Devon Hunter

Sorry, couldn’t resist the New Kids on the Block reference… Anyway, there’s a new LGBTQ magazine coming out soon, and I am the first cover man for it (click to enlarge). The magazine is called Night OUT Carolinas, and it will be placed in all the bars in North and South Carolina. It will also have some placement in the border areas of Tennesse, Virginia, and Georgia. If you see a copy, pick one up and check out the resources inside. From what I understand it will be a full color, glossy, 8.5 x 5.5, saddle stiched booklet. Advertisers can place ads, and it should become a pretty helpful way to stay in touch with what’s happening across the region. Hope you are all having a good week!

Yesterday I blogged about the differentiation in my mind between pride and arrogance. Today I am going to focus on how confusing the two affects my self-esteem. Hopefully working this out in words will help me understand how to find better balance and grace.

It’s frustrating to me when I try to pay someone a compliment, and they won’t accept it. I don’t feel obliged to flatter people, as it is a compliment given for selfish reasons. Since I don’t dole out petty affirmations, when I say something nice to someone, I mean it. And it makes me uncomfortable or annoyed when the person/people in question can’t simply be gracious and say “Thank you.”

So… I wonder if that answers my question before I even ask it.

The point was made to me that there really isn’t a question of accepting/absorbing compliments and affirmations, since getting them at all is itself the compliment. Many people don’t get any, so how can I be so ungrateful as to discard friendly gestures and comments? With this in mind, I feel like the proverbial swine before whom pearls are cast. It really is unkind not to accept random acts of love and beauty.

And yet, there are two obstacles in my head: 1) I don’t want others to perceive me as being arrogant and 2) if I don’t believe the compliment, it makes me either wonder what the person’s motive is, or I immediately look for something negative to cancel the compliment out. Something about our culture that really pisses me off is that on the one hand everyone is expected to be an independent, self-sufficient individual, but on the other hand martyrs are made into saints.

If I accept my own positive qualities and become confident, well, then people knock me down for being too full of myself. But once I’m knocked down people then build me back up. I mean… Whuh?? I honestly don’t get it, and this confusion between pride and arrogance seems to make most people simply throw their hands in the air and say, “I’m average, and that’s all I need.” Bullshit! Each person on this planet should be allowed and encouraged to celebrate his own goodness and the strengths of others without fear of being emotionally neutered.

That’s just the way it is. But it shouldn’t be.

This is going to be a gradual shift, I know this already. But I think that a first step I can make, which won’t necessarily be legible to anyone else, is to simply not look for a fault to balance a strength. “You have/are (insert compliment)” requires only a “Thank you” on the outside and a moment of gratitude on the inside. And I also think I want to compliment myself more. In fact, I think I’m going to ask myself out on date, since I’m so fucking fabulous. My friend Annie engaged herself. I may have to consider that as well (do I have to move to Connecticut or Massachusetts for it to be legal?).

We live in a world that is full of people who want something from us. That has lots of possibilities. Some people seek to use us for their various selfish purposes, or simply need a rubber doll with a pulse. Others want to drain us of our energy, or to prop themselves up higher by standing on our shoulders. But… There are those who want to cull happiness and success in us, because it gratifies them to help. And there are others who genuinely admire our strengths, or the ways in which we best our challenges.

All of this up and down with interacting with various beings can break our egos. If self-esteem is like a malleable piece of plastic, then that means with enough bending back and forth it can eventually snap. I know only a few people whom I believe when they say, “I like myself. Alot.” I admire them very much. I think I am beginning to internally embrace a concept that I articulated for myself quite a long time ago: My differentiation between pride and arrogance. On a logical level it makes sense to me, but until now I’m not sure I’ve been ready to apply it.

Put simply, I believe that there is a very distinct difference between being proud and being arrogant. When someone says to you in a negative tone, “Well, that sounded proud!” in my mind what they should have said is, “Well, that sounded arrogant!” And here is why I believe the two should be separated, not connected or juxstaposed on top of each other:

Pride is self love based on truth, and arrogance is self love based on nothing.

My challenge is to accept that which is true about myself, regardless of whether or not it is good/bad, right/wrong, etc. If I know something to be true about me, and I appreciate it, then it is my duty to be proud of that strength/attribute/goodness. Conversely, if I know something to be true, and I am ashamed of it, then it is my duty to make steps towards growth in this area of weakness/difficiency/negativity. The problem with arrogance is that it creates a false strength of weakness, generates lies that have to be forcefully propped up, and then uses the insecurity within the lies as a weapon against others.

I am having this discussion with myself, because tomorrow I want to discuss the problems I have had in accepting compliments and affirmations. After some very good long talks with a beautiful friend, and after an hour-long rant about my perfection from my mother (thank the Goddess for mothers! HA!), I woke up this morning, and for a flash I had a moment of pure acceptance: I am fucking fabulous! It passed, but it’s progress, right? Tomorrow I want to talk about the way the confusion between pride and arrogance stops me from seeing myself as I am (no matter how much others say they see something else in me).

I was chatting online last night, and some dude hit me up. We talked some formal chit chat for a little bit before he told me that he’d just had a fight with his boyfriend, had shown his boyfriend my profile, and had told his boyfriend that I was the guy waiting in the wings for him to leave his boyfriend. To which the man said his boyfriend replied, “Well, he’s a pole dancer, so I guess that’s just fucking typical!”

Mhm…

Ring, Ring:

“Hello?”

“Hi, Kettle?”

“Yeah?”

“This is the pot: You’re black.” (Click.)

Alright, bear wiff a strippa fo’ jess a moment… we gonna get deep ‘n shit… but only for a moment (don’t worry).

Often we think of space and time as two separate concepts; however, research in physics shows us that they are not. There is space-time, the joining of the two into a whole that is inseparable throughout existence.

I went to dinner tonight with a friend of mine named Chuck. He is very kind. I admire him very much as a human being. He invited me to go along to dinner, specifically because he knows I’ve been feeling a bit down lately, and he wanted to introduce me to some of his favorite people. That gesture in and of itself is beautiful, because it proves what I’ve sensed about him: He cares about people, and he wants them to feel appreciated. Sadly, that is not always the default setting amongst gay men in general, but his kindness gives me hope that I can not allow past hurts to define my present and future disappointments before they even happen.

At dinner I asked him, “Do you know what the fourth dimension is?”

“No,” he replied with a puzzled look.

“Yes, you do. It’s so obvious that you’re overlooking it. If we need to meet somewhere, we need to know the x-, y-, and z-axis. If I want to meet you at Fifth Avenue and Third Street on the 10th floor, what else do I need to know before I can meet you there?”

“Hmmmm… I don’t know.”

“Time. I need to meet you at Fifth and Third on the 10th floor at noon.”

“Oh! Yes. Of course.”

“Flattery is one-, maybe two-dimensional. But compliments – those have shape, because they have depth. Those are three-dimensional; however, I want to give you what I have decided in this moment to call a four-dimensional compliment. That means that although I am telling you this here in this place, I want you to take it forward with you wherever you go in time.”

“Alright… I think I can handle that.”

“You make me want to truly embrace gay men again.”

It can be very easy for me to go into cruise control and simply smile and nod. To not connect with people in my community out of a sense of self-preservation. To be able to cut men off unceremoniously, whether they actually deserve it or not. My experiences have taught me that most gay men are simply not able to accept, let alone give, true kindness to other gay men. But Chuck is a gay man who defies my experience. I have to allow his friendship to teach me a new lesson.

You see, it’s okay that we hurt sometimes. It’s okay that growth is uncomfortable. But at some point it becomes just as important to go on living, right? What’s the point of hurt without healing? God, remembering balance can be so difficult! Anyway, negativity really isn’t (or at least it doesn’t have to be) permanent. Also, negativity isn’t necessarily bad. It’s simply the balance to positivity.

If you agree that the universe is expanding because of the Big Bang, then there is something else underlying that concept that you will almost have to agree with as well: Whatever pain (and I’m not speaking exclusively to gay men here) you have experienced is no longer here with you now.

If the world is rotating at something like 1,000 miles per hour, and if Earth is revolving around the sun at 10,000 miles per hour, and if the sun is revolving around the center of the Milky Way at 100,000 miles per hour, and if the Milky Way is racing away towards the ever-expanding edge of the universe at the speed of light… Well… Then by the time you can register or recognize that you are uncomfortable or unhappy… your stressor is already a million miles away, and in the past too.

I’m not saying this to trivialize that which causes us duress. Nor am I trying to be escapist. I’m simply trying to help myself (and anyone who cares to join me) realize that once you decide to let go of them, the experiences that bring you unhappiness can be left behind in less than an instant. This doesn’t mean our memories should be forgotten or disrespected: Those challenges define who we are, because they reveal us to ourselves as we meet and exceed them. But what it does mean is that, when we’re ready, we can choose to let Creation remove our pain as we travel along.

Acknowledging that I can carry four-dimensional compliments with me along with four-dimensional injuries helps me feel some equilibrium. It’s also encouraging to think that when I’m finally ready to hand a weight off to the universe, that it will be whisked away from me faster than I can think to miss it. I can have distance whenever I want it. Now… if I could just bring myself to unclench my fingers… Ha!