Jeff Shaumeyer writes: I am generally not a gregarious person, and the experience [self-discovery of coming out and among whom] for me was the culmination of introspection with the emotional support of a few close friends.
This sentence, lifted from a context of coming-out experiences, seemed so stunningly like-me as to spark all manner of echoes. They have nothing particularly to do with coming out, but rather articulate a quality to my life I've found elusive.
I don't think I was ever genuinely gregarious, certainly not in the sense of wanting to be in the company of a group of people. In what now feels like the middle period of my life, I was outwardly gregarious, very much so, in fact I was but seldom alone. But throughout that period, there was always a strong emotional bond with a single partner, and in some way that isn't clear to me, that connection underlay my then very actively social persona.
The real me -- how do we characterize such things? -- as a child, teenager, college-age person, and working professional, right up to the present -- has always been a rather serious, bookish, introspective person, a person who felt that the greater portion of his joys and sorrows were expressible without being communicable. I've always felt that the parts I could describe in a more or less understandable way (I hope) were somewhat like the tips of floating icebergs, the far greater part out of sight, less accessible, moving along unseen and silent, as beneath the mirror of a fjord.
What I usually say aloud is that I'm really quite shy, but those who know me a little laugh in my face at that, because they see the person whose self-assurance is visible, who chats amiably with strangers, who loves jokes and laughs a lot, who now and then will sit alone before a roomfull of people and perform music, who interacts with various friends and colleagues in ways that aren't wildly eccentric, and who as all of you know, certainly doesn't have to sit and agonize over the next word to be written.
But that outward portion seems a small part me. The rest, to use Jeff's phrase, is the culmination of introspection. My model of reality is that all my experiences, wherever they come from, whatever gives rise to them, flow toward some central lake within me, where they retain little of their original characters as series of events with a chronology.
Instead, very nearly all of these experiences merge in that inner place, from which now and then introspection fetches a portion up, to contrast, perhaps, with something one of you has said, to echo or reinforce what another has said, to speculate alongside a third, to answer a question posed by a fourth, and so on.
The lake becomes a well in the heart of the floating city. Jeff, and John Fisher to whom he was responding, and several others mention their contrasting impressions of the richness revealed to surround them when their gaze was shifted by the process of coming out. But John, especially, talks about a kind of, oh I dunno, wallflower feeling without unhappiness, a sense of otherness. I have that sense more and more, but what it feels like is not the loss of a formerly gregarious self, but rather a reintegration with the larger, less visible parts of myself, with what I always was innerly.
If these images resonate somehow with the experiences of others,
that would be interesting to know about. Those resonances
themselves go down into the reservoir, one assumes to re-emerge at
some point. I can reach no conclusions, one way or another, about
any of this. I will say that while one lives, the well seems
inexhaustible.
