A while back, I began reflecting on honesty as a core value of mine, and I began to express it by living more openly and vulnerably, both in my writings and in my life choices. Not long after, I was at rock bottom and was reconstructing my functioning from a very low level. I focused for hours a day, weeks turning into months, on the bare sensations and reactions within me. I didn't know at the time that these activities were preparing me to have a new ability: by attending to and honoring what is truly there inside me, I loosened the straightjacket of repression, and nutured my authentic self.
That is, when I wrote of honesty as a core value, I was not yet aware that it is more specifically authenticity that drives me. There is a deep, sturdy, powerful, and definite self inside me that is screaming to be represented through my actions. This self is something that the world has told me all my life that I cannot be, and that its choices are ones that I cannot make.
I have felt this way since the demands of masculinity first began to be imposed on me. The incongruity became disgust as the notion of masculinity grew more toxic and associated with domination. I always felt kinship with those whose survival, or access to basic love and connection, was predicated on the repudiation or persecution of their genuine selves. Even though I mostly see myself as cis-het, my heart has always been queer.
This self cannot sustain these repressions anymore and, like the moth finishing its incubation, it is emerging for better or worse and I cannot stop it. There are many nouns for this moment. It is an awakening, to the plain truth of myself. It is a return, home to the person I knew I was as a child. It is a coming out. It is a calling. Here goes.
If you ask me what I am, I will say: I am a skeptical hippie.
If you ask me what I do, I will say: I practice secular spiritual service.
I have spent most of my life constructing a reality in which these facts are not true. Saying publicly that I work in spirituality might be the most vulnerable thing I will ever do. I expect that it won't hit everyone with the power that it does me, because of course they don't know my story. In fact, I fully expect that plenty of readers will hold the prejudice that traumatized me and I will have to fight for acceptance. But it is who I am and I cannot repress it any longer, so I will start getting used to it.
Going further and saying this variant makes me even more uncomfortable: I am looking to make a living in secular spiritual service, and I ask your help in connecting me with sources of income.
On this blog, I go into detail about how I consider my work, for the sakes of clarification, normalization, and selling it.