As I worked on my fourth step yesterday - the moral inventory - I realized a theme emerge: I am afraid of being me. I am afraid of embracing my potential. I am afraid of embracing love, happiness, truth, my career, my failures, my successes, my strengths, my weaknesses. I am afraid of embracing my own sullied expectations of myself. I am afraid of seeing myself.
As I worked through this step, I talked with my sponsor who told me to balance this out and focus on my strengths. I realized that while I am afraid of embracing myself, I do. That, my sponsor, noted is courage. Courage to be myself, despite all emotional warnings to the opposite.
This got me thinking about the nature of happiness - happiness defined as the subjective enjoyment of one's life as-a-whole. In other words, I am happy as a queer man. I am happy because I have connected and embraced my queerness; I have embraced it as a part of my identity, as a part of my life - as component that necessarily shapes my eternal identity. Certainly this raises a series of theological questions.
As I think about my life, I like the life that I'm leading (well maybe the addiction piece not so much). But I am happy as a queer man. I no longer feel I am hiding from myself. However much I want to not embrace me, there is much happiness in so doing. Does embracing me necessarily mean I must position myself for or against the church? I don't think so. Does it mean I can occupy two spaces at one time? I don't know.
I am happy and content not having to know the answer to that question. I am happy and still like my life in spite of uncertainty. I no longer allow the answer or potential answers to control me, I no longer give them power. And it is precisely in the ceding of power - the divesting of power - unhappiness comes.
I am a powerful happy queer Mormon man.
And it is from that position that I can speak blessings and not curses about myself and others.
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