A reader writes:
I’m a 25 yr. old who graduated from the Ivy League a few years ago with great ambitions/hopes/dreams, and who lays awake this rain-soaked morning because I’m haunted by a recent post of yours and felt compelled to write. I’m referencing “I Lost my Impulse for Self-Preservation,” which spoke so strongly to me, although I of course cannot know the depth of your reader’s words.
But as he described a suburban-bred, sexually adventuresome young man rushing headlong into life, I heard my story.
So too his illustration of Wall Street success and outward identity as veneer, disguising a deeper-placed sentiment of self-destruction. Whether it’s common among young gay men I don’t know, but the “crippling self-consciousness,” self-doubt and loathing, and the reader’s struggle against isolation each brought such clarity to my own experiences. I’ve smoked weed for years, and recently tried ecstasy for the second time to experience, amidst a euphoric chemical cloud, something incredibly resilient, fulfilling, and whole. It was as though my whole body was flooded with a sense of purpose, and the confidence! To feel that again after so many months of loneliness; indescribably sweet. But sadly, those moments are only faintly echoed by the sober, regular me that labors with regrets and finds it easier to just retreat from it all.
Perhaps some of this is universal–young gay men are so often shamed into a complex relationship with their sense of self, desire and identity, and so often paired with a frenetic, explosive engagement with the ‘community’ they’ve been distant from. That progression from exclusion and uncertainty to a full-throated embrace of identity is naturally jarring–unhelpfully framed by society as a grave conflict or sinful whirlwind. What I cannot shake, though, is the gut feeling that confidence, purpose and identity are all in the same pot–and that without some kind of chemical breakthrough, my brain and sense of self have been fried by the last several years.
I hear your reader’s voice and fear my place in this world is slipping through my fingers–wasted destiny. It’s not the drugs that worry me, save the extent to which they adjust my brain chemistry. But thinking this way, it seems life affords only so many free passes; and when hard realities (a parent’s disapproval, the Christian right, the grid) necessitate hard choices, with identity/confidence in the balance, I worry my brain isn’t up for the task. What if my character is too weak, my courage failing; after all, the headstrong passion I once though of as strength of will is, itself, only a hollow projection of force. Will I survive, can I choose wisdom over self-delusion enough to make it?
More than anything, I fear nothing can fill that hollow, that identity cannot escape reality, and that for some (gay men among others) happiness will be rare, and fleeting.
I understand my reader’s feelings. They are still there in me and many others, although much diminished from the relatively recent closeted past. It’s hard to explain how the gay man’s psyche survives childhood 
and adolescence and early adulthood even in a completely tolerant society. To feel unworthy in the depths of one’s being is a wound that takes decades to heal and courage to face. Many young gay people feel it; more to the point, in my view, many young gay people will always feel it – because being different in such a profound way from one’s peers as one grows up is inevitably isolating. To live in a world where all the institutions are designed for the other, and to navigate a path through that, is really tough. So, yes, happiness can be elusive or too easily bought.
But this is life. It is tougher for many gays than straights, but not always. And this is the human reality: men die and they are not happy, to go all Camus on you. We have to suck it up and deal with it, and realize how insanely lucky we are to be born as homosexuals in one of the very few periods in time when we haven’t been targeted for murder or jail or unmitigated obloquy.
I don’t think I would have gotten through intact without God, my friends, my family and my husband. The first matters. The double bind for gay kids is that the refuge I believe they need – a loving God to heal and protect them – is actively hostile in many faith communities. And so the internal isolation deepens, even as the search for faith is often the most tenacious among those the churches deem unworthy of it. The temptation to drink or do drugs as an alternative is very strong – and, frankly, not entirely unhealthy in moderation as a way to find moments of transcendence or escape or perspective.
But in the end, the only solution is love. I believe that all love comes from God, but whether you do or not, love is still tangible in the human and natural world. Alas, we gay men have taught ourselves so powerfully how we are unworthy of such love, and afraid of it, that we seek it in all the wrong places or grab simulacra of it we then use to punish ourselves.
It is the fear of being loved that we must overcome.
It is what is undetectable that we must recover.
The Dish 