I Got Lost Trying to Find Myself

I was taken hostage by life at an early age. I found that in my childhood my true personality was defective, faulty, and would need to be changed if I would ever want to be happy. I’ve always had a soft-hearted nature. When I was younger, I was quick to befriend the kids who everyone made fun of or seemed lonely because I couldn’t bear the thought of them crying alone because, for no real reason, no one liked them. Of course at the time I couldn’t verbalize so articulately how I felt, but I felt.

So I was bullied too.

I could never understand why some of the kids were so mean, so aggressive. Why they found so much joy in the misery of others. Why they wouldn’t simply listen to the teachers instruction. I mean, we all got into trouble, but where as with me it was because of a lack of focus or more of a child-like negligence—I would spend more time goofing off or in my head, with those kids it was a calculated intent. It was like they reveled in their bad behavior.

As we all got older, the acting out became more extreme as they got physically stronger and learned more, strengthening the tools to inflict misery on those they deemed weak around them. What guy doesn’t remember the first time he got put in a choke hold, confused, tapping vigorously on the assailant’s arm as a silent plea for mercy. There was no reason to ask “why?”, it was just because. I can remember lying on the floor coughing and sputtering, struggling to catch my breath, my eyes filled with tears because I didn’t do anything to deserve this treatment, I would never do this to another. I felt frustrated, and weak. I didn’t want to fight back, I wanted to be left in peace.

At home I lived in an extremely psychologically healthy household, perfectly balanced with morals and love. But unfortunately for my sisters and I, our neighborhood and school life did not reflect the world to be about morals and love. I’m not sure how Staci and Jodi coped with the disparity, though I know for a fact that neither of them had a smooth road to maturity either. As for myself, I observed a few factors and came to a conclusion. Around the fourth grade I observed that I was unhappy. I observed that I felt dissatisfaction in life. I felt like there was something essential missing. I felt isolated from my peers because my parents made me and my sisters spend a third of the week in church where I was taught lessons that I did not see observed in real life. I felt awkward. I began to recognize that everyone in my school, church, and neighborhood were all black. I started to associate most black people with violence, aggressiveness, insensitivity, and poverty. And I struggled with my identity because though I was also black I didn’t think, talk, or act like any of the people I was coming into contact with, nor did I want to. And I didn’t know how to deal with my growing curiosity toward girls, who for the most part ignored me. My conclusion was that there was something wrong with me and the natural feelings I had as to right and wrong and how to treat people. In elementary and the first half of middle school, I spent most of my time feeling out of place. I did my best to fit in among the friends who I did make, though I remember most of the time I felt a discomfort at a lot of the things they did and said as “wrong”. I just went a long with it and suppressed how I felt and laughed instead.

As I grew older I dedicated my time to learning how to stay in sync with the motions of society, how to blend in, how to become a “normal person”. I emulated and acted out a lot of what I perceived a “cool guy” would do from different things I saw at school, on TV, and in movies. By middle school, I learned that the most aggressive, most obnoxious guys were the ones to win the attention and affection of girls. However, incapable of being intimidating and Alpha; loud, animated, and obnoxious came out in the role of the “funny guy” when put through the filter of my God-given personality. It did succeed in winning me the attention of girls but not their affection. I again felt ashamed and defective.

As I grew older, into high school, I was still struggling to feel “normal”. I had learned a lot by now. The vast majority of lessons were in stark contrast to what I was learning in church, which I had all but abandoned by this time as useless, though I retained many of the morals and my belief in God. High school was about learning to unlearn my morals, and I completely put God out of my mind. I learned to curse more, I learned that I shouldn’t take girls so seriously if I wanted them to respect me, I learned that respect was earned by doing something sexual with a girl on the weekends and then reporting to your friends on Monday. I learned that you could do or say anything as long as you assured everyone that you were “just joking around”.

Indeed I was learning all that I needed to become a normal person and finally not feel so unfulfilled, so broken. Soon, I thought, I would be accepted and I would be happy. All my lessons in school were reinforced by cable television and movies. Sex and relationships should be my number one priority, followed by abusing substances and bragging about it, followed by not taking anything too seriously. Those three things came together to make a person normal, I thought. Not church, not morality, not spirituality, not taking the countless issues out there seriously, not even thinking of our future really. Not only were those things not fun in and of themselves, I would have no friends. Of course “good” was still done in its appointed capacity. The vast number of us wanted the opportunity to party on a varsity level so we did what we needed to do to get into college. At the time going to college wasn’t about our future education it was about more sex, more drugs, and more “fun”.

I completely failed at all of these. I failed to lose my virginity in high school. I had somehow gotten it in my head that I wanted to lose it within a relationship to a girl I really cared about. We can already see my personality getting in the way of being normal. Not only that, but I wouldn’t get into a relationship with just anybody, I had to “love” her. So I spent all of high school looking for her, and when I finally met her she wanted nothing to do with me romantically. Her story is one for another day. Also, even though I partied and drank a lot, it only made me feel worse about myself. Sure there was the occasional drunken make-out that would gain me some respect for myself, but drinking did more harm than good. And finally, there is “fun”, or joking around, or not taking things too seriously. Perhaps the greatest reminder that I would perhaps never be a normal person was because I could never naturally enjoy “having fun” or “just joking around”. I would get uncomfortable when guys would talk about other girls like they didn’t have feelings, I would get upset with myself when I would laugh at their jokes and make my own. I didn’t want to believe the world was like that. I wanted to believe in romance. I didn’t like peer pressure, and I didn’t like pressuring others. I didn’t like hearing a sentence composed only of curse words, I didn’t like hearing people mock God and religion, I didn’t like how guys would compete to prove they were the most macho even when it led to physical fights. None of it made sense to me. None of it felt natural. My biggest question was always “Would he like that if someone said/did that to him?”. To me people were huge hypocrites who knew how to deal it, but became aggressive and indignant when someone did them wrong. But I did my best to blend in, to give myself a chance to let it all sink in. Honestly I felt like I was two different people. I just kept laughing, hoping I would one day actually find it all funny.

By college, soon my hunger to fit in was fueled solely by women. I had succeeded at winning the respect of most guys I met, but only the friendship of girls. I just wanted a relationship like the ones my other guy friends so easily slipped in and out of. To be honest I had put all my hopes of fulfilling this feeling of emptiness into finding the one girl. I figured once I met her, everything else would get colored in. But I still didn’t feel worthy. I still wasn’t normal enough. I still felt different than what I knew a real man was supposed to feel. By now I had everything down pat as far as the basics-- how to talk, how to party, how to drink, and how to smoke. But I was only becoming more confused by the day. And after being emotionally destroyed by the girl I had a crush on senior year of high-school, I felt pathetic. It seemed no matter what I did, I still didn’t feel like girls acknowledged me. I was riddled with insecurity. And I was broken on the inside, broken and divided.

I never successfully pushed God out of my mind. At rock bottom over my high-school crush’s rejection, desperate and alone, I was forced to self-reflect for the first time and ask myself, “What is going on? Why do I feel like this? Why am I even alive?” First year of college launched an intellectual and spiritual renaissance for me. For the first time I saw life for being much more vast than the closed eco-system of high-school and chasing after temporary pleasures. I started to think about a career, started reading books on psychology and religion, and started to see signs that a lot of what I naturally felt wasn’t a defect or weakness but were actual gifts from God like empathy and a natural kindness and a warm personality.

I found God personally during the renaissance. But from there my problems would only get worse. I had a hard time assimilating my Christian beliefs in God, with my actual day to day life, much like when I was a child. And society largely scoffed at the idea of God so now I felt more alienated than ever as I joined a small minority of believers. I felt like doing something drastic anyway and so I pressed on. I gave much over to God as a lot of what Christians believe in I naturally did too. But other things, I did not. The classic case for most Christians, I would not turn over the books of my sexuality to be audited. I completely glossed over that. And so I was spiritual in everything else, but when it came to relationships, I kept that out of the reach of God. I instead decided I would “figure it all out” on my own as I went on. And for some reason I felt like God would take all the fun out of my coveted future relationship. I just couldn’t bring myself to look at sexuality and romantic relationships through the fish-eye lens of Christian values. It was too much and I had a vivid idea of what it would have to entail to make me happy, and I knew for a fact some of that ran afoul with Christian values. Throughout college was a series of lessons. I would get caught up in one thing or another, forget about God, get hurt, run back, get comfortable—cocky, find myself in a new situation, forget God, get hurt, and run back. I grew frustrated with myself because it seemed no matter what I did or believed I still felt like crap. I still always felt pulled in both directions, a spiritual direction and the direction that society was telling me was normal.

I never found what I was looking for. None of my sexual experiences were particularly satisfying, though when I was a virgin I was told that sex would be the ultimate high. I found it more clunky, awkward, and out of place than anything else. And it didn’t feel right at all. Maybe because none of my experiences were with someone I was committed to and was more filled with friends and sometimes acquaintances when we “had one too many that night”. For me this would serve as the source for a deep, sad, dissatisfaction that would last for a couple years. When I told some of my friends about my experiences they would tell me that I just need to relax and let go and not be so tense. In other words, they said it was me. I couldn’t understand how they were enjoying it so much. How the characters on TV were. How the rappers were praising hook-ups in their songs. To me it was the worst. The ultimate let-down. Though I found dissatisfaction in sex, I kept trying anyway, hoping that it was just that I was getting with the wrong girl each time. But as I came to find out, it was same script, different cast.

It all leads up, all the experiences, the stories, the tragedies, losses, failures, disappointments, frustrations, and anger, it all leads back to me. The formula to my misery is a simple one. I was born, as I grew older I noticed a natural feeling or spirit inside of me. I noticed that when I lived by what this feeling guided me to do I drew unwanted attention and was made fun of and bullied. I observed that people who acted opposite to how I felt got everyone’s attention and praise and seemed happy. I decided that whatever I felt was wrong, and that there was something wrong with me. I struggled to retrain myself to act and think like I thought a “real man” should according to what I saw in media and in my environment. I failed often, reinforcing the idea that there was something wrong with me. The more I tried the more miserable I became, further reinforcing the idea that there is something wrong with me. A part of me felt ashamed at the things I would do or say to fit in, but when I tried to learn more about God, a part of me felt like I was giving up on really being successful and turning to religion as a crutch. I became even more miserable because I didn’t know what to believe or what to do. I was lonely, and confused, and unhappy, and I felt like a failure. And all of this was because when I was younger I felt like there was something missing and I set out to fill it.