Hear, O Israel

It’s been over ten years since I visited Israel, and yet I still see that time as a formative period in my life: It was the first time when I came out to a large community of people, and the support and love I received encouraged me to live more openly as a gay man.

When I started college, later when I added a second major in political science to my degree, I focused primarily on national politics: After all, it was my desire to achieve LGBTQ civil rights in the US that first drove me to political activism. Even later, when my responsibilities directed my focus toward pedagogy and equity in education, inevitably my involvement in politics waned.

And with it all, so did my awareness of current events in Israel. As a child, I heard most of my Israeli news from my rabbi’s sermons every Shabbat; when I moved to college and no longer regularly attended services, that avenue of information closed, and I was so focused on my studies and campus involvement that I never searched out that information on my own.

Now, in the news, there are big talks about annexation and sovereignty and human rights and racism–and as a Jew, what else can I do but to do what I do best: write about it?

What would it mean?

I was on the phone with my therapist today, discussing the possibility of an ADHD diagnosis. About forty minutes in, he started asking, “It sounds like you’re…” and my brain finished for him, “hoping to be diagnosed with ADHD.” Part of me feared, for a split second, that he thought I was being selective with what I shared, painting a picture of what I want to see, not what’s really in front of me, but instead he said, “It sounds like you’re looking for a medical treatment,” so I just answered, “The thought I could take something to fix just things is very hopeful.”

And then, because I know rushing to medication immediately isn’t always the best answer (I was in counseling for depression two years before I began any prescriptions), when he asked if I would be open to continuing psychotherapy or adjusting the medications I’m already taking, I told him, of course, I’d be willing to give it all a shot. I am. In fact, waiting for a new medication is probably wiser, whether or not I feel impatient waiting for things to finally change.

When the call ended, he hadn’t given any diagnosis, but in addition to scheduling a second meeting, he also scheduled me with a psychiatrist in his practice whom he feels is especially good at teasing out what’s depression and what might be ADHD. That sounds a lot like what I need, and I’m hopeful for what’s to come, but now, hours later, that first impulse in my brain still lingers: What if he thinks I was being selective? Why do I feel such desire to be diagnosed?

What would it mean for him to say I actually have ADHD?

Confirmation Bias and Stigma

In my last post, I left off saying I need to dig deep into my memory and identify factors that may inform a possible diagnosis of ADHD. But there are two big problems I have to reckon with as I start this process: confirmation bias and stigma. It’s almost like you knew what I’d say before I said anything. Pretty cool. You must be psychic or something.

Battle Lines

This post is part of my 2019 Pride Month series “Proudly Reaffirming Identity, Diversity, and Equity,” exploring present-day issues facing the LGBTQ+ and allied communities.

It’s raining today. The sky was overcast all morning as I nurtured a throbbing hangover. Last night was my first gay wedding. Well, it wasn’t my wedding, but of all the weddings I’ve been to, this was the first same-sex affair. It was a delight. The grooms hosted an amazing party, with delicious cupcakes and a well-stocked bar at a local staple of the “gay district” in Milwaukee, and two local drag queens performed. It was beautiful.

It was, in a word, progress.

There’s a reason why this was my first gay wedding: Up until a few years ago, same-sex marriage was still illegal in most of the country. But through advocacy and activism, through raising our shared voices and not just waiting for legislators to give equality, but facing the courts and demanding it, this battle was won.

But this battle, big as it was, is just a single front in a much larger, ongoing war.

Onward, Odysseus, I am with you

My goal when the year began was to live this year with love. To live in love, to live with every action imbued with love, to draw my intentions all in line with love.

It’s an ambitious goal. It requires reflection, introspection, and mindfulness. How else will we uncover our deepest motivations? Our deepest passions? Our deepest...fears?

When I turned my compass toward love, I had no idea what sea I was sailing into.

Satisfaction/Distraction

Black clouds. Rain clouds. Grey clouds. Large black dogs with floppy ears and wobbly feet. Shadowy hands holding you back. Globs of dark fur, drenched in the rain, peering at you through an alleyway as deep as dreadful. All these things, and I’m sure many more, have been ways that people have tried to visualize depression.

For me, I’ve always considered it a bit more comically, more commercially even. Do you remember that little guy from the Zoloft commercials? It’s so cute, but so sad, so small yet so poignant, altogether insignificant.

It’s a frown, a sigh, an expression of anguish or uncertainty as the weather darkens, but you look outside and it’s still sunny and warm.

Perhaps it helps to visualize depression. Perhaps it helps to make it human. Or perhaps putting a face to these feelings isn’t at all what we need.

A Return to Happiness

Polarity is an interesting animal. We think we know opposites–day and night, sun and moon, light and shadow–but then we’re faced with nuanced categories that defy perfect dualism–male and female, black and white, good and bad. Here there isn’t so much a binary system as much as a continuum, and it’s easy to get lost in the grey matter.

So lately I’ve been longing, lingering, languishing…and I’ve been fighting against it, feeling frothy and shameful, and it hasn’t gotten me anywhere. So I’ve been perusing TED Talks, because they’re awesome, and sometimes a little awesome makes you awesome, too.

And in a way, somewhere in this mess of chaos, a new story began.

Three Winners

Sometimes the weather says it all: cold and bitter, turbulent, frustrated and uncertain–should it rain? Turn to ice? Remain indecisive, unfulfilled, until it blows aside?

Earlier this week three Muslim students at the blue school up the road (UNC Chapel Hill) were shot and killed over an alleged parking dispute, but in my heart, in my gut, I believe it truly was a hate crime. The small-town feel of our campuses was shaken, shattered.

The students, filled with fear, tragic loss. The weather said it all. A good friend, when I crossed her path yesterday, said it better: “They were our age, Darren. Our age.”

Since Wednesday I’ve heard nothing but the inspiring and heartwarming stories of these three students, their compassion, their faith, their service toward building bridges of understanding and commonness between diverse groups. And I can’t even bring myself to say their names, or write them, because to do so brings them too close, closer than I can handle. I didn’t know them, but I feel now as though I do, and it’s a loss I cannot bear.

I’ve thought all day, repeatedly for days, that hatred against anyone is hatred against everyone; violence against one is violence against all. And the oppression of Islam and Muslims in a Christan-dominated society recalls the same oppressions once faced by Judaism and Jews, and still often experienced if not at the same explicit and violent level as that experience by my Muslim sisters and brothers. I recall, as long as I can remember, the police officers guarding my synagogue’s doors, but what must they go through daily?

It’s rather atrocious, to think of it, that anyone should need security outside a house of worship, but that’s the virulent symptoms of a one-minded, belligerent society.

That’s not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say is that today they were Muslim, but they could’ve been Jewish. They could’ve been gay. They could’ve been me.

Our age, my friend said. I think too often of death, but death is abstract, and in my mind I run through my obituaries, hopes and dreams of what my life should be: …survived by his husband and their children… well-known for his books of poetry and fiction series… They don’t stop at 25. They stop at 70 or 80 or 90. My greatest achievements are not serving in student leadership roles or working as a tutor–in these obituaries I’m praised for inspiring a hundred mathematicians, for being senator or governor or even president.

They don’t end at today. They certainly don’t end at the end of a gun.

It’s tragic, but that’s the wrong word. It’s sickening. Vile. Evil.

The Sages once asked, “Why was the Temple destroyed?” And their answer was sinat chinam, senseless hatred–and I believe that it is this same senseless hatred that has shook our community and every day still threatens to topple our entire world.

God, however, has provided an alternative: Chesed, compassion and loving-kindness, the lifeblood of these three students and the service that defines their all-too-short lives. Binah, understanding, the open-minded willingness to accept and learn. And gevurah, courage, strength, the candle flame flickering in the wind that holds on, burns brighter, stays alight.

I pray. I cry. What else can I do? I keep breathing, living, believing.

To Silence the Silent

I have never been brave. I feign courage, I swallow my nerves, psych myself in anxiety until the adrenalin overpowers my emotion and I go. But I do not claim to brave. I follow the path of heroes, one step at a time, sometimes barely one breath at a time.

But I manage.

When I wrote last, I remarked about the number of unpublished posts I’ve written–it’s disheartening, the stories I yearn to tell, that I’m too afraid to share.

Today is one of those tales.

Sloom

Sometimes I wonder what damage those fairytales we were told as children left imprinted in our psyches. Forget the idealized yet ignorant gender norms portrayed in every romance. Forget the blind hopefulness of always waiting for a happy ending. Forget the unbridled belief in magic and myth and mystery.

Maybe there’s a deeper damage to all those Disney dreams.