I’ve been meaning to start blogging again, and every night seems to be something and it doesn’t happen. Usually it’s me staring at my phone rather than reading or writing or doing anything that’s constructive, but hey, I’m certainly not alone in doing that.
Truth is, I blogged for a long time – starting in 2003 – but the last time I wrote a post was in October. I just haven’t been moved to write like I used to. Part of it is because it seems like blogging is very passé. Does anyone even read blogs anymore? In a world of Facebook updates and tweets, is a post like this even interesting any longer? It’s hard to tell. But in the end, I write for me and not for anyone else. If someone happens to read it, great. But it’s not my primary purpose in writing.
It just seems like now’s the time to start up again, and honestly, I’m ready to be done with my other blog. 15+ years is a long time to maintain a blog, and although my posts had dropped off in frequency a lot in the last several years, it still felt like home to me. But too many people from my real life know me there. Hell, my mom reads my posts there. And ultimately, I’m not really that person any longer.
A lot has happened in my life in the last year. I’ve admitted that I’m a gay man. I’ve said so to my wife (you read that right) and we remain committed to our marriage. A lot of people would say that I’m lying to myself or only hurting her but honestly I couldn’t care less what other people say about that part of me because only I know the real truth and it’s my relationship to navigate. Who is anyone else to say what makes a family, especially mine? I’m much further out of the closet than I ever expected I would be. Even writing this blog is an act of bravery for me. The simple act of saying it out loud is sometimes hard. I still have a difficult time saying the words “I’m gay.” It seems foreign to me and something I spent so much of my life running away from that to embrace it feels crazy.
It’s weird to be in your mid-40s and suddenly you decide that you have to be honest with yourself. Perhaps it’s the mid-40s themselves that create the environment for that kind of thing to flourish. It’s easy to call it a mid-life crisis, but I don’t think it’s that. I think that if you get to middle age and you’re NOT thinking about what you’ve done with your life and what you want to do with the time you have left, you aren’t paying attention.
I’m dealing with a metric fuckton of anxiety currently. It’s been so bad that it’s basically crippled me. I’m still managing to get out of bed and go to work every day, but there isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think about calling in sick. Much like I have always been gay, I have always been anxious. I look back to when I was a kid and I was one of those nervous kids that always feared the worst. Sadly, it was the 80s and I couldn’t get the therapy I so desperately needed so I turned into an anxious adult. My college years were mostly lost to undiagnosed anxiety and depression, a fact I still struggle with. I was anxious and depressed when my daughter was a baby and now she’s in her final years of high school and not much has changed. That kind of thing makes me feel bad about feeling bad and that just spirals in on itself, like a snake eating its tail.
My goal for this blog is to talk more openly about my sexuality, how it affects me day to day, and also to process the anxiety and depression that are as much a part of me as my eye color. If even one person reads these words and feels like they aren’t alone, I have accomplished something. But I don’t want this blog to be just about serious subject matter. I’ll have some fun too because, despite the anxiety I’m feeling these days over just about everything, I have a good life with a lot of things to live for.
So here we go. I’m not promising brilliance, because I’m not putting that kind of pressure on myself. We’ll see if I can keep this up.
Four Poster, Dull Torpor 