Disconnections

I’ve often observed that whenever a significant event occurs in someone’s life, what they expect doesn’t quite live up to what they actually experience. This works both ways of course: I remember that when my friend Shauna got married, the look on her face throughout the whole experience left her feeling like the entire enterprise of marriage was something far beyond what even she - the woman for whom it seemed like marriage was what she was preparing her whole life for - was expecting.

In my case, moving to Fredericton was met by my expectations being succeeded, quite handily, in ways both positive and negative. For the positive side of things, I was expecting, to some extent, the people I’d encounter to be quite friendly, and indeed, some of the most friendliest and open people I’ve ever met in my life have been the friends and acquaintances that I’ve made here. On the other hand, I’ve come across a lot of interpersonal issues that have left me, for lack of a better word, vexed.

When I lived in Toronto, I thought nothing of the relationships I had with people of the opposite sex. I naturally gravitated toward them, towards the fact that I could have actual conversations with the girls in my life, as opposed to many of the guys I’d befriended who seemed to talk about things I’d thought of as puerile and banal. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t come across as the most “masculine” person around, and I make no pretensions as to what I think of manliness and my own sexuality. Suffice to say, with girls I developed a sense that I didn’t have to go around waving my penis (intellectually or otherwise) around to show that I was someone worth hanging around, and I didn’t have to brag or lie about my said member’s size or length to show that I was someone of value and merit in someone’s life.

I think one of the first things that I came across was an attitude towards relationships between men and women that were a complete 180 to what I was used to. Now, I had to brag. I had to drop the pretensions and act and feel like I was someone which I wasn’t.

A case in point: I learned some time ago that someone I knew was uncertain as to my sexuality. I’ve never had an issue with where my preferences lay (and in fact, one of my great stumbling blocks with respect to sin is that my preferences are too strong for my own good), but between how I displayed that and how some people saw it was a disconnection. Sadly, as what happens all too often, disconnections were followed up not with a desire for dialogue, but a set of assumptions which left me feeling emasculated and divorced from the people around me. I’ve thankfully had the experience to not dwell too deeply on that (er, much), and to at least focus on that separation in a positive way - a way to know what I shouldn’t do as opposed to what I should do when faced with people who defy common expectations. If I may be allowed, I think I should be permitted to feel just a tad incensed that, on top of the emotional work I’ve had to do to try to “fit in” with the lay of local culture and practice, I’ve had to also work to break out of the assumptions and expectations suddenly laid upon me. The shortest path between two places may be a straight line, but sometimes, that line can feel like it’s as long as infinity.