I remember in my life when I felt the world move past me. It was like knowing that I could not keep up and they were all going places and experiencing thing I would never know. There is a specific feeling that goes along with these memories. I remember the first time I had it was when I was asked to read aloud in third grade. I still remember sitting there reading, but not as well as some of the others. The feeling was overwhelmingly and castrating. I actually felt my balls shrink in shame. It was a tingling sensation, a retreat a cowardice of sorts. But in fact it was shame because I knew I could do better if I only had the voice, the guts the intelligence. The next time this feeling fell upon me was when I was standing outside of a university campus in New York State. The buildings were impressive and elegant. I was sure many fascinating things were going on inside them. And I also knew I would never know the joys of those classed, those conversations and those people. I began to descend into depression. It was hard not only because I felt as though I was falling behind, forever lost in mediocrity but because I felt stupid. Not the kind of stupid "stupid" people feel - they usually are so ignorant that they do not know how stupid they truly are, but the kind of stupid you ARE aware of. And I new why. Being gay and in the closet most of my life has been a chore so monumental that it has robbed me of much of my potential in many areas of my life. It is no wonder I sank to the bottom right from grammar school. I was doomed and there was no help or hope for me. When you are in the closet you are challenged to an extent that the preoccupation with your sexuality and the shame of being found out along with problems it causes on many other levels. Basically the the energy we are required to spend sexuality related adaptation wastes so much of our time that we can no give our studies sports or social connections the focus or the attention they deserved. Hence, our lives are lived in mediocrity. Virtually all our up-time spent problem solving and adapting to society instead of conquering it.

The consequences of such things lead me straight to drugs in college and then to painful relationships that ended always in pain. I never had never developed skills to deal with people where it mattered. I have lived on superficial relationships as long as I can remember and now, at 54 years old, I find myself forgiving the past and myself for not understanding the degree to which I was challenged.

When a child has a condition in his life as powerful and important as sexuality where he can not go to his parents or teachers or to his minister with complete trust and confidence he is lost. I found myself completely responsible for my condition all alone, and I knew that would never change. An adaptation this large would have been difficult enough with therapy and support from family and society but to imagine the burden for a child to handle this taboo in 1963 (eleven years from being re-defined as NOT a mental illness) was and still is unimaginable. And so it has always been. There is no wonder why I have been alone most of my life. I am alone at this very minute as well. I do not know how to be with people for extended periods. I adapted heroically for the amount of recovery I have achieved. And yet, even though I have tasted life I never was able to sink my teeth into life. The reason is because quite often live bit back ... my inexperience brought with it problems that were bitterly sad, even tragic. And my world had collapsed time after time imploding with fear and sadness.

Now I look back trying to reconcile reading in third grade, standing in front of that university. I knew I was broken. And I knew I would never be whole in the way other people were. The problem appears to be that I had placed in front of myself an expectation that I "must become" someone that I am not. The goal was not specific. But the expectation was a reversal where I would tell myself that anything different from me would be good. Hence assigning myself a general label of undesirable ... just like everyone else in the world thought of me. I was forever in shame. This mistake sticks with me to this day. And I am sad to know that I am lived my life with this weight. This useless weight. Even today I look out at the world from my relatively secure place in the world and see that there is no place for me.

Still I try to adapt and to fit in. I try to make friends and to be whole, but I know that it is all in vain. I will never fit in and there will never be a place for me in the arms of a beautiful trusted partner. And I will never drive that Ferrari. Most of that is okay, except never having a partner.

We go most of our lives romanticizing what it would be like to be married or in love or to have a great boyfriend who we adore. That well has been poisoned to a degree that is can not ever be clean drinking water again. There are parts to our psyche that do not recover unless we attract the love of a person so very kind that they must have been a saint in a past life or just by sexual attraction we can keep a guy on a string. But that all comes at a price.

In my experience the people I have been involved with always had a reason to love me. Either it was the promise of gratification in terms of sex or if they were also broken the emotional support they craved or they just simply did not want to be alone. These kinds of people are not ready for relationships and should by definition be in therapy NOT in relationships. But then that was the only men I attracted. The broken, the beaten and the damned. And, of course, their interest would disperse as quickly as it came often leaving me devastated hurt and living at a level of self reproach far greater than before.

I never wanted to hate myself but it was too late as that train had long left the station. My education was ruined and my mind was a maze of knee jerk reactions and patchwork adaptations. To build a life on these things means you are not going to get much of a life at all. And that is how it has turned out. I do not have much of a life at all.

I still deal with ghosts from the past. Pathological lying pops up from time to time along with the reality of really scary things like when I got arrested, or got in deep with the internal revenue or other scary thing that happened.

Generally I can beat down depression, lying and take care of the legal stuff. But now I am 54 and I am getting tired. As much as I try I still do not have the necessary mitiv////

I stopped writing and did EFT Tapping on all the the issues above. I did three rounds of Emotional Freedom Technique. We will see how well they worked.
End.