The wounded boy

[Trigger warning: death; loss; abandonment, rejection, neglect.]

Yesterday my boy-chest turned 15 months.

Something I was hoping to celebrate with the gay guy with whom I had my first date last week and was planning to see again last night. But I ended up having to attend to the wounded boy in me, instead of celebrating his 15 months of visible existence. 

The gay guy canceled on me at the last minute. To be fair, he didn’t simply cancel on me. He had been having a particularly exhausting week at work — something he had already let me know during the week — and tried to reschedule for tonight. But I gave him a hard, non-negotiable “No” for tonight because of special & important plans of my own involving other people and other activities that are very meaningful to me. Given both my schedule and his, the earliest we can see each other again, for our second date, would be May 14th, more than two weeks away. He asked if we could put it in the calendar to see each other then and he would cook for me to make it up to me. Also, to his credit and to be totally honest, we had this conversation on the phone yesterday evening: he called me to try to reschedule and decide together what to do, he didn’t just send a text to cancel. 

I know that his liking me is genuine. And he likes me as a whole, not just physically, but even intellectually and emotionally — we both feel & agree that we’d want to be platonic friends even if the romantic/sexual aspect didn’t work. But how I feel is that “he canceled on me last night after having nearly had to cancel last week”. What remains for me is that he couldn’t rally himself out of his tiredness last night to see me. To me that nullifies all his compliments and sweet words for me. 

I need someone who shows up. Words come later, if at all. Actions, facts are what matter to me, what count for me, what I need. Like with my climbing buddies: we show up for each other, even if/when we’re tired. We build the trust not with words, which can be so empty, so deceiving, but by actually showing up, by actually being there for each other. 

I was so angry last night, so disappointed, so hurt. Out of proportion angry and disappointed and hurt if one looks at it in terms of a “canceled second date”. I know my reaction to what happened last night is “out of proportion” to last night’s event per se. My flaring anger last night came from a deep deep wound, a very old wound of mine: the wounded boy in me, the wounded boy that I am. 

The wounded boy who was abandoned, or rejected or neglected, by his father for so many years, for decades, from a tender age. I “technically” lost my dad last summer when he died; but I actually lost my dad over three decades ago when he abandoned me because I was a “girl” and as such “my mother’s business”. 

This wound is so deep in me and still so raw also because it encompasses two losses at once: there’s the wound from not being acknowledged as the boy that I was, that I’ve always been; and the connected/consequent wound of being abandoned, or rejected or neglected, by my father because of me “not being a boy”. And the consequences of this deep, old wound are that I still get very triggered when somebody whom I look forward to seeing cancels on me — and I feel much more hurt (& therefore angry) when it’s a cis-male “bailing on me” rather than someone with a less masculine gender identity. 

My entire life I’ve been yearning and striving to have cis-boy friends as buddies to help affirm my boy identity. And I’ve also sought out (& fortunately found) many surrogate father figures as mentors and/or older cis-male friends. And I realize that one of the reasons why my relationships with my climbing buddies (almost all of them cis-male) are so important to me is precisely because they’re cis-men with whom I can have a very strong and deep and intimate connection, stemming from the camaraderie between climbers, while still being platonic and as such “safe” for me because it’s “close but not too close”. 

Eventually, I would also really like to have sexual and/or romantic partners who are gay cis-men, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to. I won’t unless I heal that deep, deep wound; unless I find a way of healing that wounded boy in me.