It is profound what can be found in the tiniest of silly things. I have joined TikTok and it is peeling away my armor and exposing the heap of trauma responses masquerading as an out and proud queer.
Yesterday, I received a notification that I have access to the new three minute feature, not that I had intent to blather on about anything on a platform that I have yet to build.
But I did have the notion that I could go ahead and film a tour of our gardens in its entirety, something I could not accomplish in the one minute format. Today, I briefly thought that I would do so. I went out the front door three times and talked myself out of it just as many.
As easy as I could brush it off as such, it isn’t the potential exposure of my current wellbeing: “Here, you have an unfinished flower bed.” “And here is an unfinished fire ring.” “Over here, is an unfinished flower bed.” “And an unfinished flower bed.” “This here is an overgrown bed, neglected because I started another unfinished flower bed.” “And here are all the bloomed out flowers I haven’t deadheaded.” “Over here is a pile of mulch and soil I need to eventually spread somewhere…”
I know this isn’t the prime push behind balking. I understand enough about executive dysfunction to find secret shortcuts around processing problems if I really want to do so. And I know why many of these projects are incomplete and what I am waiting to have in place before I continue them.
I have only spoken in two videos posted to Tiktok, and I deleted one of them. I can step up to being silly in front of my husband in the process of the recording (but it takes effort) as he is very good at embracing my weirdness, but outside?
Our garden is not behind the house, it is along side of it, with full exposure to the neighbors and full exposure to the street. And I am tone-policing myself. I am resisting being myself because I have so permanently encased my queerness in a shell of code-switching heteronormative bullshit. I am silencing my own voice and I am getting frustrated to a level where it effects my function for the remainder of the day, or even longer.
I just… I have lost myself. My queer being that I once embraced so fully. A series of tiny sacrifices were made for a life of more than getting by. Sixteen years later and I am frozen in my steps to think about acting naturally in my own front yard. Instead I am a pent-up, overly serious, brooding scowl of a queer man. I have so completely circled the wagons around my inner unicorn to stay protected from the horrid things the outer world has shown itself to be in the past year and a half.
I am so happy with the accomplishments made with our house and gardens. Ecstatic. Not only have we covered a lot of territory in the years we have lived here, but we have done so with chronic conditions and my grueling work schedule and the very real possibility of neurodivergence interfering at each step of the journey.
As a child, I regularly learned not to trust an audience, not to be openly unguardedly myself around too many people. Coming out in my late teens started the journey of unpacking and unravelling this baggage. The changes in my life following chemotherapy, namely a job change landing me in a harsh manufacturing environment slowly led me to pack it all back up. By the time I realized, there wasn’t a whole lot of my glittery gayness left to witness.
And there I stood, mad at myself for not having the sense of self and piece of mind to record a silly fucking three minute video of the garden that I love so much for a silly little app for teenagers.
And here I am.
quantum man 