May I Love Myself Just as I Am

On silence, sickness, and showing up again.

Life is about relationships, and I have a relationship with this site—sometimes a rocky one.

For ten years, this site has been many things: a headache, a passion, a mission, a revenue stream, a purpose, a challenge, and a chore. I came back many times to this post, the way a conversation that must happen between lovers beats around until the silence reaches a breaking point. I'm here now. Sorry it took me so long.

Not once in those ten years has such a long pause gone between posts, at least not since the focus of this blog shifted from film reviews to sex questions. I am sitting down now, unsure what to say. Why did I let it go? It’s a long story.

I finished my second book manuscript and sent it in, but it did not feel strong. My editor and I have not started work on it yet, but it feels weaker than my first one, as if I left too much out. I think this is just the sophomore scaries after my first book, which did better than I thought; I think many writers get blue after a work is sent in.

Then I learned I have Type 2 diabetes. 

Life is wild! I have imagined countless ways to kill myself over the years, and none of them involved sugar. 

I am young, fit, in shape, athletic, and now I can add a second chronic disease to my medical file. The fates were unsatisfied with just HIV and all the other disabilities I have—they had to add another. With medication, diabetes does not have to kill me, and many other poeple have several worse ones, but damn. God damn it all.

The doctor says it’s probably due to genetics. I am adopted and have only found one birth parent so far, so my biological history, my risk factors and family data, are mostly a mystery to me. Nothing in my 23&Me report said I had an elevated risk of diabetes. If anything, HIV in men results in a higher risk of developing diabetes, so maybe I’m part of that statistic. Now I have another pill to take every day, bringing the current daily total to five. I want to complain, but the more grown-up side of me says these things happen. Take a pill. It says: You’ll live, get back to work.

I suppose I feel somewhere in the middle, somewhere between acceptance and sorrow. Sometimes it feels like life doesn’t want me here. But it’s just diabetes, right? I’m not dying, at least not right now. But I’m sick. Chronically sick. Sick forever. When I say that aloud, it sounds worse than death: like a weakened, stunted life.

Is that cruel to say? I’m not in a wheelchair; I still have my legs, my eyes. I should be happy that I have so much, and sympathetic to those who don’t. But I also don’t think it’s wrong to wish—as I believe most people wish—that life could be as effortless an undertaking for me as it seems to be for so many others. Maybe that’s a fiction we all go about believing because of television and movies: the idea that the default body is healthy, and that sickness is somehow aberrant, an anomaly.

So, it’s just been blues and writer’s block. Instead of drowning myself in a project, I’m trying to just live a little, every day.  

And that’s life! That’s what we do. Each day, we just live a little. At the end of a day, a year, or a lifetime, we have just lived some. I am not circling the pit of despair as I might have been a few years ago—thanks to meditation, I think—and it would be a lie to say this present funk started with the diagnosis. No, it began with the first draft of my second book, then the diabetes, then work, and on and on.

And that’s how it happens. That’s how depression creeps in and projects stall. There’s never a moment when one looks back and says, Ah, that’s the culprit! It builds from the barrage of life, the daily hurts and offences, the bill we pay to live. 

And yes, between the hurts and offences are moments of wonder and joy, and it takes age to see that all of it, the good and bad, make life rich and complex. Depression has always been here with me, but my relationship to it—to the darkness in me, itself—has also changed with time. I now greet it as an old friend. I know its patterns.

This is why meditation is so essential for me. I do it every morning before I make coffee. I have a small rug in the hallway and a meditation bench, and for about twenty minutes in the morning, I sit, breathe, and observe the mind. Sometimes I use an app for guided meditation. Other times, I simply set a timer and let go. It’s a way to step back from thinking and observe the thinking. Ah, hello depression. There you are. 

Lately, I have been using a mantra: May I love myself just as I am.

This is the hardest thing to do in life, and I think gay men especially struggle with this. It’s hard to love our faults and flaws, especially when we grow up with so many negative messages about us. Many of us grow up in a world that doesn’t love us as we are, and then we spend our adult lives looking for or creating such a world. The beauty of the gay bar and gay culture is that, at its best, it is such a place, a wonderland where people can be loved just as they are. That is what we should aspire to create. That is what I have hoped to do, in my little corner of influence on gay life: may everyone I love and interact with love themselves just as they are.

I found this mantra in The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion by Christopher K. Germer, a book I recommend for anyone struggling with self-compassion. (Everyone.)

May I love myself just as I am: with HIV and fucking diabetes. With a broken ear. With a blog that badly needs attention. With a career that is still young, that I still must figure out. With a new life in Germany that alternately feels great and alienating. 

May I love myself as the man I have grown into and, fuck, may I love myself as the writer I hope I am. May I love Alex first, before anyone else. May I love Alex’s belly and Alex’s big nose. May I love Alex’s grey hairs. May I love Alex.

I don’t know what else to say. This is just an explanation for my brief silence. But I’m back now. We’ll get the site up and running again.

I wish we all could love ourselves just as we are, because we deserve that. But sometimes we need help, and that's where my purpose lies—that’s what this blog is for.

Welcome back. 

Love, Beastly