Being in an impossible marriage is…
To have been frazzled by 🫨 six 🫨 irreconcilable 🫨 hidden 🫨 existential 🫨conflicts 🫨 before my 2-year old 👶🏻has worked out how to resolve the conflict between his breakfast 🥣 and his spoon 🥄.
💩
And then to go to work 💻 and be encouraging to a software developer who is overfaced 😤 by resolving a code conflict 😱.
And to genuinely want to help them both 🫂🤣
To reside nestled-deep in a private interior world 🌃🌑, not because I want to. Not because it's good for me. But because I need *that* *much* personal buffer 😴😴😴 to stay functional in a daily reality that fundamentally will not make intuitive sense to me 🙃🕶️.
In my own home 🙄.
And among my own friends 🥱.
To know that I once let too much of myself out. 🤓
And now my wife has to find herself again. And my friends are in disarray. 🫠🤐🤕
To hope they will get better soon. Because Lord knows I miss them. 😭
To not take responsibility for this because experience has taught me that's not helpful to any of us (and they all did require that I open up more! Silly billies).
To have an arms-length relationship with reality 🥸🎧🚷. Making recces out to 🚶🏼♂️this friend, 🚶🏼♂️that colleague. 🚶🏼♂️The job. 🚶🏼♂️The family. The kids. 🚶🏼♂️🚶🏼♂️🚶🏼♂️
🕵🏾♀️🕵🏻🕵🏽♀️ To be surrounded by a thousand social taxonomizers and “solvers” 🕵🏾♀️🕵🏻🕵🏽♀️, trying to press me through another dang Western mould 📚 📑. Look bro, if you want to think of me as an ✌🏻introvert✌🏻, or ✌🏻on-the-spectrum✌🏻, if that helps you accept me, then why would I discourage you? But it isn't me. In case you wanted to know. 👋🏻😎😘👋🏻
To feel regularly cajoled 😡🚨 into trading this incoherent life for an alternative incoherent life. 🤡
To see my kids with their mother and realise that if she died I would marry another woman to provide that relationship to them again.
To not understand why this beautiful observation is unsayable in this world. Or why it should need footnotes or caveats .
To be told, "wow you guys talk about *everything*, that's amazing" 🤩🤩 and to look blank 😶 and think "oh, this is just what we had to do to get out of hell" 🤷🏼♂️
To watch a young person come into my house and, feeling lonely, want what I've got. And to not really get it. 🤷🏼♂️
To have painstakingly worked out in words for myself what a “mature man” is before allowing myself to become one because such things are transmitted in "nods and winks" I am unable to hear properly 🙄. And I had to be sure. 👺☠️💩👍🏻
To love myself, not because it makes sense to, but because Jesus commands me to and because the people from church did. Until I picked it up by rote. 🫶🏻🦜
To be torn by the fear that God, the church, the faith... "something here"... is bad for me 🫤🤨🫨, but also to know He is good for me ❤️. To know too much is true on both sides of that conflict for it to ever fully go away. 😔
To sigh deeply and often. 😮💨
To weep. 😢
To consider the photographs my wife put up on the wall. 🤔
To consider the 3-year-old boy playing innocently in the bath with his twin sister 💑🏼.
To consider the 13-year-old boy 🧒🏼who loved his mum🤱🏼and his dad 🙍🏼♂️ and his gran 🧓🏻and his Nana 🧓🏻 and his Grampy 👴🏻 and his friends 🤼♂️
Unconsciously certain the noble life requires self-martyrdom. The scene set for the martyrdom of his same sex desires a couple years later
To consider the 23 year-old man clasping his arms around a girl 😁 👰🏼♀️. Staggered and delighted he got a friend-for-life . Sure he understood what that meant.
To consider the 33-year-old holding his baby daughter, face white-as-death under the sheer weight of depression 💀. As reality hit.
In wave 🌊 after 🌊 wave 🌊.
Well, the same wave 🌊. Repeating itself 🌊🌊🌊🌊🌊. Again 🌊 and again 🌊 and again 🌊.
Forbidden by his own conscience from making that ancient, necessary transition: that the noble life actually does *not* come from self-martyrdom after all, but from stable self-care extended outward.
Paralyzed overlong in patterns of self-immolation 🔥🔥🔥. Doubling down. Trebling down. (What other way forward is there?). Appropriating more and more in the next recapitulation of the pattern. I don't think either I or the counsellor had a handle on how I was using his psychology techniques.. Unable to grow into fatherhood. Stuck for years 🕳️. Because to integrate his masculinity, to become whole, is to integrate his homosexuality 👬🏼, and he can't understand how that can be true 🤔, and he can't accept it 🚫
To consider the 43-year-old, fast approaching...
Will I still feel dogged by this impossible bind? Knowing I must continue the transition to self-care but frustrated by the obvious fact that I am *actually* living a life of incomprehensible self-martyrdom, so it's a bit tricky to pretend I'm not isn't it? 🙄🙄🙄
Will I still be obese? How bad will my liver problems be? Will I be diabetic? Will I be dead?
Sigh.
Will I still be blogging about myself?
...
To consider a hundred fellow Christians, and a half-dozen Christian traditions ⛪✝️. As they all stare blankly back at me 😶😶😶. Willing. But powerless to help.
Sigh.
Well, at least they were willing. That counts as love I suppose.
To have longings too unformed and deep for words.
To look at my beautiful baby son and to realise that I will know him more profoundly than he will be able to appreciate. That I have what I need to father him well.
To look at my awesome preteen daughter. The perfect blend of strident and soft. Bored in the way intelligent children are. Deeply caring. To know that I esteem and love her more than I'm able to say.
To go into my room and sob and pray to the Great I Am that the unconscious wounds left in her by the years of her father's depression will not leave too onerous a complication for her. Folded-in and hidden as they now are among those strange, eternally-ascending-and-descending golden braids of the soul. Only He would know if something needs rewinding. Only He could do it.
To go to sleep and rise and *still* be in the cosmically absurd position. Reality itself mocking me. 🤡🤡🤡 Of having to integrate and reintegrate and reintegrate my same sex desires into my sense of self. In order to remain a full man. In order to sustain a marriage to a woman and be present for his kids like he wants to. Even though this is not-really logically possible. 🙃🙃🙃🙃
But today I'll try again to patch something together. I guess.
I'm a fixer after all. Legacy software… my own heart. Both intractable. But both worth holding-together for another day. ✊🏻😎 🫶🏻
To remember I've already examined this from every imaginable angle. From every perspective available. Zooming in. Zooming out. Squinting. Not squinting. This way. That way. Trying to make it make sense.
Suspecting now that it will never make sense.
Finally able to begin to see that. To confront it more fully than I could last year. This is the one thing even more difficult than that other difficult thing about being a dad.
That the deepest most personal suffering of my life. The bedfellow of my existence. That it has no meaning. Neither hating it, nor loving it, grants a stable purchase on reality or myself.
It all just…
“Is”
This is the thing the human psyche cannot cope with isn't it? That suffering this *defining*, this *present*, is meaningless.
Most choose denial. A thousand internet influencers get it confidently wrong.
Even those who say to me “suffering is arbitrary, life is meaningless” don't live like that's really true. They still seek wives, and an income and have children, and build lives. No. They use that belief as a pretext to justify their own meaning. They *really* mean “suffering is meaningless, so don't you make it too difficult for me to justify or obtain the meaning I'm finding for myself”
I smile. I'm not so different.
Ahhh. Secrets, secrets, secrets.
What is my secret?
I could do as they do and keep Meaning a secret to protect myself from the meaninglessness of the current social order?
That would be the easy option. The one I've been doing for a while now by default.
Or, I could invert it I suppose? Keep Meaninglessness a secret in order to build a fictional world of positivity and sunshine and rainbows? For the kids, I would say to myself.
That feels self-righteous.
Or I could take the Jesus route?
And lay it all out. Exactly the way it is.
And let the gospel do its work.
In my heart and yours, dear reader.
A man is like a wildflower 🌺 that springs up for a while and then a storm snuffs it out 🥀.
Beautiful as it is. In its way. For a time.
And that's that.
But none of that helps us make progress on the question of whether life itself has meaning. The truth is, the world was created good, by a good God, who was (and still is) interested in bringing about Good and our good. The notion that suffering is meaningless and arbitrary is an ancient human instinct, an inevitable one, a natural force of gravity. It's understandable.
But it's wrong.
And none of this has anything to do with Darwin.
If I'm able to weather so much apparent daily meaninglessness and still appreciate that. Then I'm sure you can too.
You got this.