Disparaging Without Labeling

I only know the normal of being a 16 year old and giving yourself to another 16 year old. The feelings that followed were not generally identifiable as a new specific presence, but, nonetheless, this interchange radically altered my genetic makeup causing me to become a different person. Trust me, I haven't kept secret how I was changed as if it was something I already knew. How can you know you are different when all you know is who you are?


I had a sparkle in my eye.


The color of life returned. I now had a place where my sincerest unashamed naked self could be found and acknowledged. That gift, at 16, was the spark to the dry tinder of my soul. I wasn’t looking for some outlet or horny desire, or so I think. I was looking for a mate, in which the raspy sparse cords of my soul could intertwine and find renewed strength in another.


Despite all of the built around me pressure to never do what I was doing. I found my hope in doing the exact thing I was told to never do. AND I didn’t get cast out of the garden for it, so far as I knew. What does that do for my worldview? I never really pondered that thought. To find out that, the elephant graveyard, as Mufasa put it, which was never to be gone to, was a place I could go to, and a place where I found meaning and life?


It seems like the story of Adam and Eve. The story doesn’t start, not in a real way, until they do the one thing they were never supposed to do, and then... BAM! The story begins and now we are here. It’s like before they eat the fruit, they are not us, they are in something like a dream with nothing tying them down to the real plane of existence, nothing making them real to us. But as soon as they touch the fruit, real life emerges and we get our first taste of reality. We see in their first interactions after the fruit, our first glimpses of ourselves in them. That is US waking up from the dream. Gaining consciousness, awareness. It’s like we don’t realize our breathing until that moment, and we take in a deep breath of air. As our lungs fill in that moment, so does our soul. Our scope for reality begins to open up. And for the first time we look out of our eyes and see the reality of who we are.


In the case of the Adam and Eve, the reality they saw when they opened their eyes was their nakedness. Not in the sense that they were prudes, but when their eyes opened they realized what it is that being naked in the world meant. It meant that, being uncovered in the vast world is foolish and leaves you open and vulnerable to pain. The minute they found themselves open and vulnerable with their eyes open, they immediately began the effort to cover themselves and close themselves off from their vulnerability.


That is what it is like to wake up from living in a dream. I was asleep, until I broke the highest rule given to me. And in doing so, I woke up. I can’t say that waking up was a good or a bad thing, because all I know is that I am who I am now, and I’m pretty okay with it.


And if I was asked if it was worth it, I have to say it was.



If your house of cards never falls then you never know what it means to watch the effort fall squandered around you, seemingly in vain. Like a safe, rarely entered room, with no wind, was the investment made by those who love me. They created the house of cards, the structure for me to find safety in till I reached the point where I could be safe and independent inside of it. In it’s violent fall, I found myself free. No longer trapped by the scaffold of the world created by those around me. Maybe, I was always meant to come out of the structure put around me, and at the right time it would all make sense. But how could I wait around for nothing, when all I had was right there in front of me making all the sense of the world.