The Little Prince and the Fox

This has been the first good Christmas for me in years. But it’s also been very melancholic and full of different, even opposite, intense emotions. 

This month of December has been rough, a roller-coaster of feelings, often difficult ones, with a lot of loneliness and fear of the holidays. 

The end of the semester with its more than usual extreme/dichotomic reactions from the students was rough, almost too intense to be bearable. 

The extra loneliness and sadness I felt as the holidays were approaching was also unbearable, but then fortunately things turned around as I was (& am being) showered with & wrapped up in love and support from friends — (geographically) near & far — as well as neighbors, climbing buddies, and acquaintances from the queer community. I can feel the warm love, and it feels wonderful. Compared to last year’s holidays and several recent holidays or holidays as an adult back in Europe, this Christmastime has been so much better, so much lovelier. And yet also so much more melancholic and even sad, mainly because of my losses from this summer feeling sharper again now. 

This is the first Christmas without my father — not just for me — I hadn’t really had Christmas with my dad in years — but especially for my mother (& sister). The last time I saw my dad alive, in person, was during the Christmas holidays eight years ago, three weeks before I left Europe and moved to California. That memory has been coming back to me very sharply now. And with it the memories of my father’s final hospitalization and death this summer, and of my European queer ex-lover’s support to me, a partner’s support, in those days. And thus also a renewed longing for my European queer ex-lover again. 

All of this mixed with the sense of being at home here, of having finally found home in this corner of Colorado. A lovely, warm feeling but also somewhat confusing or concerning because of my professional uncertainty. Which is starting to haunt and worry me again. 

And then the memories of last year’s holidays, so lonely, so isolated, as all that I was waiting for was my gender-affirming top-surgery for which the one-year anniversary will be in precisely one month. So much has happened, so much has changed since then… 

So much, so much… 

So many deep, intense, even contradictory emotions for me to hold in this melancholic merry Christmas…  

I’m having nightmares. Nightmares from which I wake up screaming, or wanting to scream, wrenching myself awake with a huge, conscious effort, like a struggle for life.

Then I’m left feeling shaken, scarred, almost traumatized all day long. 

What’s happening? 

Something is stirring in the depths of my psyche… what is it? 

These nightmares seem to point to some male/female battle but also, maybe mostly, a terrible threat upon me, as if something, or someone, wanted to kill me, were trying to harm me. 

Who is it?

Maybe the hardest part of all this for me is that I still have hope, I still have some fuel left, given by a mix of hope and anger. I am a fighter: the fighter in me is exhausted and sad and bitter, but he’s also still alive and angry and a little hopeful.

I’m livid at our Western society. That’s the truth. It infuriates me that when someone comes out and says, “I’m too lonely to bear it, my life is too joyless because of lack of sufficient closeness”, society’s response (including many good-natured, well-intentioned friends) is, “Go see a therapist” and/or “Get on antidepressants”. 

Antidepressants do not cure loneliness, they do not create the close connections that we — or I — need with other human beings. Apart from the fact that antidepressants actually dull ALL emotions, not only the “difficult” ones (and I don’t want to live with dulled emotions), there’s the plain fact that meds like antidepressants can maybe be, at most, a band-aid, a patch, but they do not cure loneliness, they do not solve the problem at its root. The root of the problem is in our society, in how it functions, in the nuclear family or couple format, in the importance we give to romantic relationships above all others (so if you don’t have that, you’re screwed), in the rampant and pervasive individualism. And in the tendency, especially here in the U.S., to solve everything by putting people on meds. I spent most of my life in Europe and I never saw, there, the massive use of meds for every little thing as there is here in the U.S. 

You have some pain in your body somewhere? Take pain relievers. 

You have some pain in your heart? Go to a shrink (now I can fully, and sadly, appreciate Woody Allen’s humor around “Americans and their shrink”). 

You’re lonely? Take antidepressants. 

You’re sad? Take antidepressants. 

You’re nervous or worried? Take anti-anxiety meds. 

What about creating, building, and maintaining real community? What about working less and fostering more free time, more time together among humans, more time out in nature? 

What about asking, “Why do you feel lonely or sad or worried?”? 

What about addressing the root causes of this (pervasive) loneliness, sadness, anxiety? 

Almost everyone I know here in the U.S. is on some form of meds for mental health or neurodivergence. I had never, ever, seen this in the three decades I spent in Europe. The system is broken. The system here in the U.S. is broken. 

The fact that Western society puts the weight of “finding a solution” almost completely on the individual (& on their/her/his family of origin and/or spouse/romantic partner, if they/she/he has one) is unhealthy, unrealistic, unsustainable. So it is unsurprising that that weight might sometimes, eventually, become unbearable.

I am not broken, despite all my loneliness and sadness. 

And I’m not giving in to this broken system. I am going to fight it my way, no matter what it takes.

I need to write this. I need to because I’ve been bottling in too many intense and troubling emotions deep down inside me in the past few months. I need to write this also to keep track of how I feel. 

How I feel is that I don’t want to live. 

I am lonely and sad. And afraid of the loneliness that keeps coming back into my life and engulfs me more and more darkly. This loneliness is partly my own doing, partly the “simple” but real fact that many of my closest friends have been busy and/or struggling with their own stuff und thus unavailable/out of touch, and partly the way our society functions. At this point, all three of these factors are beyond my control. Probably they’ve always all been beyond my control but only now do I realize this, or only now am I finally too tired and fed up to keep trying. I’m not going to change my own nature nor am I going to change how society works, and I definitely cannot blame my friends for having their own life and/or issues. So all I can do is keep living in this loneliness or decide that I’m checking out for good. That’s the only choice I’ll have left at some point, when the loneliness becomes too unbearable. 

(And there are, truly, no other solutions. Neither meds nor my therapist can help — antidepressants are not the solution to loneliness or lack of close human contact, and if I told my therapist that I don’t want to live, I would simply get interned.)  

[Spoiler alert: some details about the book “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz]

I’m reading the book “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” by Benjamin Alire Saenz. A novel about the friendship, bromance, and love between two teenage boys in El Paso, TX, in the late ‘80s. 

Usually I’m a slow reader but last night I couldn’t put the book down, I devoured over a hundred pages. 

I had started reading this novel a few months ago, when my housemate had just finished it and, having really enjoyed it, she offered it to me as a light, “sweet, heartwarming, and adorable” book as I was still feeling the sharpness of my grieving pain. So I started reading it then but had mixed feelings around it and when finally Dante tells Aristotle that he’s leaving at the end of summer, having to go to Chicago with his parents for the upcoming school year, it hit home too painfully for me — too recent of a reminder of the separation from my European queer ex-lover & their return to Europe in August. So I put the book down, on hold. 

In the meantime, I’ve healed and read many other good books, including “Queer Theories” by Donald E. Hall and most of the heart-wrenching novel “Giovanni’s room” by James Baldwin. 

Somehow last week I felt ready to start reading “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” again, alternating it with “Giovanni’s room”. 

Both of these novels are pulling at the strings of my heart very strongly and intensely now. They both touch upon, revolve around, one of the themes that I’ve been going back to over and over in the past three or four years: deep, close, intimate friendship, even love and romance, between two boys/men. 

I had to put down the book “Aristotle and Dante discover the secrets of the universe” a couple months ago because Dante reminds me so strongly of my European queer ex-lover, Dante is them and Ari is me. Just with a difference of three decades in age. 

What would it have been like to meet them (my European queer ex-lover) back then, as teenagers? 

But this novel doesn’t pull at the strings of my heart so strongly only because of the romance & love with my European queer ex-lover. It pulls at the strings of my heart in a bittersweet way also because it partly reminds me of my adolescence, of my being — or trying to be — a boy with the boys, of my bromances with my guy-friends. It also reminds me, though, of what I really would have wanted but couldn’t fully have. Because despite having deep, fun friendships with boys and being able to get close to them and be accepted by them almost as one of them, it was never quite like it would have been if I had been allowed to be a boy fully. It wasn’t my friends’ fault or a biological difference: it was society’s fault, a cultural problem. Actually, thinking back at the environment in which we grew up and were living our bromances, it’s really quite amazing that we were to able to get that close and somewhat break the rules, inadvertently tearing down the walls in our young, spontaneous way. And yet, I wish I had had more: I wish that our genitals had not made a difference. I wish I had been brought up in a world where only our spirit, our identity made a difference, and not our genitals (& ensuing sex assigned at birth). 

I wish I had been allowed to be a boy, to be a boy fully, to be my whole pansexual, genderqueer boy self, already in my teens (& later as a young adult, too). 

For some reason, the disconnect I had had with my deepest emotions for the past couple months became unendurable this past week. A mechanism that had been working, and even serving me well, for the past month or two, came to its breaking point — and so intensely that I almost felt like I was going insane, like there were two of me, some sort of “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde”.

On Thursday, in my 90-minute psychotherapy session, I finally reconnected with my deepest emotions, reconnected with myself, reconnected myself to myself. By allowing myself to feel the pain, the sadness, the sense of loss, the longing; by allowing myself to sit and cry; by allowing myself to talk more openly and explicitly again about my deepest loves, including, and especially, for my European queer ex-lover. 

This reconnection of myself with my deepest and most vulnerable emotions, of myself with myself, allowed me to bring even more compassion and empathy to work, to my students & mentees, yesterday — thus allowing myself to see my “better self” reflected in their eyes. 

And this morning, maybe for the first time ever, really, in my life, I woke up feeling love — true, deep, compassionate, unconditional love — for myself. And I must say, it is one of the most beautiful feelings I have ever experienced. And I think it comes from the love I’ve seen in the eyes of all the people who’ve loved me sincerely, compassionately, unconditionally, all the persons in whose eyes I’ve seen the “better, potential me” reflected — all those people, whether they knew it or not, taught me how to love, including how to love myself. So to them I am, and will always be, infinitely grateful. 

I’m a little worried that my non-binary climber/skater friend with benefits & I might have different expectations or levels of attachment — theirs being stronger than mine. I hope that’s not the case — and I need to clarify ASAP. 

Where I stand in this relationship, as with many of my closest & most meaningful friendships/relationships, is a desire or willingness to explore together, while still leaving each other plenty of independent room. 

For me, exploring together is a very powerful way to build trust with someone. It requires a base of trust to start with, that might even just be instinctive or an intuition at the beginning. But then exploring together, going on adventures together, is what strengthens the bond for me and builds trust. 

It’s always been this way for me: from my sailing buddy (& sexual/romantic partner) from over two decades ago, who’s still a close friend; to a dear friend with whom I went on a “fun girls trip” in the summer of 2019, exploring activities and parts of the U.S. that were new to both of us to help each other get over respective heart-breaks; to the little trips discovering new parts of coastal California and Southern Colorado with my dear friend from Iowa; to exploring art and gender through photography with my artist/swimmer friend in California; to exploring Pride events and queer clubs and sex and gender through sexuality with my European queer ex-lover this past spring & summer; to the exploration of emotions, thoughts, identity, and gender with many close friends here in Colorado and elsewhere; to the climbing adventure in Utah, driving through a snow storm and trouble shooting car engine problems with my closest climbing buddy a month ago. I’d like to be able to explore together with my non-binary climber/skater friend with benefits, too — do some trips together, both here in the U.S. and abroad, since we have similar traveling styles & desires; explore sex and gender though sexuality together; and simply, but also maybe most importantly, overall explore the possibility of having a very deep connection, a relationship that includes emotional closeness, intellectual alignment, sexual & romantic aspects without being in a standard relationship, being “royal chosen family” for each other (as they put it) while avoiding the “relationship escalator”, i.e. queering it together and thus building more & more trust. 

Is that possible?

Yesterday, I felt sad. A mixture of sadness due to some specific reasons together with a more vague melancholy like a blanket or veil covering everything. I’m still feeling it a bit today. And while it’s not fun, or pleasant, to feel this way, I am also grateful because I am feeling something, I am allowing myself to feel something other than the general “emotionless groundedness” dotted with moments of joy or anger/frustration that I’ve often been experiencing lately.

Lately, I’m often, usually, feeling empty of emotions. 

After all the turmoil and roller-coaster of emotions from the past year — discomfort and anxiety from the place where I was living (i.e. the person with whom I was living); fear and trepidation for my gender-affirming top-surgery; relief and joy in the new place I found to live and opening up to springtime, summertime, and life again; joy and love and excitement in the romantic relationship with my European queer ex-lover; and then also pain, sadness and anger related to them; grief and sorrow around my father’s final hospitalization and death; pain, effort, and anger around having to defend/protect my boundaries from some attacks coming from people I love — now I feel almost uncannily calm, grounded, centered. And often almost empty of emotions. Or far removed from deep/strong emotions and only able to feel “superficially”. 

Often now the only things that bring back strong(er) emotions to me are related to getting into my body, connecting with my physical self, through (intense) exercise, sex, music. In order to feel emotions, I need to set my body in motion… 

Is this a “natural”, “physiological” phase of sorrow or post-grief?