Monthly Archives: December 2015

December 11, 2015

Hidden Pain

By Joe

  
In my counseling session yesterday, my therapist brought up something that I found quite intriguing. I’d woken up with a headache yesterday. It should come as no surprise that I have been having them more frequently in the last two weeks. When I mentioned my headache, we talked about the causes of them, and I explained that they are caused by different factors: environmental, emotional, and dietary. I talked about how long I’ve been suffering from headaches, and he asked me how I handled them. I told him that for the most part, I just carried on and tried not to let them ruin my life. He brought up that I have a lot of “hidden pains.” My headaches are just one example of it. Rarely can someone look at me and tell that I have a headache. Only people who know me very well can tell on even rare occasions. You see, I try not to make a big deal over them. Yes, I have mentioned them on this blog more than once (an understatement), but I don’t want it to be something that defines me. I also don’t like to show weakness, so many times when I have a headache I don’t mention it. I go about my day and then when I’m alone and away from everyone that’s when I can deal with the pain.

My headaches aren’t my only hidden pain. I hid my sexuality for a very long time. My sexuality wasn’t something I wanted to be defined by either. While you hope that people will react kindly to finding out you’re gay, it’s not always the case. Someone that I’d always thought of as a friend (he is married to a friend of mine), once said to me after I made some offhand comment about a guy being sexy, “I don’t care if you’re that way, I just don’t want to hear about it.” As a whole this group of people knew I was gay and didn’t care, and it was one of the few times in Alabama that I could be my true self. After he said that, what I’d thought of as my safe zone shattered. I eventually stopped hanging out with this group because I realized that while they’d all acted like they accepted me, no one called him out on him calling me out. All the people I work with now know that I am gay. I never made it a secret, but at some point you do have to come out. To me that’s the worst thing about being gay, you have to continue to come out all your life.

I also hide my emotions. Southern boys/men aren’t supposed to be emotional. You can’t talk about your accomplishments because then you are bragging, unless it’s something manly like hunting or athletics. Accomplishments in academics and the arts just makes you a weakling and a braggart. Men, of course, no matter where you are must hide weaknesses. You most certainly have to hide emotional pain. I “fail” at this one too often. While I can usually keep my emotional pain hidden, sometimes the sadness bubbles over. With the death of my friend, it was hard to keep that sadness hidden, but I’ve suffered from depression for years, and I do my best to keep it hidden. My anxiety is the same way. I hide the magnitude of it often by making a joke of it. I always say that I fly Air Xanax because I have to take Xanax to be able to fly. If I don’t, then I have full blown panic attacks and generally burst into tears. So it becomes anoher pain that I hide, but with anxiety I just make a joke out of it so that no one realizes the magnitude of my anxiety at times.

Even though I may look fine on the outside, it doesn’t mean that everything is great. Often I feel ashamed if I can’t maintain poise and self-control at all times, even when I am alone. I hate the loss of control over my emotions or other pains. I have to begin to understand that it is human to break or to feel that I just can’t take another hit. It is okay to lose it once in a while. That is when I need my friends and family the most. My friend that I’d lost was one of the few people who I could be completely myself with. I didn’t have to hide my pains. The sharing of vulnerabilities, mess-ups, weak moments and despair with my friend who was a trusted listener helped. No matter what the problem was, I could get past hellish happenings, cease downward spirals and emerge from an abyss because he made me feel understood. Being understood is empowering. It’s right up there with being loved or respected. With my friend, I had all three. He understood me, he loved me, and he respected me. Now I have to learn to deal with these hidden pains by myself, without the tremendous help of my friend.

2 Comments | posted in Health

December 10, 2015

Grief

By Joe

  
I don’t know that someone can ever get over the loss of their best friend, especially when that person was so integral to your life. For me, it seems like each day gets a little better. I can talk about him now without bursting into tears, but then there are times when I want to tell him something and I realize that I can’t. When I have moments of happiness or moments when I’m not thinking of the loss, I feel guilty for thinking that way. 

Last week when I couldn’t seem to stop having thoughts sadness filled with the loss of a willingness to go on, I knew I needed some counseling. I saw a counselor last week, and I will see him again today. I haven’t had suicidal thoughts, but I wished that it could have been me in that car accident and not my friend. I’m not sure when or if I will get over wishing that it had been me instead of him. He had so much life to live and so many wonderful things yet to do.

Anyway, it’s getting a little easier each day, the grief and sadness isn’t, but the ability to continue becomes a little easier. I’ve thought for a while that I needed to see a counselor, so I think these appointments will do me good on many levels. I have to remind myself to still find the joys in life because that’s what my friend would have encouraged me to do. He was the person I always turned to in times of need, and I need him now more than ever.

Thank you all for your words of sympathy and support. They mean a lot to me and have helped me through this last week and a half.

1 Comment | posted in Uncategorized

December 9, 2015

Sacrilegious 

By Joe

  
Queerty published an article the other day titled, “Jesus Had Two Dads: Guys Share What It’s Like To Be Gay And Religious.” I clicked on the article because I thought it would be be interesting. Instead I was disgusted and outraged. While the pictures like the one above with the text were posted on Whisper and many made excellent points in my opinion, the Queerty article chose to deride and belittle people because they held religious beliefs. To make the article even more detestable, the commenters were so bitchy and chose to make fun of gay people who had religious convictions. While a few tried to comment in the defense of religious gays, they were completely attached by other commenters. It’s one thing to not believe, but it’s another to call someone a fool because they do. I think everyone has their right to believe or not, but no one on either side has the right to belittle me because of what I choose to believe or not believe. I tried very hard when I was a teacher and teaching about other religions to get my students to not think of other religious beliefs as crazy, but to try to understand other religions and cultures. As gay men and women, we don’t like people judging us for our sexuality, so why should we allow for discrimination against those who are religious or have a different skin tone. People need to quit being so judgmental. If they would do that we would have a much better and far more happy world.

1 Comment | posted in Religion

December 8, 2015

Holy Sonnets

By Joe

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Holy Sonnet V
By John Donne

I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic spright,
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My worlds both parts, and oh! both parts must die.
You, which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres and of new lands can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it, if it must be drowned no more:
But oh! it must be burnt; alas the fire
Of lust and envy burnt it heretofore,
And made it fouler; Let their flames retire,
And burn me, O Lord, with a fiery zeal
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.

Holy Sonnet X
By John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Holy Sonnet XIV
By John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
“Wilt thou love God, as he thee? Then digest”

Holy Sonnet XIX
By John Donne

Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one:
Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot
A constant habit; that when I would not
I change in vows, and in devotion.
As humorous is my contrition
As my profane love, and as soon forgot:
As riddlingly distempered, cold and hot,
As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none.
I durst not view heaven yesterday; and today
In prayers and flattering speeches I court God:
Tomorrow I quake with true fear of his rod.
So my devout fits come and go away
Like a fantastic ague; save that here
Those are my best days, when I shake with fear.

Sonnets are my favorite form of poetry. While Shakespeare, Spenser, and Petrarch are the most famous sonneteers, I do love the sonnets of Donne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Today though I am featuring four of Donne’s Holy Sonnets. The Holy Sonnets—also known as the Divine Meditations or Divine Sonnets—are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne (1572–1631). The sonnets were first published in 1633—two years after Donne’s death. The poems are predominantly in the style and form set forth by Petrarch (1304–1374) in which the sonnet consisted of two quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a sestet (a six-line stanza). However, several rhythmic and structural patterns as well as the inclusion of couplets are elements influenced by the sonnet form developed by Shakespeare (1564–1616).

The primary theme of Donne’s Holy Sonnets are to mourn the passing of his wife and address religious themes of mortality, divine judgment, divine love, and humble penance while reflecting deeply personal anxieties.

I’m not sure I’m in full blogging mode again yet, but I had read Holy Sonnet V the other day, and it just sort of stuck with me. I used to teach the Holy Sonnets when I tortured taught my students about sonnets. Donne wrote some of the most difficult sonnets to understand but I think if you are in the mindset he was when he wrote them, it becomes easier to understand. He is obviously coming to terms with changes in his life (Catholicism to Anglicanism), the loss of a loved one (he lost his wife), and general anxieties that come with such struggles. Moving from Alabama to Vermont, I can see allegorically how I moved from a rural conservative place that was what you expected of Alabama, to a somewhat rural but much more liberal (and even more urban since I live in town) Vermont. Anyway, just my thoughts as I woke up this morning, and decided to add this last paragraph.

Leave a comment | posted in Poetry

December 6, 2015

The Morning of Joy

By Joe

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Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:

‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’

‘Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?’

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.

1 Corinthians 15:51-58

In The Morning of Joy

When the trumpet shall sound,
And the dead shall arise,
And the splendors immortal
Shall envelop the skies;
When the Angel of Death
Shall no longer destroy,
And the dead shall awaken
In the morning of joy:

In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy;
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy.

When the King shall appear
In His beauty on high,
And shall summon His children
To the courts of the sky;
Shall the cause of the Lord
Have been all your employ,
That your soul may be spotless
In the morning of joy?

In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy;
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy.

O the bliss of that morn,
When our loved ones we meet!
With the songs of the ransomed
We each other shall greet,
Singing praise to the Lamb,
Thro’ eternity’s years,
With the past all forgotten
With its sorrows and tears

In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy;
In the morning of joy,
In the morning of joy,
We’ll be gathered to glory,
In the morning of joy.



I woke up Friday morning with this song in my head. As I sang it to myself, tears rolled down my face. This song was sang at my grandmama’s funeral, and I often sang it when I was the song leader of my church. It brings me comfort, since I know that in that morning of joy, I will be reunited with my friend.
The above sculpture is called “Angel of Grief” and is an 1894 sculpture by William Wetmore Story which serves as the grave stone of the artist and his wife at the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.

1 Comment | posted in Music, Religion

December 3, 2015

Coping 

By Joe

  
Many of you have emailed and left comments. I have not had the ability to respond. Every time I think of the tragic accident and the loss of my friend, I begin to cry again. However, I wanted everyone to know that, I am coping with the loss. It will take some time. My friend was such a major part of my life, I just feel a void right now that can’t be filled. I don’t think it can ever be filled, but I am trying to focus on the happy memories and what a wonderful and loving person he was. I met with a counselor today and will be having weekly counseling sessions for the foreseeable future. It’s something I’ve needed to do for a while to deal with some of my own issues but I’d never felt the need because my friend was the best counselor anyone could ever have. There was nothing we couldn’t tell each other. Talking about him and getting to know some of his other friends better has also helped. I still burst into tears, but I can at least speak without sobbing and my appetite has finally returned. So, I am coping the best I can. I’m still not up to blogging right now, but I felt I should just give a quick update on how I was doing.

3 Comments | posted in Uncategorized