Part 2 - Who Am I Really?
What a big question: who am I? What am I doing here?
I've always been one of the "good ones." I was a good kid growing up, staying out of trouble. I'm a good employee. A reliable friend. A rule respecter. And while some of that is definitely important to me (I will always sacrifice the shirt off my back for the good of a friend), the rest has often felt lacking.
I've joked that if everything ever fell apart I would sell everything I own, buy a camper van, and become a nomad. These days I'm not sure it's much of a joke.
Most of my life I've had short hair, wore collared shirts, responded with ma'am and sir, and by all accounts appeared to the world like the spitting image of a nice, respectable man. I think I had even fooled myself for a while, and so much of that puritanical training is in my bones now that I find it hard to fully escape. But these days my hair is to my shoulders, my body is tattooed, and metal band shirts make up a chunk of my wardrobe.
Some might call it a mid-life crisis. I've always believed a mid-life crisis is a natural sort of rebellion. The soul of a person, long repressed, yearning for escape. Why do men buy sports cars and motorcycles? Freedom. Expression. The vivid, tangible sense of a long unknown self made physical.
Of course items cannot provide these things, thus why mid-life crises tend to fail. But I think it's a mistake to view that as reason to dismiss the core motivation - the need for something more.
I've always found monogamy odd. There's too much beauty in the world, too much love. Should we find a single painting to latch onto forever? Or a single book? A single natural panorama? A single location? In all things we say variety is the spice of life, and then we deny ourselves that spice in our daily relationships. When I was younger I wrote off this feeling as a typical male puberty fantasy, for what boy does not want multiple sexual partners? Yet as I've grown older, as the feeling has lingered, as it has confirmed itself to be about something other than sex, I can no longer deny it. There are too many people to intimately know and to be known by, too many people in pain and in need of connection, too many people who need a shoulder to cry on, or a person to share in their triumphs. There's too much need left on the proverbial table of society. Why repress ourselves so?
But then I have often been labeled a hopeless romantic.
My politics are usually defined as radical, though I would argue they're simply sensible. Morality should always rule over the almighty dollar. In fact, the almighty dollar shouldn't exist. Who's morality? Whoever does the most good for the most people. What is good? That which brings joy and comfort. Billionaires should not exist, for they are the leeches on the underbelly of our social order, sucking life from the rest of us. Everyone should have shelter by right, and utilities, healthcare, food, etc. How we can live in a society that's happy to treat its people with such cruelty as to not give the basics for life is beyond me. And on and on. Borders are dumb, people are people everywhere, trans rights, you get it. I'm one of them radicals who cares about people more than systems.
Is all this who I am? Or is it just an explanation of ideals? What's the difference?
I'm the small, rural town nightmare. I know this because I was raised in a small, rural town. The heat hushed fear is that the kids are being stolen and brainwashed. That they'll go to college and then a big city, they'll lose their religion, drink, fuck around, get tattoos, and worst of all, become liberals. Well, I guess they had to get at least one thing right eventually, though they'll never interrogate why such folks chose to leave their town.
I always knew something was wrong, even in my youth. I became very religiously devout for years in search for answers to questions I couldn't even construct. I was preaching to my youth group peers, debating theology with my ministers. I was one of those kids.
Those kids always seem to turn atheist eventually. I am no exception.
Who am I, really?
I have no idea, but it's better than who I was.