the guilt of the lazy A-student. As a prepubescent, I actually did work jolly hard. I consider my 13+ Common Entrance exams (which I took at 12, yada yada) to be the pinnacle of my academic career, because I studied hard and reaped my just reward. Everything since has felt unearned.

And yet the A grades and the accolades have kept coming, even as I've coasted through on the minimum of effort. I've mastered the art of working just hard enough to make people think I am very smart, and no harder. It does make me wonder, as Tyler said, what I could have accomplished if I'd kept on working as hard as I did when I was a preteen.

But I didn't; and actually TV's not to blame (I didn't start watching it until a few years later). The correlation I can pinpoint – the major factor that changed in my life at the same time that I started to coast academically – is that I started having friends.

Contrary to my prep school math teacher's predictions, I am never going to win the Nobel Prize for mathematics. But I am going to spend my leisure time with other humans who enjoy my company. My younger self might have been disappointed with my current self for making that choice, but I'd say it's a pretty fair tradeoff.

Of course, seeking validation through academic achievement is such a deeply ingrained part of my personality that if the tradeoff were, say, having friends but getting Bs, I'd be significantly more hesitant. But as long as the choice is Nobel Prizes or friends, I absolutely and without regret choose friends.

* * *

Having said all of which, grad school has just opened up a serious can of whoop on my ass, so if things are a little slow here at GCG over the next couple weeks, please bear with me. I'll be back on top of stuff just as soon as I can.

So, You Have A Crush On Me.

You're my friend, or perhaps a casual acquaintance. Or maybe you've just seen me at a bar or something. Whichever, something's gone awry in your brain chemistry, and now your feelings toward me are a little more than friendly.

Stop.

Do not ask me out. Do not offer me a drink. Do not tell me you have a “thing” for me, as though telling me will somehow absolve you of the guilt you feel over mentally straying from your SO. Just don't.

I will not acquiesce to your advances. I am, with all the best will in the world, not interested. I do not need this information.

Prior to your outright telling me, I was not aware of your feelings for me. I have not picked up on your social cues. I cannot read the signs (and if I could I wouldn't believe them).

Your telling me changes things. Whatever stage of friendship we were at, whatever good thing we had going on, you ruined it. I value our friendship/acquaintanceship/strangership and I don't want it ruined by an aberration in your brain chemistry.

Repress those feelings. Squash them down inside. Turn it off like a light-switch. Your culture may tell you that it's healthy to get these things out in the open, but I'm telling you: if you just suppress it hard enough, it will go away. Or, you know, it won't; but either way I won't have to deal with it, and that's what matters.

In all seriousness, I'm frustrated by the concept that a close friendship will or must evolve into a romantic relationship. I think it's because our culture confers ultimacy on romantic/sexual relationships, and this necessarily entails devaluing friendship: think how many movies and TV shows you've seen where the protagonist throws over career, friends, and everything else for the sake of a romantic partner.

I wear flannel and dungarees and am pretty openly gay; and yet, even in this queer progressive community, my very close relationship with a male friend is constantly read as romantic (it honestly couldn't be less so). Thanks, wider culture.

In high school, I categorized my strong feelings for a (male, gay) friend as romantic, even though I had zero physical designs on him, because I'd internalized the cultural messages that any strong feelings I had for a boy must be construed as romantic. I didn't yet have the deconstructive tools to maintain a very intimate but wholly platonic friendship.

Now I do; and now I know that, for me, friendship – not romance, not sex, but real true friendship – is the ultimate in human relationships. And that, in essence, is why I don't want people crushing on me.

Happily Ever After

My grandmother likes to say that, if she ruled the world, she would outlaw ending fairy tales with “...and they got married and lived happily ever after.” Instead, they would end: “... and they got married, and some days were better and some days were worse, but they both worked jolly hard at it and forged a loving mutual partnership, and I guess you could call that happiness.”

Of course, if I were writing fairy tales, they wouldn't involve marriage at all. The happily-ever-after would be something along the lines of “...and that lonely little girl grew up to have multiple kickass friends on several continents, and they were most excellent people.”

Then again, maybe calling that a happily-ever-after is a little premature. As Herodotus put it, “call no one happy until ey dies.” So, natch, I've been thinking: what is happy?

Since I started grad school, I'm happier than I've ever been. I love California, I love my studies, and I love my new friends (I TOTALLY HAVE FRIENDS HERE, YOU GUYS). Never before have I so quickly and easily found a place where I slotted in, made friends, felt at home: in both high school and undergrad, it wasn't until my second year that I really got comfortable, whereas here I felt totally settled by my second month.

That doesn't mean some days aren't difficult (though so far I've only had one really awful day, and most of that was fury at a profoundly horrible decision on the part of the UK government), and it certainly doesn't mean I'm in a perpetual state of bliss. I'm still human and this is still a human situation.

The thing about happiness – or this thing that I'm calling happiness while I'm still alive, at any rate – is that it necessarily carries with it an undercurrent of sadness. I've noted this at other times when I would characterize my general state as happy (final year of high school, spring through fall of my second and third years of undergrad, my summer 2010 travels around Europe with the then-girlfriend): true happiness is, for me, always accompanied by an awareness that this too shall pass.

Maybe it's different if you're a real, settled grown-up with, like, a career and stuff, but as long as you're planning your life in increments of two or three years, every period of joy you find also brings you the pain of knowing that it will be over soon. I'm in a two-year master's degree program; even next year won't be the same, as some of my friends will have graduated, and the year after that – who knows?

And that's the looming shadow of mortality. Any day, any minute, I or one (or all; oh hai, San Andreas fault) of my friends could snuff it, and it'd be sayonara to this precarious happiness. Any account of the good life has to encompass the tragic transience of human existence; and that knowledge, I think, is what transforms mere surface happiness into the deep, sorrow-tinged contentment that is joy.

This too shall pass: it's a source of sadness, and it's a clarion call to carpe diem, to make the most of this fleeting delight for as long as you're graced with its presence.

Quiet Days

Almost every other day, somebody says to me, “Are you okay? You're very quiet today.”

Recently, after a pleasant dinner with the gang, one friend (who prides herself on her emotional astuteness) texted me: “I can't help but notice that you didn't look okay earlier.” My repeated assurances that nothing was wrong seem to have convinced her only that I am unwilling to share with her my deep emotional pain and trauma.

So I asked another, less emotionally-charged friend if I had looked somehow not okay at dinner. He said to me, “Sometimes you're very talkative, and other times you're very quiet.”

Well, duh. Why does this confuse people?

When we were teenagers, my very best friend, who I have known my entire life, used to say pretty often, “You're very quiet today.” I wondered how many quiet days I would have to have before she cottoned on, but I attributed her repeated confusion to her extroversion (in contrast to my textbook introversion).

Some days, I have a lot to say. Other days, I do not. What is odd about this? What is unusual about this? Do most people have things to say every day, or do they just force themselves to keep talking even on days when they have nothing to say?

I like good conversation, but I am not afraid of silence. I talk when I want to, and when I don't want to talk I don't. In this way I can (mostly) avoid those instances of mindless babbling where I listen to myself talking and think, “My God, would you shut up?”

Some days, I am talkative. Other days, I am quiet. This is entirely logical. Why do people find it so baffling?

Awkwardness.

At the moment I can't cope with any of my feminine-coded clothes or accessories. I can't even carry a purse. I can't hack anything coded feminine. Everything I wear, I have to question whether it's coded feminine. Everything I carry, I have to question whether it's coded feminine. My slouch as I walk down the street, my stance as I stand on the BART platform, my body position as I sit watching movies beside a friend: is it coded feminine?

All the time – all the time – I am thinking this, and it's doing my head in. I'm worried that it's a manifestation of internalized misogyny that's making me reject “girl stuff”. I'm frustrated that all the subtle coding in the world won't stop me from being read on first sight as female (until I can get my hands on a binder, anyway). I'm despairing at the knowledge that one big bearded guy wearing a skirt is doing more to shatter the patriarchy than I'm doing with every aspect of this obsession that's consuming my waking life, because “person read as male choosing things that are coded feminine” is a billion times more transgressive than “person read as female choosing things that are coded masculine”.

I hate that gender performativity has us being read as one of two options, when I want to be read as something else. I hate that I can't stop thinking about it, no matter what I'm doing. I hate that “male” and “female” are still seen as important categorical distinctions, even as I find them increasingly arbitrary and irrelevant.

*

I can't stop overthinking my new friendships. When somebody says or does a certain thing, I find myself thinking: This is what a friend does, right? This person is doing friend stuff with me and considers me a friend. How long until I say something so irreparably stupid that I ruin it forever? Or have I finally got this friendship thing figured out?

Without wanting to speak too soon, I think I have a couple of pretty great new friendships going here in California. I've been here just over two months, and there are definitely a few people who seem to regard me as a full-blown friend. It's weird, though, that, at a time when I'm doing better than I've ever done at the friendship game, my tics and stims and awkwardness in casual interactions have gotten significantly worse.

Like, I went to a burger place where I'd never been before. That should be a simple interaction if ever there was one: you order your food, the cashier tells you how much it costs, you pay, the cashier hands you your food. And yet it was excruciatingly awkward. I just couldn't seem to do it right. When faced with conversational awkwardness, some people start babbling, but I BSOD – just freeze right up and forget how to make words with my mouth.

Like, the other night (we'd been drinking), one of my new friends asked me, “What do you think will happen if you let go of your collar? Do you think you're going to float away?” Like, I was getting funny looks on BART yesterday because I couldn't stop stimming. Like, the other day someone unfamiliar with the guide to not touching jokingly grabbed me by the shirt, and thinking about it still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

*

Shit, I wish I could just switch off sometimes.

A Guide To Not Touching

America generally is a much more touchy-feely place than Britain, and progressive seminary in the East Bay Area might be the touchy-feeliest place of all. This makes me super-uncomfortable, so I've thrown together a brief Guide To Not Touching for my new friends. Bookmark this page, and if you see me and feel inclined to get touchy-feely, consult this guide first.

1. No unsolicited hugs. Whether we're in church, doing something specifically hippy-dippy, or we just happen to bump into each other, don't hug me. You're great and stuff – this doesn't mean I don't like you – but wanton hugging is weird for me. You don't French all the friends you run into; I don't hug all mine.

2. No sneaking up. If you're approaching from outside my field of vision, or if I'm really absorbed in something and haven't noticed you, speak to me. Don't clap a hand on my shoulder. It freaks me out and I have to fight the urge to punch you.

3. No friendly poking or prodding. I get that some people like to poke their friends in the rib, or punch them lightly on the arm, but that's not a friendly thing for me. I find it aggressive and it sets me on edge. Personal bubble, okay?

4. NO TOUCHING MY FACE OR NECK. Ever. Under any circumstances at all. My hitting you is a reflex reaction to your touching my face or neck; you've been forewarned, and I admit no liability.

5. No rubbing my stomach. This means you, Tyler.

6. Ask. If you want to hug me, ask first. Give me space to refuse, and don't be offended if I do. I do like hugs, but they're quite an intimate thing for me and I don't want them every day. On a very special day, I might be up for hugs. Under ordinary circumstances, “Go Team Venture!” is an appropriate level of physical contact for me. If I'm feeling extra twitchy and anxious, I'll want nothing more than a nice distance-keeping Vulcan salute.

I know it seems strange to you physical people, but this is my deal. If it helps, think of me as a brain in a jar – it's what we'll all be in a few years anyway.