Twenty Nine Decline
On January 25, 1993, God was in heaven and completed his best accomplishment ever. Mariah Carey won Favourite Pop/Rock Female Artist at the 20th American Music Awards. His second biggest achievement was creating me. Obviously. I’m not really sure what direction I’m going to take this post in. I write to the cyber abyss hoping it reaches the eyes of some reader who will find something relatable in this cesspool of word jumble. If you’re like me and have reached the latter half of your 20s then you know the incipient feeling of death approaching our door. As I look at my age go down a tick and the second digit almost hitting a new milestone, I prepare myself for another year of uncertainty and confusion. In gay context I’m not old enough to be called “daddy",” yet I see the profiles read in bold, capital letters that some 21 year old prefers someone “close to my age” which is a vague way to say 18 - 25.
Gay men have a complicated relationship with aging. For those of us who have lived in the canonical closet you will know that most of our formative years were spent in a façade. We live out an inauthentic life in order to blend in with our surroundings and appear “masc and straight” as a survival mechanism. We change the way we speak, the way we dress, conform to how our relatives expect us to act, and hang out with the cliques that make us feel socially secure even at the sacrifice of genuine connections. I am no exception to this cliché much to my chagrin. High school was a nightmare and a half. I had to turn down my femininity and blend with the youth group teens so I can find some sense of belonging in the hormonal labyrinth. Since we gays live out this fake life for a handful of years, it’s enough to mess us up that our therapists will be in business until retirement.
When so much of our life has been spent acting a certain way that isn’t aligned with how we truly are, by the time we decide to come out we are spending the chunk of our adulthood unpacking the things we thought were authentic to us. We ask ourselves if being that jock was really who we were or was that just me trying to survive in a climate that couldn’t accept authenticity. In the spirit of honesty, I will disclose that much of my adulthood after coming out at 21 has been spent trying to figure out who I really am even as I type the words you see in front of you. I would assume this is true for a lot of other gay men out there who are in the ripe geriatric 30s and over. How do I know which part of me is real and which part was fake? Was it me being honest to myself or was it just an act?
In the work I do in therapy, I’m trying to connect with my inner child who has been so badly mistreated by the world that he refuses to speak to me. I call him Eeyore. I would call him Tim, but if Tim starts talking in the third person, Tim will start to sound like Elmo and Tim will be confused. Eeyore and I have a complicated relationship. Eeyore is a closeted kid carrying lots of emotional baggage brought upon by a world that wished to do him harm from every which way. My issue with Eeyore is that I don’t know if that is an authentic version of myself or if that’s something I’m imagining. Almost as if I’m gaslighting myself. I’m trying so desperately to reconnect with Eeyore and reassure him that he’s not broken. He’s trying his best to protect me from feeling worthless and dumb with what little resources a kid has at his disposal. So while I try to reconnect with Eeyore, Tim the adult tries to catch up on all the things that an authentic adult would have experienced. Rushing to find love only to discover it in the wrong places like the back of a seedy dive bar. Getting intoxicated with the drag queens because I’ve fallen victim to peer pressure. Acting like a Regina George within my own queer community because I never got the chance to be the popular kid in high school. Trying to put other gays down because if I can’t be happy with my gayness, then nobody should. Attempting to find the right label because I’m somewhere between a bear and a twunk and a Drag Race gay and not quite a Real Housewives gay. I’m not exactly sure where to fit in. And I’m not exactly sure I’ll ever find the answer to that question.
As I turn 29 and live out the last year of my 20s, I continue to explore the idea of living authentically and simultaneously looking back and looking forward. I look back at my young adult years and see the mistakes I’ve made while looking forward and see what I can learn from those mistakes to be a better version of myself than how I was back then. I celebrated by having my first threesome of 2022 because I learned from my teen years that life is too short to not have threesomes. I’m currently trying to find the right antidepressant combination to help with my mood disorders because I learned that finding help and being on medication and therapeutic intervention is nothing to be ashamed of. I also learned that as much as I love to help people, I need to help myself. I need to be there for me in order for me to be there for other people. I haven’t given myself the genuine love, care, and attention that I’m so readily able to give others. I take these lessons with me to heart hoping that 29 will serve as a conclusion to what has been a tumultuous decade. I hope that everything will be okay and that I am able to continue to do the work that I do in servicing the sluts and help you live your most authentic selves. As I’ve mentioned in the past, my mantra to sex education is, “Don’t do what I did and learn from my mistakes.” I hope that with each passing mistake I make in this next year I take a lesson from it to carry with me for the years to come. I wish the same for you. Be well, dear reader.
And happy birthday to me.
