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This blog has moved. I will no longer be updating this one.
If you want to know where I am now blogging, please ask.
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I recently returned from Camp fYrefly - a national youth leadership camp targeted towards fostering leadership and building resiliency in LGBTIQQA2A individuals between 14 and 24. This is my (semi) obligatory post-camp blog.
I identify as asexual.
I'm not "out" in real life, but to be honest I don't think anyone in my (admittedly) limited social circle would be surprised. I am aware that this blog is public, but there is no one that I am aware of whom reads this blog with regularity and whom I care about discovering my sexual orientation. That being said, even if every student at my school was informed of this new development, my lack of any intimate social relations is a fair safeguard against any real harm.
I am not certain what prompted me to sign up for this camp. I have never been discriminated against on the sole basis of my sexuality. I have never been the subject of homophobic slurs because I am not homosexual. Asexuality is a relatively ignored sexual minority, in terms of both support and oppression. I have never been hated because of my sexual orientation because I have been bullied and harassed and hated for such a large variety of other reasons that their magnitude make my asexuality pale in comparison. Having been taunted and shoved into lockers for being a 13-year-old loner who spent every day in the library afterschool until it closed, and having only literature and teachers as companions, my sexual orientation was far, far down on the list of malfunctions to be barraged and harassed by other sadistic 13-year-olds.
I initially hesitated to register. I have been to numerous youth camps in the past, but all of them have been obligatory. Camp fYrefly was the first camp that I walked into willingly, because social interaction is generally an activity which I avoid with an ardent, misanthropic fervor. It was an enormous leap - a leap into the dark rather than a leap of faith, because such faith in the goodness of human beings is a quality that I have lost long ago.
I believe that I committed myself to this camp because I desired a sense of belonging. This desperation was foreign to me. As an individual who found the emotional expression of humanity to be confusing and irrational at best, general society had long removed me from the ranks of the narrow definition of "normal and well-adjusted". But intellectually, certainly, I understand the intrinsic, human imperative of such a need. It is a need that I seldom acknowledge, because what I have seen of people so far in my short life has saddened and sobered me - enraged and disgusted and embittered me. I saw humanity and my share of eighty years as a gauntlet to be run - a finite state of perdition from which I would emerge and fade into nothing.
The camp began with the typical onslaught of bonding activities: name games, introductions, and rules to be followed. The youth were then given opportunities to participate in various workshops revolving around resiliency, self-esteem, sexual health, and leadership.
A significant function of the camp was to offer queer youth a period of time, however small, to for once be in the sexual majority - to experience life without judgment. It was during the last few workshops however, that a novel reality occurred to me - even among the minority I am a minority; even among the most alienated I am an alien.
I was the only asexual youth camper. Actually, I was the only asexual person on the entire damn island - adult volunteers, camp counselors, camp cooks, and probably forest wildlife included.
My opinion on this is one of confusion. I was not aware until rather recently that asexuality is in fact considered a legitimate sexual orientation, although even that legitimacy is continually under assault. I have never been one for causes - there is nothing in my existence that I support with all the love and rage and anger that many individuals of our species ascribe themselves to. There is nothing that I would adamantly worship nor vehemently oppose. What I am exists in a constant state of apathy - I am a ghost, as I always have been and in most likelihood always will be. Whether I am accepted or not does not unsettle me; isolation is something I have grown accustomed to. Solitude allows me to pursue my knowledge and to study the world and the people that inhabit it with a critical objectivity.
But where does that leave me?
At camp, we discussed the idea of alienation in depth. Adult volunteers and other youth campers related their stories at length; professed to be stories, but really, primary testimonials of man's inhumanity to man.
The margins of society are, contrary to popular belief, not static. The marginalized are always in motion, their definitions are dynamic rather than absolute. While alienation is the convenient catch-all category to which society hurls its deviants, the alienated cease to be alienated once there are enough of them. Once outcasts ban together they are by definition, no longer outcasts. There is comfort to be found in one another.
And so to that understanding, the other youth and adults at the camp have more in common with the heterosexual majority than I could ever hope to. If only they could realize that and learn to love each other rather than punctuate their differences, because if enough alliances are formed as barriers against a foreign group, eventually the entire universe will be morally interdependent. Deviancy will lose its meaning. If every organism in the comprehensible world is different in some significant way to its brother, then every organism is the same. The critical necessity to peace then, is not shared commonality, but rather, shared differences.
I am so certain that while this is an inevitable eventuality, I will never see it realized within my lifetime. The inevitability of it brings me no comfort. The only cause that could matter - that could ever change an individual for good or ill - is a cause that is understandable during the individual's lifetime. And this concept of peace is one that we are far, far away from integrating into our comprehension.
I will be honest in confessing that this camp brought me no comfort. It was enjoyable, certainly, but the sense of belonging I have searched for all my life continued its long absence. It makes me question if it is something that I will ever experience during my lifetime. It makes me question the mercy of our creation. It is humbling, to say the least. Not merely humbling on an existential understanding, but humbling in the sense that it makes me unsure even of my own humility. It is a humility that enrages me. It is a humility that reminds me of the fact that all my life I have known nothing but invisibility - a ghost, in every absolute sense of the word.
It is a humility that sadistically reminds me that I am a rudderless, directionless boat that is still adrift only because it wishes to spite all the raging storms and hateful rains that have dragged it down time and time again into the abyss. But it is no longer a spite borne of reactive, youthful, excited rebellion - it is a spite that is tired and fatigued beyond comprehension, that has felt every passing year like a century - that has been utterly defeated, and now endures in the manner of a deer run to the ground.
I am unsure whether my attendance at this camp was beneficial or not. I would like to think it was, but that is a stubborn, residual measure of hope that is always present but not always realistic.
Time passes and time crawls regardless of whether or not we are in it. But what does a ghost know of time?
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I must confess that my understanding of their most intimate, commanding affective intuitions are based upon naught but tireless estimations and mimicry - empty reciprocity to the revelations I receive every day.
They count me among their number, and I have watched as they garrison themselves and their children behind a holy vigil of human passions and common morality. I observe patiently, I study them in their dependencies and lusts and love and relations and materials and ambitions and gluttony and expectancies and all other manners of humanity that are foreign to me. I sit in the distance and am still able to descry their lavishness and golden drapings they hang like blighted fools, I hear the declarations of love and bitterness and remorse and loneliness that they are stricken by every moment they are alive.
I watch from afar as they fall into torment, and revel in it. They drench themselves in agony and wade willingly through depravity, but when they are raised from perdition by some alien grace, they insolently proclaim that such grief is ennobling.
I do not watch them because I aspire to understand, for such things are inscrutable to me. I watch them because in a critical way, I am a ghost, and the world I observe is a world I will never be a part of. But at the very least if I cannot be seen, I will be feared.
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I haven't spent much time in my childhood suburb as of late, since I've relocated to the adjacent Vancouver metropolis for school. I haven't genuinely walked the streets and weaved through shortcuts as only a native can, in a very long time. Realistically it's only been a year, perhaps less, but I am young and in one's days of youth a year is a lifetime.
I look at the streets differently now, much more differently than I did as a child. Somehow home never looks the same when you return following a period of maturation. It doesn't feel like home anymore, not like it ever did, really. Even the shortcuts learned when skipping school or exploring with classmates feel foreign; alien. I felt like an intruder, like the intimacy of these streets that no non-local should ever know about were unwillingly and unwittingly passed onto me by some accidental chance.
I felt like a shadow, one whose time has past and was clinging onto some remnant of nostalgia. I see no one on the streets that I recognize, and so many stores and buildings have changed - not significantly, but enough - that I would look upon an intersection and not remember what memories I made there.
I suppose this emotion would be described by people as grief. It doesn't chill my body like it would for others, but there is something ringing intermittently there that tells me the time to move on is nearing. One day, soon, I will leave this city and never return. As I walked again on the deserted weekday streets, it struck me that this must have been how the ancient Romans felt as they watched their empire fall into decay. It happens almost imperceptibly - an overgrown temple, fading marble, and abandoned villas that gradually lose the sound of children and festivities of daily life. Things and places that once had a purpose now stand only by the mercy of humanity's obsession with the past. Like a mother who sits in her grown child's bedroom - left immaculate and in the state he left it in - and gently fondles dusty toys and ragged teddy bears, whilst brokenly longing for the days of packed lunches and soccer practice and broken curfews.
I ran into him in the City Hall parking lot.
In younger years I would look to him as a superior, but now I spoke to him as equals. He waved and beckoned me over and asked me what I had been up to in recent years. What to say? These sort of passing conversations on sidewalks among acquaintances were never really meant for substance, but to say nothing would be a lie.
I responded truthfully. School, work, rinse and repeat. It felt like I had made childhood out to be such a scam - you think you're finished upon highschool graduation and then suddenly you realize that you are nowhere close. There are still years of schoolwork and cliques and confusion and searching and youthful exploration left in your life, and then suddenly highschool doesn't seem like a monumental rite of passage anymore.
But then maybe adulthood is a larger scam, because it's a scam you don't see coming. You perceive children as your peers, and then suddenly and abruptly they will rebuke you because you are no longer part of their youth culture. And then finally, finally, once you have settled into an existence of mediocre purpose, it is over, and you feel that time has been snatched away right at the moment when you have best discovered how to spend it.
On this note, I stopped and regarded him seriously. He looked older; the wrinkles more pronounced and his hairs graying.
"I think it's a surefire sign that you're growing up; when you wake up on morning and realize that life is actually rather boring. You come to realize that all the successes of humanity are merely instruments of which to pass time. All of our worldly materials and substances are no better than a child building a castle with imaginary bricks - you build toward something that you define yourself; that otherwise wouldn't exist. And if you lose sight of where to place the moat or the gate or the walls or the lord's manor, then you're kinda' fucked."
Life can be summed up as a desperate scramble to pass the time. Except that it's sort of self-delusional because you scramble and scramble and then suddenly when it's over, you feel like there was never enough - like the gods had cheated you out of a year or two or maybe three. But really, that year would have been spent at the office, standing in the Monday morning coffee line making inane, superficial conversation, listening to the news during the 5 o'clock traffic jam, or watching reruns of soap operas and yelling at your neighbor's dog to please shut the fuck up because it's 4 in the morning and you need to wake up early tomorrow to do it all over again.
I really have nothing more to say.
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