Children with Problems

I am a man who is terrified of everything.

When I see an author experience something good on twitter, I’m terrified that success is a finite resource and my share just got smaller. When I hear someone say something good about another author, I’m terrified the implication is that they don’t like me. And when I hear that someone didn’t like my book, I’m terrified that there’s something wrong with me.

These sometimes last for days. Though, lately, they last for about fifteen minutes and then I realize I’m being stupid and get back to work.

There is a large difference between terror and fear.

And I am not a man ruled by fear.

I do feel it sometimes, and when I do, it’s usually something deeper. Like this shit right here in which shitty people advocate acting shitty to treat people like shit so they’ll stop being gay.

Sometimes I am afraid that this really is the world I live in.  A world where I can say “hey, a bunch of people are trying to justify persecuting, harassing and possibly physically harming gay kids” and the general response will be “what, again?”

Fear used to be a bigger part of my life, though.

I was not a pleasant child. Overweight, not much interest in social activities, let alone learning social mores, you can imagine how a lot of my life as a kid went. I’ll spare you the details, save one.

When I was a kid, I tried to fake sick everyday. I didn’t want to go to school. Ever. It wasn’t always clear why, to my parents, because it wasn’t always clear to me. How do you explain why “I’m not happy” is such a big deal at that age when every kid isn’t happy when they go to school? How do you tell your parents that having people look at you and wondering what they’re thinking is the worst feeling in the world when you’re not even sure that’s what’s the matter?

For a long time, I lived in fear of school, of my peers, of judgment, of everything.

I wrestled with it. I won. I control it well.

Today. Not always.

Fear is something that ages well. You leave it alone, it doesn’t shrink or go away. It echoes your body and mind, maturing in ways you didn’t know it could.

By age ten, fear is an idea. We move past the animal stages of fear—“pain is bad,” “fire is hot”—and we move into more sophisticated fears—of the other, the strange, the new.

At age eleven, fear is a philosopher. As our minds develop, it’s one of the central thinkers. It looks at something new, something strange, something we’ve never seen before. Our first instinct is to mistrust us, but until now that mistrust is usually beaten back by curiosity. Fear is there to refine that instinct into something firmer and shout down that curiosity so that we genuinely are afraid.

At age twelve, fear is an ideology. We can grasp concepts of social inclusion and popularity, how they are dictated by trends and perceptions of maturity. Perceptions, not understanding. So we’re very sensitive to things that challenge that fear. Curiosity is for babies now. Admitting you’re wrong is no longer an option. And confessing that you just don’t know something at the ripe old age of twelve is simply unthinkable.

From thirteen on, fear is principle. Fear is ever-present. Fear is the consequence, fear is the other kids laughing at you, fear is the uncertain, unwavering knowledge that nothing else in the world, nobody else in the world matters beyond this exact moment and this exact place and this exact situation in which you could possibly embarrass yourself.

And at that point, we no longer tease each other about being gay. We use it as an accusation, a means of controlling fear. We call people gay to turn attention toward them. We call people gay to figure out how to keep ourselves from being teased. When someone else is being looked at, no one is looking at us.

These people, the ones who hurl and spit and say it’s good and right to use “gay” as a bad word and to sling it at whoever, they are the ones that understand fear. The whole “they’re just kids” idea is a fallacy. They know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, even as it destroys things all around them. Because even before you were ten, you could understand hurt feelings and being outcast. When you’re thirteen, you know exactly what it is you’re doing to people.

The ones that get the words slung at them? They usually don’t understand fear. They understand hurt, sure, but they don’t understand why you’d want to do that to someone else. They know it won’t make them feel any better because they know what it does to the other person.

Fear, for them, is something big and vast, but not solid.

You grow out of it. Eventually.

Fear eventually becomes less firm, less important. Duty, routine and obligation become guides. For a few lucky individuals, inquiry and creativity and ambition become the hardest and most immovable things. These people took a very long time to figure out what was important to them and it’s not fear. Fear is something they don’t understand, still, but it’s much smaller. A nuisance that can sometimes grow very big, but not ever life-threatening as it used to be.

For some people, though, it just doesn’t go away.

From ages one to eighteen, everyone grows up wishing they were normal. From eighteen and beyond, everyone goes into the world wishing they were special.

Some of us are special, though nearly none of us realize it.

Some of us aren’t yet and have to wait to become special.

And some of us aren’t special and don’t feel like waiting.

These people are the ones who understand fear because these are the people that hate. These are the people that know what words can do and realize that they’ve been doing the same words, the same things and the same shit since they first stumbled upon the right combination of words to make a kid cry in school.

They aren’t special.

Fear isn’t special. Hate isn’t special. Envy isn’t special. They are the basest, most common emotions with the least complexity and the least interest.

And they feel it in abundance and nothing else.

So they yearn to be special by becoming bigger, by hurling their words to a bigger audience, by joining together with other people who will say “yes, you’re so special and they deserve to die, now please tell me I’m special,” by not being satisfied with making people cry and trying to make them kill themselves instead.

They want to have that power. It’s not the same thing as being special, but they can’t tell the difference.

But while they want the power, they don’t want the responsibility to go with it. They want to be the orator, but not the writer of the speech. They want to deliver the judgment, but not have to deliberate over it. They want to be the persecutor, but they don’t want to be the bad guy.

So they say “it’s not my fault.” It’s what the Bible says, maybe. It’s about the sanctity of marriage, maybe. It’s about you threatening my way of life, maybe.

“It’s not my fault I hate you,” they’ll say. “It’s your fault for being hated.”

It’s going to sound like I’m implying every hateful person on the world is secretly jealous. Some are. Some aren’t. Some are misguided, some are taking a long time to figure things out for themselves, some had a hard time growing up that was hard in different ways.

That doesn’t mean the words they say and the shit they do isn’t abhorrent. But it does mean that all these people aren’t entirely bad. And to hate them, as they hate people, isn’t something that’s going to work.

This part is for you, weird kids.

I’m not trying to espouse a “love thy neighbor” philosophy. Nor am I going to say that hating them means they win.

But if you’re even half as weird as I was growing up, you don’t have a lot of yourself to give up. Your mind is always somewhere, in some other world that’s better than where you are. Your time and energy are for people that you actually enjoy hanging around. Your life is yours and these people are trying to take it.

You don’t have enough to give to them. You shouldn’t even bother. They’ll figure out their own shit, eventually.

Or they won’t. They’ll go on, always ruled by fear, afraid of the others, of weird kids and gay kids and kids who are different. Because when they’re looking at those kids, they’re not looking in the mirror and realizing just how the most special thing they’ve ever done in the world is try to convince a kid who never hurt anybody to kill themselves.

They are going to realize how fucked up that is. Or they won’t.

It’s never going to matter to you.

They will never matter to you.

Fear won’t matter.

Friends matter.

Family is what matters.

What you do and who you are, which is never, ever affected by some asswipe who hates you for being you, is what matters.

This will become clearer to you in time.

Trust me.