The reason I became a total lying bastard!

Why does secrecy fascinate me?

It must be to do with my decade of closeted-ness followed by years of cringingly and embarrassedly coming out to friends, family and work colleagues.

From the age of 9 or 10 my 'dirty little secret' gradually became my whole sexual identity and lies came like reflexes to protect me from the condemnation and rejection I had been trained to believe would result from its discovery. Ten years of leading a double life. Ten developmentally significant years of keeping the biggest secret ever. What you saw was not what you got! Ten years of blatant lying. Portraying myself not as I was but as I believed others expected me to be. Ten years of damped down spontaneity, growing a false self, a hard crust to defend my true inner core. Ten years of homophobically driven self imposed social sexual isolation. Inured against authenticity and deprived of sexual and emotional intimacy. Despising those who purported to like the sham person I pretended to be. Drawn to those who disliked me. They at least seemed to have a better perspective on what I was all about. What did that 10 years of duplicity and dissimulation do to my sense of integrity? By the age of 20 I’d certainly developed the capacity to be a totally deceitful lying bastard!

Well, not totally-as a good catholic boy I tried my best to be honest about everything else but when it came to my sexuality the truth was nowhere to be seen. And because my lying was all about my sexuality, it meant that not only was lying a deeply central feature of my personality but it also became powerfully eroticised. Lying and being queer had strong associations with each other and were therefore both charged with sexiness and danger.

I’m now in my Thirtieth year of coming out. Being honest with myself and bearing witness to others in various shapes and forms that I will not allow homophobia to intimidate my nature into pretending it is anything other than it is.

However I’ve recently been toying with the idea of redeveloping a secret self (regular readers will know about my totally anonymous blog www.gaysocrates.blogspot.com)

The way I see it is that generally sexuality is a mysterious and private aspect of an individual's personality. If you’re heterosexual you aren’t expected to be explicit and specify to others what your sexual likes, kinks and preferences are. So when we come out we sacrifice a significant aspect of this secrecy, which is the birthright of our straight peers.

I’m not advocating going back into the closet, but if you’ve had years of secrecy sculpting and shaping your identity then the coming out process may have forced some of your private aspects to have been more public than they ought to have been. People shouldn’t be able to access all areas of who you are and it’s really worth discovering your private secret self in a fully conscious way.

Start writing a secret journal or create an anonymous blog where only you have influence over what you write or post.

The danger we all face is that unless we own up to our ignored secret side it has a nasty habit of inhabiting our lives anyway.

This is my column for the November Issue of GSCENE-Secrets and Lies

Meditation and the Tao Te Ching

The big event for me this week has been my decision to relinquish the moral high ground I’ve been adopting with regard to my conflict with my employing organisation. Not sure what allowed me to arrive at a resolution. It may have been reading the Tao Te Ching or it may have been a result of meditating on my manager as ‘my enemy’.

I can’t remember what that great Taoist book of wisdom was saying exactly. It was something about how knowing good creates bad, how one extreme is simply a function of, or is always seen in the context of the other extreme. Adopting the high ground creates the low ground. The advice was along the lines of finding the peace to let it go- and not to let it go with a vengeance so everyone gets hurt by the sudden change in direction, but to let it go gently.

Meditating on my manager as a source of evil has been helpful too because it enables me to see how ridiculous it is to attempt to locate evil intent in any individual. The evil I locate in others tends to be discovered by me and as I’m becoming increasingly aware may well have been planted there by me.

The self-righteous, blinkered ego is the enemy of peace. I am finding that, if I can cultivate the humility to recognise that I am an injured soul searching for salvation but reluctant to accept the nature and extent of my shortcomings, then I can stop griping about the splinters of wood in others’ eyes and attend to the plank of wood in mine!

I have developed a mantra for myself when meditating and reflecting on ‘myself’- that is when I am reflecting on the mental image I have when the psychological construct of ‘me’ is brought to mind.

The mantra is:  ‘I’m wrong, I’m bad, I’m sorry and I forgive myself’

This allows me to acknowledge and face up to shortcomings but not to wallow in them or wait for forgiveness from someone else. It helps me to equalise the feeling-tone I experience when reflecting on myself compared with when I reflect on my friend, my enemy, or someone I’ve just had a chance meeting with recently.

I try to read a page from the Tao Te Ching every day at work. It often surprises me and helps me with n issue I’m grappling with at the time. A reading which surprised me this week concerned leadership and the dangers of praising others. Praise of others creates competition. The danger of valuing treasure is that it creates in others a desire to steal them. The final phrase was an encouragement to ‘do the non-doing’ which is the typically paradoxical advice akin to ‘don’t just do something-sit there’ as opposed to ‘don’t just sit there- do something’. It’s a reminder that the ego has a terrible habit of trying to impose itself on how things are. Things are the way they are regardless and the imposition of ego won’t make things better of worse though the ego may be the source of the way things are.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of the ego as being the source of the universe as perceived by ourselves. The idea is that we make our beds, which we are then forced to lie in. Maybe our relationships with ourselves and others are borne from our essence and we can choose who we are as a way of determining the pleasures and pains we encounter.

My advice for today is just take a few moments out of today when you’re alone and check out what you feel when you think of yourself.

Now what do you feel when you think of your worst enemy.

Then what do you feel when you think of  a good friend.

Finally think of someone you had a fleeting contact with.

If you feel similarly across the range then you’re in the zone.

If you feel differently then you’ve got some work to do!

SEX, POWER, and DEATH!

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to my Dirty Little Secret posting. What possessed me to post it in the first place and then why did I take it down?

The GaySocrates blog is the fruit of having completed Julia Cameron’s Artist's Way 2 years ago. To those unfamiliar with the process, it’s a 12 week self-directed course which involves doing a bit of reading, writing 3 pages every morning and, every week finding something you want to do to cultivate your creative self-called the ‘Artist’s Date’. The purpose is to unlock your creativity. As a life long scientist I had been pretty much trained out of doing any non-scientific creative stuff and 2 years ago I’d felt that it was time for me to release my inner creative energy. At the end of the 12 weeks I decided that I wanted to write and this blog has been the vehicle for my writing output. An opportunity to put into the public domain what started out as a hypothetical weekly spiritual advice column for young gay men. Once the blog was up and running I was accepted as a regular contributor to Brighton’s monthly LGBT listings magazine GSCENE.

In order to protect the whole process from potential attack and to allow me to freely write without inhibition I’ve kept everything secret from everyone I know.- friends, family, work colleagues, my partner-everyone. For a gay man who had remained closeted until his early 20s, it’s been a fascinating experience to develop a secret alter ego. It’s a bit like reclaiming the secret part of yourself, which you sacrificed when you revealed your true sexuality to people when you first came out.

As time went by I noticed another process too. Initially when the work involved just me and the written page it was easy to write straight from the heart. It stayed that way when I first started to blog and believed that no-one was reading me. But then I started reading other gay blogs, started linking to them and had them link to me, got emails from some readers and started corresponding with others. Then I figured out how to install Google Analytics and was getting feedback about how many hits I was getting, I got drawn into the idea of increasing the blog’s popularity. I was interested in promoting what I was writing maybe more than the writing itself. I realized that with each communication, with each link, with each analytic report, my sense of anonymity was being slowly eroded and my ego was playing a much greater part in the whole thing.

That was when ‘Dirty Little Secret’ reared its head. Just a short, graphic story about sex in a gay sauna. I’d written the story as an exercise in creative writing and wondered about posting it. It didn’t really fit with the character of the blog but then again it was an aspect of who I was so why should I self censor? A couple of weeks ago I posted it in a fit of recklessness.

Once it was posted it didn’t feel right. I started to worry that it was an obscene publication which, if brought to the attention of the authorities would be found to contravene some obscure archaic anti pornography law resulting in me being prosecuted and ending up in court!

:-)

I also worried that in spite of my ‘over 18’ blog filter, the material could still be accessed by minors. I wouldn’t have left a hard copy version of ‘Dirty Little Secret’ lying around a family home, not even in a folder marked ‘Please do not read if you are under 18’, so why am I leaving it on a public site accessible by kids?

Lastly, I felt that there was too much of a clash between my purported aim to corrupt Gay Youth with Love and this piece of writing which might be seen as an attempt to corrupt them with lust- which was something I didn’t want to do.

So I’ve taken it down. It’s still available by email, on request, but no longer as easily accessible.

So what has all this taught me? There’s something in there about how, for me, as I move away from matters of the soul towards concerns of the ego then sex begins to play a much bigger part. I’m lucky, in that, as I get older, my ‘sexual imperative’ has become more of an ‘optional extra’. Nevertheless sexual concerns remain with me as an indelibly influential aspect of my ego. In my meditations this week I’ve been reflecting on those aspects of my ego that seem to have supreme and executive authority over me -unless, of course, I can spot what’s going on before it happens.

For me the big three are: SEX, DESIRE FOR POWER, and FEAR OF ILLNESS.

None of these aspects are ever explicit but they constitute a set of implicit features of who I am. It’s great that I have begun to recognize them because I’m now working on gradually chipping away at their influence. Funny too how, as my sex drive dwindles, the other two aspects grow to plug the gap.

My ego is so good at playing tricks on me. For instance, with the recognition of my ego’s desire for power, I have deliberately avoided seeking a management position in a recent structural reorganisation at work, happily conning myself that I am eschewing the trappings of power in order to weaken the pull of my ego. In reality I know deep down that I’ll be more influential as a dissident than as a line manager! Similarly I’ve been kidding myself that because I welcome death I'm kind of somewhat enlightened yet my preoccupation with aches and pains and potential ailments belies any sense that I’ve come to terms with my mortality. Maybe I’ve developed a kind of emotional detachment from life caused by or as a cause of my illness worries. So I restrict myself from doing a whole range of things because I feel a bit ill or because doing something might make me ill. Consequently I never engage in life to the full which then makes it easier to think- Wow life is pretty hard work-so bring on death!

My challenge with this fear of illness is to see if I can engage more fully in life regardless of what my illness worries might be. Having discovered this aspect of myself this week, I challenged myself to attending a 2 hour 5 Rhythms dance meditation with excellent effect! More of this next week!!

Dirty Little Secret CHAPTER 2 is available on request Email me -just convince me you are over 18!!