I’ve noticed over the past year or so that whenever I start to write in my daily journal, whatever I’m writing about very quickly turns into a list of questions and/or ideas that I want to discuss with people. These people range from famous (both living and dead) psychoanalysts, authors, economists, historians, to musicians, actors, activists, astrologers, and scientists. I used to be satisfied to just have a sort of internal dialogue with myself but this has increasingly felt severely boring most days. So I’ll either start writing in my journal but then quit pretty early on, copy what I wrote, and paste it into my AI app of choice, so we can have a conversation because I know from the footnotes (and from my philosophical training, mostly self-taught) that it is responding dynamically to my very Socratic questions with either all of the people I want to talk with or those who have engaged with the people directly or indirectly through their works. Once I make sense of things in my own mind, then I love to share my findings with a willing audience.

This is very different that the world in which I was raised. I was forced to go to school. I was assigned texts to read that I was told to memorize so I could regurgitate the information on tests. If I was lucky, they said, I might actually learn from these authors/texts and want to engage with them more. Then I was to graduate and become a worker bee, or if I was one of the chosen, become an expert in my field, either teaching this information I’ve processed or I use it to build something productive for society. All of this was an utter waste of time to me, especially given the fact that I was highly sensitive and introverted. So there wasn’t even a social bright spot for me in the whole system. Except for a fleeting moment or two (mostly due to jazz choir and drama class), school was where my soul went to die.

Only since I began to become conscious have I discovered why this was the case for me. First, from 5th grade through graduate studies, I was required to read not what mostly interested me but was deemed necessary by the experts. Every once in a blue moon would a text on the syllabus align with my interests, but 99% of the time it didn’t. It wasn’t always because of the text or author, per se. Sometimes it was just bad timing for me personally. Second, even post-high school, this wasn’t just an issue of texts. I was also required to take classes I was thouroughly disinterested in. Third, in all of these educational systems I mostly had teachers that I didn’t feel a connection with. This could have been for a whole host of reasons, including that they were just people who might not have been feeling well on a particular day (or year), had personal problems they were dealing with, or didn’t actually want to be teaching but they were caught in the same system as I was. This was all just a recipe for misery for me. I wasn’t the biggest reader as a kid. I mean, I read lots of Hardy Boys and Choose Your Own Adventure books, but it really wasn’t until my early 30’s that I discovered how much I loved reading. And what I loved the most was that I could interact with authors and voices and ideas that I was interested in. No one was telling me what I had to read anymore.

And then I entered seminary and the whole fucking miserable thing started all over again. But this time it was even worse because the religious authorities over me weren’t just telling me what I had to read, they were telling me what I had to believe and what I had to go teach once I got out of school. The whole thing, top to bottom, was and is a propoganda machine. Virtually no thinking ouside of the box. Sure, they wanted just enough edginess and charisma from a student or two in the hopes that a popular priest would reflect well of their institution. But free thinkers were out of the question. Once I left the priesthood and organized religion altogether, I experienced an intellectual freedom that I had been yearning for since I was 10 years old. It was my personal Shawshank Redemption.

But pretty early on in my newfound freedom, I discovered more challenges. My intellectual interests and questions were deeply personal and existential. The closest thing to a field of interest for me was philosophy but not in any proper sense. I felt a deep desire within, one I could no longer relegate to a hobby, to make connections between virtually every possible field. Music, theater, film, art, philosophy, spirituality, economics, politics, sexuality, social justice, psychology, science, death… these are not separate fields for me. They are all interconnected expressions of something I feel so deeply in my being. What’s even harder to put into words is how all of this connected learning and expression made and makes me feel inside. It’s pure, raw desire. It’s love. It’s profoundly romantic. It’s sensual. It’s sexual. How could it be anything else? It’s connection. Electrical. Chemical.

I spent years praying to a god I don’t believe in anymore, asking him to take this desire away from me. I felt like a freak of nature. So strange. So different. Why couldn’t I just be normal like everyone else? That’s what I thought. Gabor and Daniel Maté’s excellent work, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, & Healing in a Toxic Culture” may be my favorite title of a book because it captures how I’ve always felt deep down.

I see more clearly than I did before, but I have days where I still struggle quite a bit. Why couldn’t I just pick a subject, go to school, get a good paying job, not provoke the authorities, not poke the bear, and just be content and happy? What made this feeling of inadequacy even more unbearable was that I desperately wanted to be liked, to be loved. I believed that if I could just get rid of this desire, just be someone different than myself, maybe then my parents would be proud of me, maybe my wife would really love me, maybe this god would accept me. I think that’s why Christianity was so appealing in the beginning of my life. For a few brief years, I felt like I had a new desire, a desire for Jesus. But when you date a guy who never shows his face and never talks back, it’s a pretty fucked up relationship. And it was a cover up. That other desire was still there, it just got suppressed. And when desires get supressed, they just get deeper.

So most assuredly by the time I was 21, I felt completely screwed. Christianity was no longer a romance for me. It was now something I desperately needed to be true so I could be and feel forgiven. This desire in me was starting to feel like a cancer that was rotting me from the inside. I believed only Jesus could save me now. I spent untold hours weeping and begging for Jesus to forgive me… first in my Bible college’s basement library and then later in secluded parking lots in my car, late at night, shoving copious amounts of fast food into my mouth to try and snuff out the pain of my devious existence. It was an endless shame cycle. I can still feel it. I can close my eyes and see that man-child, just desperately wanting to feel normal and feel worthy of love. I can still weep while I hold him.

The difference now is that the shame doesn’t feel like it’s me now. It’s a wound I carry. That’s the difference between unconsciousness and consciousness. The work I’ve done to excavate this infectious shame has been so exruciating over the past year and half, at times I thought I would die in sugery from the pain. Even my anesthetic of choice, cannabis, stopped working. The good news is, I made it out of surgery alive. I have an incredible, beautiful scar to prove that I’m still here. It’s not just a reminder that this desire in me is incredible and needs to be expressed, but it’s a huge part of what’s allowing me to express it for the first time in my life. At 53, rediscovering who I am after 40+ years of being lost is equal parts liberating, terryifying, daunting, thrilling, and suprising. That’s life. I was hiding from it. I’m back in the game and I’m all in.