A Decade and a Half of Hell, Part the First

I have written a lot about my recent journey after discovering that the source of so much of my unhappiness came from self-hate and shame. But I haven't talked at all about what all the self-hate and shame actually looked like and how it played out in my life. This is, I believe, a very important reality that anyone who desires empathy should be aware of.

I've decided that since my 20's are the symbol of my most prolonged and intense "adult" struggles, I should write about what they were like and how I felt while going through them. This is not to say that this one decade was either a) all terrible, all the time or b) the lowest I've ever felt in my life, but it was like my self-hate was on a slow boil. Sometimes I had to move it to the back burner to make room for other things, but it always got pulled back up to the front for at least a while. Sometimes I would crank the heat way up just to watch the steam rise and the water splatter all over. Sometimes, in a way that I still don't completely understand, I would forget its presence entirely, pretend it wasn't there, pretend that its bubbling was the sound of something else.


To augment this post (and the next one), I'll be using several quotations from a brilliant short book I read recently. It is called Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul, written by Jonathan Rauch. It is very short and it's only $1.99, so I highly recommend it for anyone who either experienced deep shame and/or denial growing up or to anyone who wants to read about how it feels to know, with painful and agonizing certainty, that one is different from everyone else around him. (My citations come from the Kindle version of the book and are location numbers rather than page numbers.)


The past approximately 18 years of my life can be summed up into this one quotation: "For all those dreary years, I had made myself a monster in my desperation not to be one" (934). From early childhood, I knew very well what society thought of me. I knew very well what my religion thought of me. I made a pact with myself very early on in my life that I was not and would never be seen as any of those things I was being implicitly taught I was. I alone knew what was going on in my heart. I knew that I wanted to give and receive love. I told myself over and over that it didn't matter what anyone else thought of me, and I told everyone else the same. But somehow, against my every intention, it became all about them. It became a performance. I was, in a very real sense, marketing and selling a brand. Despite my pragmatism, intellectualism, and logic, I turned into the very thing I promised myself I would not.

I had my first official boyfriend, Aaron*, when I was 18. He was 23. We met, of all places, on a phone dating service. His message said something about being raised Mormon and I was immediately enamored of him for that fact alone. Against my better judgment, with a stomach full of terror and a guilty greed, I signed up for the service (which one had to do in order to reply to messages) and left him a message. I have no recollection now what I said, but he responded, and in a matter of a couple days we were talking on the phone and corresponding via letters (real, hand-written letters, kids). When I finally saw pictures of him, I found him attractive in a charming sort of way but knew that I didn't feel that "gut" spark of attraction. There was only one thing on my mind, especially at that stage: prove to the world and to the family I had just come out to that I was normal and could have a normal relationship like a normal adult. When Aaron and I met in person, I naively convinced myself that he was the one I was going to be with for the rest of my life. He spent Christmas with my family that year, after telling my mom that he had no family in the area. I did all I could to make him visible, to flaunt him, as it were. But he and I were not a match. I knew it deep down from the very start; there were plenty of red flags waving in my face. But I ignored every one of them and went full steam ahead.

This attitude was to become my modus operandi for the entirety of my 20's and almost half of my 30's.

Although "I could look in the mirror...and see that what looked back was, in fact, not a mantis or a mutant...my appearance as reflected objectively was beside the point. I might look halfway human in this mirror or in that photo, at this moment or in that light, but that trivial victory had no bearing on the unbudgeable reality of my ugliness..." (481). There were two distinct (and opposing) mirrors I used to gauge my validity: my family and men. I got something unique from each of them and wore different masks when presenting myself to them. From my family, I needed spiritual validation; that is, I needed them to embrace me as an equal in order for me to embrace myself as a legitimate human being. I felt that the only way to do this was to appear to them as well-adjusted, confident, and "normal" as a gay guy could be. But I also had this lurking sense of shameful ugliness, both within and without, and to mitigate that ugliness, I had to use basically any man who was unlucky enough to cross my path, viz. any man who complimented me or otherwise stroked my ego. This was the part of me that my family and 95% of my friends never saw or knew existed. (So get ready for a shock, family and friends. Or stop reading here if you don't want these details of my life. Things are about to get ugly.)

I became, "in the dark," the exact person I tried to prove to my family and the world at large that I was not. It was a slow process that started when I was about 21. At that age, I started going to clubs and dancing with my shirt off. I found out that I could get lots of attention that way. At this stage, I didn't have the Internet, so meeting men was done in person at bars or clubs or through friends. Even when I finally got internet access, I rarely met people that way.

In my mid-20s, I started frequenting internet chat rooms and dating websites. I met guys and sometimes did things that put me at physical risk. (The fact that I made it out healthy still amazes me.) I did all this for one purpose: I had to feel attractive. I needed to feel wanted. Feeling attractive made me feel powerful; feeling powerful made me feel wanted and desired; feeling desired made me feel attractive. I'm sure you see the cycle. It became a drug I was terrified to go without. In addition to the "cycle of validation," there was also a perpetual subconscious drive toward self-punishment, a drive that was probably even more powerful than my addiction to validation. But I would remain ignorant of that for many years yet.

I told my conscious self that I was husband hunting. I convinced myself that I had to date a lot of guys in order to find the one with whom I was meant to be. But what about the guys I didn't date? What about all the no-strings-attached encounters? What did I tell myself about those? Nothing. Nothing at all. Often, when I would leave someone's house, I would either spit repeatedly in his driveway or hold all my saliva in my mouth until I got home, where I would spit into the sink. I would brush my teeth until my gums bled and gargle mouthwash. I would shower in the hottest water I could handle and scrub my body as roughly as I could. I wanted nothing more than to rid myself of the entire experience I had just had. I didn't allow myself to consciously think about anything I had done: I kept my mind a total black, bleak, abyssal blank. After someone left my house, I would oftentimes just sit on my bed and stare silently and numbly at the wall in front of me or at my ceiling. For a while I would say in my head, never again, Justin. That has to be the last time. It has to be... And that thought, fake optimism as it was, was what kept me going on. (I wish I had a dollar for every time I promised myself that "this time" was the "last time.") It would never be long before I faltered again: feeling ugly and worthless was just too powerful, and there was only one thing I could use to fight it: my body.

There were brief sparks of light, however. I dated a guy named Mark for about ten weeks. He was kind and funny and intelligent. He stayed at my house every weekend, and almost every single weekend, we would go to my mom's house for dinner and a movie. My mom liked him. My siblings liked him. My friends liked him. This relationship was everything I could have wanted. And he was going to school to be a doctor! It was after the first time he told me he loved me that things started to fall apart for me. "I had been born without a soul. What is a self, after all, but a soul, and what is a soul without love and without even the capacity for love? The soul is a sovereign, but without love it has no kingdom. In a matter-of-fact way, I began to understand that I was a monster" (36). Since I was a monster, I knew that I was not worthy of love. I knew, or had convinced myself, rather, through years of self-conditioning that anyone who said he loved me had something wrong with him. And as soon as someone said he loved me, I began to look for anything that could be considered "bad," anything at all to justify my breaking up with him. And as any psychologist will tell you, when you go in search of something, no matter what it is, you will always find evidence to support whatever you want to see or believe. You will create realities. You will fabricate facts. Your brain, in short, will do whatever is necessary to give you the peace of mind that you are right and the other person or people are wrong. More to the point, "Whether one likes this or that person is less important, finally, than whether one likes oneself with this or that person" (891). Because I hated myself on a very deep and fundamental level, it was impossible for me to like myself with anyone, no matter how wonderful he may have been. In fact, the more wonderful a guy was, the more essential it became for me to push him far, far away from me.

So Mark had to go the way of all the others. He had to go because he wanted to see me in a way that I could not see myself, that I was incapable of seeing. He will always be the one that got away.

*all names changed for privacy