Neck Becomes The Boot

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everyone and welcome back to my Curiously Queer Life. I just want to say, first off, I have been going through my stats, and uh there's a lot of new people. And I just want to say thank you for coming on this ride with this old queer because I I don't even know. There's no because. Thank you for coming on this ride with me. I am so grateful. It is a very cool thing to speak into the void and uh have someone call back. So thank you. This week I have been thinking about patterns and the things we do, and there's a pattern that is so old, it predates every civilization we have ever built. Someone holds a boot, someone's neck is under it. Eventually that neck gets strong enough to push back. And what happens next in the part nobody wants to talk about, the neck becomes a boot. Not out of evil, not out of malice, out of memory, out of survival instinct that never got the memo that the war is over. And here we are, generation after generation, cycle after cycle, trading places, but never actually leaving the room. This whole conversation started with a question a friend had asked me. What have we lost in a world that keeps turning inward? A world where marriage is suspect, children are optional, the white pick and fence is the punchline, and I stopped because I had to ask myself honestly, am I a part of the problem? Is the work that I'm doing here, the inward looking, the healing, the sovereignty of self, is it quietly encouraging a kind of beautiful, articulate isolation? Segregating, the segregated to a community of one? I sat with that question longer than I'm comfortable admitting to. But here's where I landed. The problem was never the inward journey. The problem is when you never come back out. You go in to heal, you come back out to connect. The whole circuit, break either end, and the current stops, and you become a community of one. What we're really talking about is roots. Not the kind that trap you, the kind that feed you. Human beings have always needed tribe, not ideology, not a curated community of people who use the same language and share the same differences. Actual, messy, complicated, different from you, tribe. The white picket fence was never the point. The point was the impulse underneath it to build something beyond yourself, to reach past your own edges and say, I'm planting something that will outlast me. That instinct is not naive. That instinct is ancient. And somewhere in the noise of becoming ourselves, a lot of us quietly let go. Somewhere along the way, the self-help world got very singular. That same friend said that to me recently, and they were right. The journey inward became a destination. Healing became a trophy. Awareness became a weapon, and we did the work, we got the language, and we used that same language as a hammer on anyone who didn't think the same. That's not healing. That's just a more sophisticated version of what was done to us. Here's what I know from living inside more than one community and the fights that exist. When you spend years being invisible, being wrong, being the thing people lower their voice to mention, oh, here comes the gay guy. Something happens to your nervous system. You develop radar, hypersensitivity, always on, threat detecting radar. And that radar saved a lot of us. It kept us alive in rooms that weren't safe. Only my gaydar was that good. Anyway, that same safety radar in a room that actually is safe can misfire. Someone stumbles, they use the wrong word, the old frame, the language that was used and handed down to them before. They're not attacking you. They're standing at the edge of something unfamiliar, squinting their eyes, trying to find their footing. And sometimes what they get back is a wall. A big barb wired wall with fuck off spray painted in white on the front of it. I know that wall. I helped build a version of it. Because I was tired. Because I had explained myself too many times to too many people who didn't actually understand what I was saying. Tired of hearing, don't make our kids gay. Sidebar, if I had the power to make anyone gay, I promise you you would all be gay. Just saying. Eventually, tired looks angry, and anger looks like aggression, and suddenly the person in front of you who just wanted to get it right walks away feeling like shit. And then they stop trying. They see someone who looks like you in the future and they walk the other way. Or worse, dump that negativity on the wrong next person. That is a loss. That is a horrible loss. The person who doesn't see me the way I want to be seen is not my enemy. They're just someone who doesn't understand me yet. Maybe they never will. And I have decided, no, I have chosen to be okay with that. Because my worth was never located inside their perception of me. When we forget that, when we start operating from the premise that their ignorance diminishes us, we hand over something we can't afford to lose. We hand over our steadiness, our clarity of who we are. And a person who has lost their steadiness cannot build a circle. They can only build walls. My friend who brought up these points is very different from me. We come from very different places, very different ideas, a life. But that doesn't hinder our chats. We don't have to be the same to be kind. We don't have to understand each other to make room for each other. And honestly, I love people questioning me because then I question myself. And then I evolve and I grow and I have a better understanding of myself and the people around me. Every cycle of suppression continued because nobody was willing to be the one to put the boot down first. Everybody waits for the other side to give in. Somebody has to go first. Somebody needs to take the first step to a different life. Maybe that somebody is the one doing the inner work. Maybe the whole point of healing yourself is so you have enough left over to extend it to someone who genuinely needs it. That is not weakness. That is not surrender. That is the only direction that ends well, that includes everyone. We want to be known genuinely, fully, without apology or asterisk. Known. That is one of the most human wants there is. It predates every moment, every flag, every word we've ever invented to describe ourselves. And the only way to be known is to stay in the room. Tolerate the awkward. To let someone stumble towards you without punishing them for not already being where you are. The roots of who we are, the deep ones, the ones that go all the way down, they were never about being right. They were about being connected. That's what we lost. That's why we're trying to find our way back to I don't have a flag to wave here. I don't have a side to represent. I just have a circle. And it stays open most of the time. Go be in the same room as someone who confuses you. You don't have to fix it. You don't have to feel it. Just exist together as you are. It is so much easier. It is so much easier to walk through life with your head held high, a smile on your face, and a happy hello to whoever's in front of you. Because we are all suffering something. All of us. It is not a singular thing, it is a global thing. So when do we all realize that? When do we all look at all the news frames, all the everything, and realize that everyone is suffering? Maybe the suffering could come together and be one. Just saying. Anyway, that is it for this week, everyone. As always, fill your tanks with joy, love, and kindness. And when you feel it spilling over the edges, you share it with everyone around you. My name is Thomas St. James, and this is my Curiously Queer Life.