It’s Personal: This is Why I Trust Artists #thePowerofArt

 
It is possible nothing will stop the hatred — unless you MOVE. Your guidance counselors may not notice; no one may understand. It does get better though — entirely different — when you are around enough varied people that you are able to choose friends who accept you — being gay or mistaken for gay or whatever your uniqueness may be. The best thing I’ve found is to move. Decisively change your physical location. To a place with varieties of people. Spend time only with those who accept you. Do not try to be friends with everyone; you do not need anyone’s approval. Invest in yourself and your skills until you can afford to change your social environment completely. There is nothing wrong with you — or your children or siblings or whomever may be reading this. There are a whole bunch of friends out there waiting to have fun with exactly who you are.

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When you’re a young heterosexual guy who draws and reads a lot, quietly living with a vivid personal world — and when you move around every few years…from a hippie community in Central Coast California to a small-town multi-generational cliquish Catholic school in suburban Maryland — and then when in sixth grade after a few days at your new school you say it “doesn’t matter if people are gay”…and then, when classmates are lined up asking you to repeat this in front of others who you thought were your new friends — and you’re so fed up and obstinate and naive you want to flippantly say, “Yeah I’m gay” — out of contempt and a mistaken impression that you are actually standing up for someone…Don’t. It’s not your fight. Wait to take it up when you are older. You are not going to change anyone’s mind in sixth grade.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.  Fyodor Dostoevsky 

That ‘political sarcasm’ in those few hours on the first week of sixth grade defined my life for YEARS. I was fortunate to be able to take a girl from another high-school to prom (she was beautiful, bright, and cool but the still lingering stigma from a misdirected stance in the last year of elementary school continued defining my social life through a very conservative high-school). Then when I finally went to college — far, far away — I met a wonderful girl (a preacher’s kid) with whom I basically had more sex than most married couples in several lifetimes. Easily. With vengeance. Thank God. (Thank you Heather.)

It was a stroke of luck my family was able to afford college. It is painful to imagine what it must be like for those less fortunate to be locked in contingent accidental social relationships which oppress them. Move. Keep changing the combination…sooner or later you will find your friends. It is certainly not your fault. You are a fun person, you just have to find the right people to have fun with — there are a lot of people who will like you for being exactly the way you want to be.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman