Coming Out Of The Closet of Abstraction

I have realized a disturbing characteristic of my narcissism; it lusts after potential and what can be gained in the future while at the same time disdaining what is already possessed but true self love embraces the present. I live in two worlds, the present and the future, the pragmatic and the principled, the tactile and the rhetorical. To me, my life appears to be so abstract, even my writing only makes passing references to my lived experiences, my relationships, my job, my studies, but how I live out my waking hours is like a gay man's heterosexual marriage--a sham, not at all representative of who I am. Yet, I am terrified of coming out of the closet of abstraction. Abstraction used to be an escape from the delusion of the mundane but now it has become the securest of all prisons. I am like a replica put on display at a museum for fear the original will be damaged if brought into the light. The stakes are too high for me to do what I am constantly being pushed towards.

I like to think on all of these things from a theoretical perspective. I say to myself, 'if I came back I would do this and that thing' or 'it is clear that this is the way such and such should be done.' But I remain motionless, sulking with my arms folded beneath a withering tree. I am unsatisfied with my life yet I refuse to change it. Writing is cathartic but it gives only the illusion of change for those who are searching for a reprieve from action. I realize that what I need I do not have and what I have relied on to meet that need could never have fulfilled it. I have wrongly blamed others for my own lethargy and shortsightedness. They were never the answer yet I sought to press them into the void that cannot be filled by my ideal. Perhaps, the emptiness I feel is not from any void inside me; rather the fulfillment of my being comes when I myself fill the void that exists outside me, the same void which holds my place and my purpose in the world.