Unlike Ricky Ricardo, I know only one language, and it's a peculiar one. Why should the word write start with a w? Who thought the spelling of psychiatrist made sense? Why should any letters be in a word if you don't pronounce them? Where'd this stuff come from, anyway?
People use the word gay to mean homosexual, and so when I came out to my friends and parents, I too used the word gay to define myself. But it’s just a word, and it does a poor job of even clarifying all the dynamic complexities that come into play when I’m looking out at the world from inside my skin. The word homosexual is not much better either, although at least I can relate to the scientific need to classify things. But the word is hung on me, I’m not hung on the word.
Like most adults, my sexual identity is an important part of who I am. Although I identify with others through the use of the word gay, my life experience isn’t represented by any definition language can describe. I can use a thousand words to tell you about my experience, but that doesn’t mean that they will tell you everything.
On the outside, people see someone or something they need to identify and categorize, but I’m not a category, I’m just a person, and inside I feel no affinity for certain words that fail to describe me. I’m not better or worse than anyone else, and like all of us I’m unique, but that doesn’t make me special. I’m just me, and I wish people would try to stop putting each other in boxes.
Gay is only a word, it’s not the person. My sexuality is a state of my being alive, one of many tandem internal states that humans run on in our daily existence. We’re also brother, sister, friend, wife, husband, citizen. I’m no more bound to one word than I am any other, because no word truly describes how I function on the inside. In there, it just is. I am what I am, and I don’t want any definition.
The word gay isn’t the only one that doesn’t define me well. In common parlance I would also be categorized as an atheist or agnostic, but theism or gnosticism don’t have anything to do with my outlook. They don't register enough on my list of importance to identify myself with them one way or another.
I don’t place myself on an Easter Bunny spectrum, neither yea nor nay. My state of being is not defined according to whether I believe in The Easter Bunny or not. I don’t look at a mountain and imagine how The Easter Bunny made it, nor does my identity disavow those who do. The Easter Bunny just doesn’t belong to my thoughts about existence at all.
So what am I if you can’t define me?
We need theists and we need atheists (we don't need extremists of any stripe), so this isn’t a criticism of other people’s beliefs or ideas. People can define themselves as they deem necessary, I just don’t want definitions of myself to overtake the actual understanding of who I am.
The people I most admire in recent history were all believers in a supernatural deity who controls all life. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Maya Angelou, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Thurgood Marshall, all these people had a grounded faith that drove their actions toward responsibility for others. Faith is a powerful part of human history, and I respect the way these people used the language of faith to lift us up and instill visions of our better selves, wresting progress from a resistant society.
These people turned language into action, and each in their own way are giants of inspirational philosophy. But that’s just one part of a spectrum. Language can also be used politically to bring about our worst nature as a race. It’s the people who cling so tightly to definitions and tidy little boxes without nuance that create hard times for so many. Language wielded as a weapon of aggression is why it’s so important to deescalate our dependence upon words related to identity. When definitions become rigid, people become fuel for reductive ideologies.
This is not to say that people can't claim words for themselves. The civil rights movements currently raging in our world all use words strategically to combat rampant injustice, and their language is a powerful tool wielded with a critical urgency. But a lot of that is an effort to rise above the limits of definitions as they've been historically understood by people in power.
Words and their definitions are changing rapidly as technology obliterates dialog as we knew it. The miniaturization of language is happening at a rapid pace as texting, tweeting and emoji-ing become our common threads. Utter nonsense is now understood by millions, and emojis are even replacing words in book-length stories. How this will play out in the long run is something we can’t know now, but it’s apparent that we’ve become disconnected from both language and meaning, which brings its own dangers.
Politically we’re living through a point where masters of illusion are using language to illustrate the complete opposite of what words are agreed to mean. People have set themselves free from the responsibilities of language, and that’s not what I’m advocating. We need to find a way to stop putting each other in boxes is all I’m saying.
So many people now shouting out their anger and boredom, broadcasting the minutia of their own little lives to collective clusters, connecting with other people in order to collude or collide in foreplays of provocative behavior. Everybody flirts, but nobody dances. Altogether it creates a cacophonous dynamic of impulsive hysteria that never stops. The anger, derision and divisiveness just goes on and on.
Our language just isn’t big enough for us, but we keep trying to fit each other into the box rather than get rid of the box altogether. Definitions are important signifiers, but our reliance on definitions to corral human identity creates tensions that keep us from liberating one another.
For me, I’m just me, and with time I’ve learned to be good with that. How others define me is their issue, but I know who I am, and if I care to I’ll share it, with the best words I know how to use.
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