If I Am Wrong - September 7, 2024

I am living.

And yet, somewhere inside me, I am still asking whether I am living correctly.

I have spent years exploring spirituality, ceremony, altered states, intuition, archetypes, fasting, yoga, sobriety, prayer, service, and the edges of my own consciousness. At times I have tried to understand my behavior through spiritual identities and traditions that describe disruption, contradiction, sacred humor, mirroring, and transformation.

But I have also had to confront something difficult:

The people on the receiving end of my behavior do not necessarily experience the spiritual framework I use to understand myself.

What may feel internally like fire, truth, revelation, or sacred disruption can look externally like volatility.

Intent does not automatically determine impact.

And no spiritual identity exempts me from responsibility for the way I affect another person.

I have sometimes told myself that other people’s wounds, fears, or “poisons” caused my reactions.

But I am learning a harder truth:

What is inside someone else may activate me. What I do with that activation is still mine.

That distinction changes everything.

There have been moments when I bit my lip and stayed silent because I wanted to be perceived differently. I believed that speaking honestly would make me look unstable, angry, dangerous, or difficult.

Sometimes silence protected the moment.

Sometimes it became self-abandonment.

The practice now is learning the difference.

When I am alone in the forest, removed from conflict and expectation, I often feel peaceful.

I am not fighting myself.

It is when I feel controlled, limited, misunderstood, rejected, or stripped of autonomy that the internal fire begins to rise.

And I know that fire.

It is powerful enough to create.

It is also powerful enough to destroy everything I have been building simply because destruction briefly gives me the sensation of control.

I don't want to live like that anymore.

I want to learn how to hold the flame without becoming the wildfire.

Water

There is a man whose presence has often felt like water to me.

When I am around him, something in my body softens.

My racing heart slows.

My heat cools.

For years, I interpreted that experience as evidence.

It must be him.

Every time life directed me elsewhere, some part of me eventually circled back.

And so I repeatedly asked:

Is this intuition?

Or is this yearning?

That may be one of the most important questions I have ever asked.

Because intuition and desire can feel remarkably similar when we desperately want the answer to be yes.

I can feel something profoundly without possessing complete information about what another person feels.

I can experience synchronicity without requiring it to become a contract.

I can believe a relationship has spiritual meaning without knowing that its purpose is romantic partnership.

That does not cheapen the experience.

It makes room for reality.

September 11

I had placed enormous meaning on September 11.

I invited the man I imagined creating a family with to meet me at a theater in the town where I was considering university.

I bought the tickets with faith.

Part of me believed he would come.

And then I created a terrifying equation inside myself:

If he comes, I was right.If he does not come, perhaps everything I believed was wrong.

That placed far too much weight on one human being.

His attendance could not prove my spiritual worldview.

His absence could not invalidate four years of my life.

A relationship cannot function as a psychiatric test, an oracle, or proof that God has been speaking to me.

And if reality contradicts one of my visions, I do not have to destroy myself to acknowledge it.

I can say:

I was wrong about this.

And still remain alive.

Still remain creative.

Still remain spiritual.

Still remain worthy.

Still remain me.

If I discover that some experiences I interpreted spiritually were actually being amplified by exhaustion, trauma, substances, isolation, anxiety, or my own desperate desire for certainty, then seeking professional help would not invalidate my spirituality.

It would be another form of discernment.

There is courage in asking:

Can somebody help me understand what is happening inside my mind?

The Tower

Recently I stripped away huge portions of the life I had spent years creating.

Relationships.

Communities.

Identities.

Plans.

Places.

I kept one storyline alive longer than almost everything else.

Him.

And that made the possibility of losing the storyline feel like losing the entire architecture.

But maybe the tower is not my life.

Maybe the tower is the interpretation.

If the interpretation falls, perhaps I am still standing underneath it.

The yoga was not for nothing.

The sobriety was not for nothing.

The prayer was not for nothing.

The discipline was not for nothing.

The medicine experiences do not have to be either perfectly prophetic or completely meaningless.

Something can teach me and still be something I misunderstood.

Something can transform me without giving me supernatural certainty about another person's future.

That is a much gentler world to inhabit.

I Am Tired

What I know without cards, pendulums, visions, signs, or prophecy is this:

I am tired.

I am tired of moving.

I am tired of financial instability.

I am tired of wondering what people are saying about me.

I am tired of giving until I have nothing left.

I am tired of trying to decode whether somebody else's silence secretly means love.

I am tired of needing the next extraordinary event to tell me that my life is finally beginning.

Those things are real.

And they deserve ordinary solutions too.

Rest.

Housing.

Money.

Food.

Routine.

Health care.

Community.

Creative work.

People who speak directly.

A stable place to sleep.

There is spirituality in those things.

Maybe more than I once realized.

The Abduction

For years I carried an image of being taken away at the exact moment love finally arrived.

Sometimes it appeared literally in my imagination as a UFO.

Sometimes I wondered whether the person in the vision was Chris Charming.

Sometimes Mai Taeo

Sometimes the symbolism changed entirely.

Now I wonder whether the image was never supposed to be interpreted literally.

Maybe abduction represents transformation.

One life ending so completely that the people who knew the former version of me can barely recognize what comes next.

I have imagined being discovered.

A stage.

A film.

Music.

A major platform.

Even fantasies of someone like Taylor Swift suddenly seeing my work and carrying me into a completely different creative world.

That fantasy tells me something important.

I want to be seen.

I want scale.

I want my creativity to matter.

I want the queer and feminine parts of masculinity to be celebrated rather than tolerated.

I want a young person somewhere to look at me and understand:

Gay is okay. Femininity does not invalidate masculinity. Beauty does not cancel strength. You are allowed to be adored as you are.

Those desires are real whether or not a celebrity ever arrives to validate them.

So perhaps I stop waiting to be abducted into the dream.

Perhaps I build it.

Taeo

And then there is you.

Taeo.

I love you.

That is something I can say about myself.

I cannot use that love to determine who you must become.

I cannot make your marriage, your sexuality, your silence, or your choices conform to the future I have seen internally.

I have imagined raising a family with you.

I have imagined children in the house.

Music.

Land.

A life.

I have experienced you as one of the best men I have known... someone whose wisdom, care, creativity, and presence affected me enormously.

Those experiences belong to me.

Your decision belongs to you.

And perhaps love becomes more sacred when I finally allow both truths to exist at the same time.

I can pray for you.

I can love you.

I can hope.

But I cannot require a prophecy to come true in order to justify my existence.

If you come toward me freely someday, I will meet reality when it arrives.

If you do not, then I will grieve what I imagined and continue becoming.

I am no longer placing my life at the edge of another man's answer.

That is too much power to give anybody.

The Real Decision

So perhaps the defining decision is not whether he meets me at the theater.

The defining decision is:

What will I do if he doesn't?

Will I punish myself?

Destroy what I own?

Disappear?

Declare every spiritual experience fraudulent?

Or will I finally become the man capable of holding himself through disappointment?

Maybe that is the initiation.

Maybe the greatest evidence of spiritual growth is not predicting what happens next.

Maybe it is remaining present when reality surprises me.

To say:

I wanted this.

I believed in this.

I may have been wrong about this.

And I am still here.

No prophecy gets to decide whether I live.

No lover determines whether my life has meaning.

No card controls the road.

No pendulum owns my future.

I am allowed to ask for help.

I am allowed to reconsider.

I am allowed to change my interpretation without betraying the person I used to be.

I am allowed to remain mysterious even to myself.

Only God may know what happens next.

But I know what I am responsible for now:

Stay alive. Stay grounded. Tell the truth. Ask for help when I need it. Create. Love without possessing. And let reality answer for itself.

That feels less like losing faith.

It feels like finally learning how to carry it.

The Beautiful Story Never Told, Jo He and Mai Taeo

"I will never shame myself for love, no matter how hard you try to shift your shame onto me. That belongs to you... I am free from that, waiting for you to awaken the pride inside."