MILESTONES: BEING DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHERS

Milestones:

being different from others.

Across most cultures, I feel like there’s a few

constant milestones everyone expects: go to school, get a job, get married (to the opposite sex), have children, buy a house, grow old, retire, die. Live, reproduce, die. All a bit bleak, isn’t it? Like cattle, really. What’s the point in that? I guess it’s the stuff you do in the middle that counts?

Life really isn’t a linear progression of events. But as both societies and our own brains construct a form of narrative progression around our lives to make them seem that bit more worthwhile, suddenly we end up having goals and expectations for everyone else to meet, in a certain order, by a certain time. Goals that not everyone can achieve, of course. We need to feel that superiority over others, after all!

Having depressed you all now, I think it’s high time to point out that if you don’t quite fit into any of the narrow boxes the society you live in has to offer, you’ll immediately question what society thinks is best for you. I definitely don’t fit into the straight box. I don’t really fit into the mainstream culture box, or really even the man box to be completely truthful. And by virtue of this, suddenly a lot of society’s big milestones, in relation to you, start to get questioned or ignored by others.

So being a queer man has one immediate advantage no one talks about. As a by-product of being portrayed in the media as either sociopathic deviants worthy of truecrime documentaries or sexless eunuchs (the Modern Family school of homosexuality), no one expects you to have kids! I mean it’s a shame the world’s worked out that way, and you can if you really want to - but it’s on your own terms, and crucially when you want it and are stable enough to do it. Isn’t that fantastic? But I found for myself that all the other milestones start to fall apart quickly too if people question your humanity enough. What’s marriage anyway when you think about it? Why do you need some guy and paperwork to make your love special? Why can I only love one person? Why do I have to be prudish and uptight? Why do I have to fit in in the way that you seem to want me to?

There’s a really simple answer I wish more people realised sooner rather than later, something I wish I was told when I was 16: you don’t have to. It’s a best fit, not a perfect fit. And people are (thankfully for once) too self obsessed to hold it against you. Coming to that realisation is a fucking liberating feeling.

WORDS BY ANONYMOUS IMAGE BY GERD ALTMANN via PIXABAY