A Boring Life

I can't remember how old I was when I first took an interest in writing but I remember being in primary school at age 6 when poetry and creative writing were first introduced as part of my school work. The stories I wrote at that age weren't exactly Shakespearean in calibre that much I can remember, but the stories themselves are lost to time. I didn't have the foresight to keep everything I wrote at that age, I wasn't exactly fond of school and there was no impetus to preserve the memory of it. I've mentioned before how I was bullied and ostracised for being different, mainly due to my disability caused by my visual impairment but I'm sure more than a few had already figured out I was gay as much as I was in denial at the time and believed that nobody could tell.

As a gay man when you are in the closet it can be hard to tell whether the people around you really are oblivious to your sexuality or if you live in a glass closet and the people around you just don't care. When you first come out there are always those who claim to have always known but they never gave any indication, and those who claim they never suspected and yet they were often the ones who spent the most time nudging you closer to that decision to share that part of your life with them.

One thing I have learned in my journey through life which is both comforting and disheartening is the reality that other people spend a lot less time thinking about you than you think they do. Perhaps it's paranoia that leads us to believe that others place greater levels of scrutiny on our lives, or perhaps it's projection, because we spend so much time in self-reflection we think that others spend that much time analysing others. The truth that I have observed however is that level of introspection isn't something unique to being gay, it's a journey of self-discovery that everyone goes on, just some people have a little more to figure out than others. The idea that once someone defines their sense of self to a point that they're comfortable with, that this might somehow lead them to a point where they begin analysing everyone else is wishful thinking to an extent, but also asinine in some regards.

The more you analyse other people the more you analyse yourself, that much is true. Regardless of sexuality, this is something we learn typically in our teenage years because we spend so much time comparing ourselves to others, but by our 20s this is something most people grow out of, or at least it's something most people used to grow out of - the rise of social media has stunted our development in some ways because that period of comparison gets extended almost indefinitely and that assuredness that comes from a defining sense of self now eludes many, this I think is to blame for the elevated levels of social anxiety and generalised anxiety disorders that we experience now as a society - to put it bluntly we're too aware of other people now and their lives, or more precisely, the image of their lives that they project, and of course the major pitfall is when you try to make your life seem as interesting as possible to others which never works, because when it isn't genuine most people can see straight through the charade, whether that be because of cynicism or stoicism.

I tried to keep diaries of my life as a child but I suffered from that illusion of normalcy that comes from your ignorance of others. I didn't have social media as a child, the only reference point for what was normal and what was not came from the few friends that I had, almost all of whom had a life that was pretty similar to mine. In hindsight I now know that my childhood was quite disturbed.

I grew up in Northern Ireland at the tail end of The Troubles, it was normal to see Chinouk helicopters land in the fields near our house dropping off soldiers who would disappear into the tree lines, sometimes I'd sit and watch and see if I could spot where they went. It was normal to see riots on the street with police in riot gear, petrol bombs being thrown, an oil tanker hijacked, taking a different route to visit an aunt because the road passed the train station was closed because there was a bomb on the tracks.

I lived in a town that at one point was essentially placed under martial law with army checkpoints at every road in and out, and although you were free to leave if you wanted, it wasn't without a significant amount of scrutiny and questioning over your motives for doing so.

Even as late as my college years in 2004 through 2006 the fact that the college had a separate fire alarm and a bomb alarm with different procedures in the event that either went off, in the first instance exit in an orderly fashion and meet at the assigned assembly points, and in the second instance exit as swiftly as possible and get as far from the main building as possible was entirely normal.

It really wasn't until my University years when I started meeting people who hadn't grown up in Northern Ireland that everything I experienced was recontextualized and I started to add gravity to my experiences. Even now I know that the vast majority of people who still live here in Northern Ireland won't think twice of anything I have written above with some even rolling their eyes thinking it wasn't as bad as it sounds but that's the ignorance of perspective.

Most 8 year olds haven't looked through the scope of a soldier's sniper rifle - I still remember that day vividly, a squaddie sat kneeling beside a wall at the bottom of my street looking up at a field in the distance, I remember walking up to him and asking what he was doing, I don't remember the conversation but I remember the sniper rifle in his hand and the scope on top and asking what it was and looking through it when he pointed at the field in the distance.

The TV show Derry Girls was written by Lisa McGee who is just 8 years older than me. Lisa grew up in Northern Ireland and the story lines of Derry Girls are pretty close to the reality of life for me and many others, the same day to day struggles of life experienced by teenagers set against a backdrop that is normalised but anything but normal. The disconnection between the reality of the extremity of the environment and the extent to which you analyse it is something I come back to quite a bit in life. Most people are too busy living, or rather, trying to stay alive, to be concerned with the lives other people are living.

The bottom line is however much time you think people spend thinking about you, double it, and that's how much time they're actually thinking about themselves, they're not concerned with you at all. The most time people spend thinking about you is when you're standing right in front of you and engaging with you, and even then their attention is probably still divided among a million other things.

Every diary I tried to keep was abandoned because I didn't think my life was interesting enough to document, despite the efforts of many teachers trying to encourage us to do so. I can't remember how old I was when I first started blogging but I was in University by that point, and since then I've shared parts of my life, on many blogs which have since been deleted, the posts I could recover have been added here to this blog and backdated to when they were originally posted however the desire to keep my personal life somewhat protected has left most of the specifics about my life offline absent from these posts.

I often wondered if I ever wrote a book telling my life story what would it be called? The title I jokingly settled on was 'The Boy Who Cried Love' - a rather sardonic title with the implication being that my life has been marked by a series of infatuations with men each time I was convinced to be true love but never came to fruition ultimately leading to a relationship that is true love but not one I would recognise as such, or at least not one I would believe to be so. The trouble with that title however is that the story I would tell is incomplete, that final love has not been found, I am single and the chance of that changing any time soon is slim to none.

It matters not however, I don't consider myself incomplete, I consider myself a whole [and a hole in the gay colloquial sense] at this point I'm not looking for someone to "complete" me, I'm looking for someone to share my life with and for them to share theirs with me. That might never happen and I'm okay with that, I am alone but I am not lonely. I do have friends, and loved ones who care about me and I feel the same for them. Love would be a bonus to me, something that would add to my life.

As for the rest of my story, the life I have lived, the happiness and the sadness, it's hard to know how interesting people would actually find it. The mentality I had as a child where I considered my life boring because I didn't have the perspective to compare it against others still pervades my psyche today, in many ways I'm just another Millennial who has lived through crisis after crisis and somehow survived, it's just that a few of those crises are personal rather than societal.

I think in some ways the Millennial, and Gen Z psyche, and soon to be Gen Alpha psyche all share the sober realisation that each of us are not as unique as we like to think but at the same time whilst our experiences may not be unique in themselves, our own personal combination is. In other words the post-millennial reality can be summed up as embracing that Margaret Mead quote and living by it:

"Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else."