IN-NATE and NEWBORN PROBLEMS

Dear, lost, clueless Nate...

[refers to HTML ability,
not his beautiful post]

I can't tell you what it means to me that you and WOE have stepped up to the plate the way you have. When I posted my "pop quiz" back on April 2nd, I had this crazy idea that I would get immediate answers. Two days later I was so torn by the lack of response that I tried a Big Saddo Appeal. [Patience has never been my strong suit.] But I have to say that the responses that have come in, weeks later, have taught me again that anything worth having is worth waiting for. Thank you both, and those who weighed in in the interim as well. Every little bit helps.

Now, on to the questions from April 5th, those of you who fit the other end of the demographic... and I know there are more of you out there than there are of "us".

Nate, I feel that you are simultaneously a role model and a Cautionary Tale for me:

I don't see myself how the life you are living now do anything but increase the tension between the halves of myself, which would continue to eat away at me from inside. The "Flip" side of that [with apologies to my Möbius-type mate] is that I really have no idea, thirty years down the road, if I could even be happy in an exclusive gay relationship, which seems at the moment where the "solution" lies. There are physical if not emotional hurdles that don't exist when you are young and are going to live forever. Well, I'm not and I know I'm not. [References intentionally mixed, haha.]

But what I AM taking on board for the first time is how often the "homosexual" side of myself I have fended off for so long has not been about thwarted sexual urges, though God knows it's about that, but about thwarted love. It took me the better part of a decade to figure out that the reason I had never liked the wife of one of my dearest friends is that I'm jealous she had him and I didn't. [Duh.] Once I saw it, it seemed so obvious I couldn't understand why the rest of our assembled families hadn't seen it before I did. [Thank God for small mercies.] I went for a walk with a friend the other day and suddenly realized that the still, quiet connection that had always bound me to him went far deeper than I had been willing to admit.

I now see it EVERYWHERE. [Perhaps more than it is there; that is another story of another set of wrinkles in the heart and soul...]

And all of that is pretty much impossible to square with staying married, or at least I doon't see how I can square that circle yet. So, I love my wife and wonder whether the best thing I can do for her wouldn't be to leave. It's a pretty sorry state to be in... at the moment I am Just Too Tired.

Thanks again for your candor. And caring.
yr Lost, Clueless Troll


Having sworn an oath to maintain the veil over my meetings with "my therapist" [how many times in my past would I have bitten my tongue bloody rather than saying those two last words?], I find that her request that I make a list of the things I hoped to resolve in our "work" together has helped focus my thoughts, at least to this point:

Am I gay? how large a part of me is gay? and does anything necessarily follow from that?

Straight enough to stay married?
Gay enough to know it’s best to leave?

What are the costs of staying? what are the costs of leaving?
[Last one is actually obvious and mind-boggling, God help me.]

How to resolve the fact that I have always desired men and enjoyed women?
[Age seems only to have increased the division, but maybe I’m crazy.]

How to resolve the division of straight in affection, gay in affection, and the dark side where it’s hard to imagine affection? Ask me about Messrs X, Y, and Z.
[Love divides and is pursued by shadows. Perhaps it’s not as hard as I think, but I can’t see uniting all of this in an even vaguely non-contradictory whole.]

I have offered to remain committed to my marriage vows in return for the permission to speak however much of the truth I deem appropriate when I want to whom I want, with the [obvious?] proviso that I would never tell more than a few people everything, or more than a few things to anyone else, or tell anyone more than I felt they could hear.

Do you think that could work? What do you think of my wife’s initial response that we cannot stay married if I come out?

How do I overcome the following dilemma: I seem to be put before the ghastly choice of continuing in silence, which I at least believe is at the root of my breakdown and depression [and my wife seems to feel it is precisely the other way around], or spreading my suffering onto others, especially the ones I love most? Watching my wife suffer over the last weeks has been exquisitely painful to me. [see blog]

How do I deal with the fact that I am “ridiculously suggestible” [her accurate description]? How much of this might just be the result of what I am having to take on board at the moment...?

How do I deal with the fact that I live almost entirely “in my head” and the way that plays into what is going on now?

She seems sure that a day or two living out what I think I want would bring my world crashing down around my ears; most of me agrees with her, and in any case I am not yet asking for a chance to live it out – only to be able to admit what I am, whatever that is.