Coming Out + Speaking Up
For the last ten years, I have been hiding a lot of myself from people. The biggest thing immediately being that I’m gay and I only recently came out. I don’t want to make my sexuality a big part of my personality. Rather I want to stop feeing self-conscious about this and other parts of who I am just for the sake of others.
I’ve moved roughly once every year of my life and have had to constantly rebuild myself for each new environment. Often that includes compartmentalizing certain parts of myself or avoiding certain topics so as not to make waves. But also moving around has exposed me to a lot of different viewpoints and helped me see that it’s not as black and white of a world as we try to make it out to be.
I still have evolving feelings on a lot of stuff, but I’m realizing that I can’t keep pushing everything down. No one can. We numb ourselves with things like alcohol, opioids, Marvel movies, Funko Pops, organized religion, and political grandstanding in hopes to make the modern world seem less awful. All that we’re doing is atomizing society. This whole concept of us versus them has been plaguing humanity for millennia.
The problem is there is no one right answer to most of life’s big questions. Everyone is guessing and they’re acting like their logic is infallible. We’re killing people for religions we barely understand and political ideologies that are never fully realized and are constantly being manipulated by people at the top that play both sides for their own profit.
Families and friends have grown distant and distrustful. Rather than uniting over the things we can change, we just divide ourselves over the things we can’t. Every side is seeing a different piece of the puzzle but so few people are taking a step back to actually look at it or to grab the lid of the box to see what it’s eventually supposed to look like.
I want to start talking about big issues and I can’t do that if I’m just constantly worrying about what other people will think. Rather than quietly collecting all of this information and growing to resent the fact that no one else seems to understand, I want to actually try to help people understand and see the big picture.
The last two years have been some of the most divisive times in human history. We’re getting people obsessed with things we that cannot change about ourselves or the world. To just reduce us to these labels is keeping society from overcoming its innate tribal instincts. We all have these biases but I want to help people break out of it or at least become aware that it is a bias.
In life I’m drawn to truth and beauty and for the most part those two things do not overlap and when they do it’s wonderful. But we as a society need to recognize that people aren’t perfect and history is a series of people trying to do the right thing only to do the worst possible thing. But rather than just demonizing these people and sitting in our ivory towers, why aren’t we coming together and figuring out how to actively avoid these things? How to actually help people?
Regardless of how you feel about any of these topics, you just have to recognize that this level of division is not healthy for society. We must accept that man is imperfect but not without redemption. Mankind is capable of amazing things but we keep getting distracted by all of this minutiae that really doesn’t effect anything. This addiction to content, to validation, to groupthink.
We need to recognize that multiple viewpoints can coexist. Eastern and western philosophies appear vastly different on the surface but both are ultimately telling to do the same thing. To look within. That all of the knowledge that you’ll ever get comes from within. The way you react to the world around you, and the way you perceive the world around you. Jesus said to be as alert as the serpent and as simple (meaning innocent) as the dove. We must protect ourselves and our loved ones from the evils of the world while also trying to prevent evil forming within ourselves and spreading out into the world.
We let our lives be dictated by these institutions that don’t represent us. Governments, multinational corporations, and religious institutions continue to have a stranglehold on society when they’re actively fighting against the very values they espouse.We let these ideas be forced upon us rather than really analyze them on our own and try to understand how they fit in ourselves and our worldview.
The only way we can fight these people is to come together and share ideas. To be loving. To be understanding. To be curious. And it’s my goal that through whatever incoherent ramblings I produce moving forward I can at least move the needle a little bit and know that I did something to make the world better.