I WISH AN I DIFRANCO WASN’T A LESBIAN . I AM listening to her right now, and I think I would marry her if she would have me. I would hang out in the front row at all her concerts and sing along and pump my fist and get angry at all the right times. Then, later, on the bus, she would lay her head on a pillow in my lap, and I would get my fingers tangled in her dreadlocks while we watched Charlie Rose on the television.
Some friends and I were walking to our cars one night outside the Roseland after an Emmy Lou Harris concert, and I could see into her bus and Charlie Rose was on the television. I thought to myself, I like that show, and part of me wanted to knock on the window and ask if I could come in. I would not have bothered her or even asked for an autograph. I would have just watched television. He was interviewing Bishop Tutu, I think. By the time I got home the interview was over. If Ani Defranco and I got married, I would write books on the bus rides between cities and in the evening, after the concerts, we would watch Charlie Rose, and three or four times each night we would whisper, Good question, Charlie, good question. But none of this will happen because Ani Difranco is not attracted to men, I don’t think. Otherwise we would be on.
The thing about Reed College you may not know is that it is a beautiful place. I mean the people are beautiful, and I love them. My housemate, Grant, and I were on campus the other day helping kids move into their dorms, and we met this kid Nathan, who needed us to move a couch up to his room. Grant and I were sort of surprised when Nathan started talking to us because, no kidding, he sounded just like Elmer Fudd. He was short and stocky, and nobody but Elmer Fudd himself sounds more like Elmer Fudd than Nathan. Grant almost started laughing, but we tried very hard to listen to the person inside the voice, and so on the way to the storage shed Nathan opened up and told us that as a summer job he worked at Los Alamos, researching nuclear weapons. Nathan does not know his left from his right, which I thought was a peculiar characteristic, given he is one of the smartest people in the world or something. We would come to an intersection and he would point and say, in a perfect Elmer Fudd dialect (I can’t do accents at all), “Go dat way, Don. Dat ith de way to the thorage thed.”
I was speaking at a pastors conference in San Francisco, and I was telling them about my friends from Reed and what it looks like to talk about Jesus in that place. Somebody asked me what it was like to deal with all the immorality at Reed, and that question really struck me because I have never thought of Reed as an immoral place, and I suppose I never thought of it as an immoral place because somebody like Nathan can go there and talk like Elmer Fudd, and nobody will ever make fun of him. And if Nathan were to go to my church, which I love and would give my life for, he would unfortunately be made fun of by somebody somewhere, behind his back and all, but it would happen, and that is such a tragic crime. Nobody would bother to find out that he is a genius. Nobody would know that he is completely comfortable talking the way he talks and not knowing his left from his right because he has spent four years in a place where what you are on the surface does not define you, it does not label you. And that is what I love about Reed College because even though there are so many students having sex and tripping on drugs and whatever, there is also this foundational understanding that other people exist and they are important, and to me Reed is like heaven in that sense. I wish everybody could spend four years in a place like that, being taught the truth, that they matter regardless of their faults, regardless of their insecurities.
Television drives me crazy sometimes because everybody is so good-looking, and yet you walk through the aisles of the grocery stores, and nobody looks like that. Somebody told me that in London people don’t judge you as much by the way you look, and I think it is true because late night on PBS they play shows out of England and the actors aren’t good-looking, and I sit there wondering if anybody else is watching and asking the same question: Why aren’t the actors in London good looking? And I already know the answer to that question, it is that America is one of the most immoral countries in the world and that our media has reduced humans to slabs of meat. And there will always be this tension while I live in this country because none of this will ever change. Ani Difranco, in her song “32 Flavors,” says that she is a poster girl with no poster, she is 32 flavors and then some, and she is beyond our peripheral vision, so we might want to turn our heads, because some day we’re gonna get hungry and eat all of the words we just said. And just about everybody I know loves those lines because they speak of heaven and of hope and the idea that some day a King will come and dictate, through some mystical act of love, an existence in which everybody has to eat their own words because we won’t be allowed to judge each other on the surface of things anymore. And this fills me with hope.
Jean-Paul Sartre said hell is other people. But that Indian speaker I really like named Ravi Zacharias says that heaven can be other people, too, and that we have the power to bring a little of heaven into the lives of others every day. I know this is true because I have felt it when Penny or Tony tells me I mean something to them and they love me. I pray often that God would give me the strength and dignity to receive their love.
My friend Julie from Seattle says the key to everything rests in the ability to receive love, and what she says is right because my personal experience tells me so. I used to not be able to receive love at all, and to this day I have some problems, but it isn’t like it used to be. My eye would find things on television and in the media and somehow I would compare myself to them without really knowing I was doing it, and this really screwed me up because I never for a second felt I was worthy of anybody’s compliments.
I was dating this girl for a while, this cute writer from the South, and she was great, really the perfect girl, and we shared tastes on everything from music to movies, all the important stuff, and yet I could not really thrive in the relationship because I could never believe her deeply when she expressed affection. Our love was never a two-way conversation. I didn’t realize I was doing it, but I used to kick myself around quite a bit in my head, calling myself a loser and that sort of thing. There was nothing this girl could do to get through to me. She would explain her feelings, and I should have been happy with that, but I always needed more and then I resented the fact that I needed more because, well, it is such a needy thing to need more, and so I lived inside this conflict. I would sit on the porch at Graceland and watch cars go around the circle while all this stuff went around in my heart. There was no peace at all. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep.
Andrew the Protester, the one who looks like Fidel Castro, was living in the house back then, and he is such an amazing listener that I would talk to him and he would nod his head and say, “Don, man, I didn’t know you were feeling any of this.” But I was. And it got worse. I would mope around the house all day, and I couldn’t get any writing done. It had been the same in all my relationships. There was always, within me, this demand for affection, this needy, clingy monkey on my back. I wouldn’t be satisfied unless the girl wanted to get married right away, unless she was panicky about it, and even then I would imagine a non-existent scenario in which she finds another man or breaks up with me because of the way I look. I would find myself getting depressed about conversations that never even took place.
Finally, Andrew said I should meet with Diane, who is this beautiful married woman who goes to our church and mothers us and speaks love into our lives because most of us are basket cases. Diane was studying at a local seminary to be a counselor, and Andrew recommended that I ask her to take a shot at all my troubles. I didn’t want to do it at first because Diane’s husband is an elder, and I had spoken at church a few times, so everybody thought I was normal. Certainly if I talked to Diane she would go home and tell her husband I was nuts and then it would get around the church, and when everybody thinks you are nuts you finally just give in to their pressure and actually go nuts. But I was desperate. So I called Diane.
She was beautiful and soft and kind with a tender voice, and she showed up at the house, and I put some coffee on. We went into my office, and I closed the door, in case one of my roommates walked by and saw me talking to Diane and discovered I was nuts. I sat in a chair, and Diane sat on the couch, and I wrung my hands a bit before starting in:
“Well, you see, Diane, I am in this relationship with this girl, and she is great, she really is. It’s just that it is very hard for me, you know.”
“You mean it is hard for you to have feelings for her?”
“I’m not gay.”
Diane laughed. “I didn’t mean it that way, Don.”
“I do have feelings for her,” I said, with sincerity. “They are almost too strong, you know. I have trouble sleeping and eating and thinking about anything else. It is hard for me to be in a relationship, it always has been. And that makes me want to bail. I would just rather not be in the relationship at all than go through this torture. But I promised myself I wouldn’t run from it this time. But I feel like the meaning of life is riding on whether or not she likes me, and I think she does, she says she does, but it still drives me crazy.”
“Whether or not she likes you, Don, or whether or not she loves you?”
“Yeah, that too. Whether or not she loves me.”
Diane sat there and made listening noises the whole time I was talking, and when I told her how I will go days without eating, she looked at me and sighed and ooohed and was definitely letting me know that this behavior was neither normal nor healthy. I think I could have told her that Elvis Presley was alive and living in my closet, and she would have been less surprised. When you are a writer and a speaker, sometimes people think you have your crap together.
“You seem so normal, Don. You have a company and are a writer and all.” Diane looked at me, bewildered.
“Yeah. But there is something wrong with me, isn’t there?”
I was half hoping she would say no. I was hoping she would explain that everybody is nuts when they get into a relationship, but then it turns euphoric shortly after marriage and sex. But she didn’t.
“Well, Don, there is. There is something wrong with you.”
“Oh, man,” I said. “I just knew it. I just knew I was a wacko.” I thought about that movie A Beautiful Mind and wondered whether any of my housemates existed or whether those guys who kept following me were in the FBI.
Diane noted the concern on my face and responded, smiling and kind. “It’s not that bad, Don. Don’t worry. It’s just that for some reason, you are letting this girl name you.”
“What do you mean, name me?”
“Well, you are letting her decide your value, you know. Your value has to come from God. And God wants you to receive His love and to love yourself too.”
And what she was saying was true. I knew it was true. I could feel that it was true. But it also felt wrong. I mean, it felt like it was an arrogant thing to do, to love myself, to receive love. I knew that all the kicking myself around, all the hating myself, was not coming from God, that those voices were not God whispering in my ear, but it felt like I had to listen to them; it felt like I had to believe the voices were telling the truth.
“God loves you, Don.” Diane looked at me with a little moisture in her eyes. I felt like Matt Damon in that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams keeps saying, “It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,” and Matt Damon just freaks out and collapses into Robin Williams’s arms and secures an Academy Award for both of them. I thought about acting out that scene with Diane, but it didn’t feel right so I let it go.
“Yeah, I know,” I told her. “I know God loves me.” And I did know, I just didn’t believe. It was such crap, such psychobabble. I had heard it before, but hearing that stuff didn’t silence the voices. Still, there was something in Diane’s motherly eyes that said it was true and I needed that; I needed to believe it was true. I needed something to tell the voices when they started chanting at me.
Diane and I talked for another half hour, and she ooohed and sighed and made me feel listened to. She was wonderful, and I never once felt stupid or weak for talking to her. I just felt honest and real and relieved. She said she would get me some literature and that she wanted to get together again soon. She said she would pray for me.
When she left, I decided to start praying about all of this too. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t prayed about it before. It’s just that it never seemed like a spiritual problem. I prayed and asked God to help me figure out what was wrong with me.
Things got worse with the girl. We would spend hours on the phone working through the math of our relationship, but nothing added up, which I received as only a sign of my incompetence, and this made me more sad than before.
Then she did it; she decided we didn’t need to be in touch anymore. She broke it off. She sent me a letter saying that I didn’t love myself and could not receive love from her. There was nothing she could do about it, and it was killing her. I wandered around the house for an hour just looking at the blank walls, making coffee or cleaning the bathroom, not sure when my body was going to explode in sobs and tears. I was scrubbing the toilet when the voices began. I’d listened to them so often before, but on this day they were shouting. They were telling me that I was as disgusting as the urine on the wall around the toilet.
And then the sentiment occurred. I am certain it was the voice of God because it was accompanied by such a strong epiphany like a movement in a symphony or something. The sentiment was simple: Love your neighbor as yourself.
And I thought about that for a second and wondered why God would put that phrase so strongly in my mind. I thought about our neighbor Mark, who is tall and skinny and gay, and I wondered whether God was telling me I was gay, which was odd because I had never felt gay, but then it hit me that God was not telling me I was gay. He was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talked to myself, and that somehow I had come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself. It was as if God had put me in a plane and flown me over myself so I could see how I was connected, all the neighborhoods that were falling apart because I would not let myself receive love from myself, from others, or from God. And I wouldn’t receive love because it felt so wrong. It didn’t feel humble, and I knew I was supposed to be humble. But that was all crap, and it didn’t make any sense. If it is wrong for me to receive love, then it is also wrong for me to give it because by giving it I am causing somebody else to receive it, which I had pre-supposed was the wrong thing to do. So I stopped. And I mean that. I stopped hating myself. It no longer felt right. It wasn’t manly or healthy, and I cut it out. That was about a year ago, and since then I have been relatively happy. I am not kidding. I don’t sit around and talk bad about myself anymore.
The girl and I got back together, and she could sense the difference in me, and she liked it, and I felt that I was operating a completely new machine. I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was to receive love, to have the authority to love myself, to feel that it was right to love myself. When my girlfriend told me how she felt, I was able to receive it, and we had this normal relationship that in the end didn’t work because we realized we weren’t for each other. When we finally closed it out, it didn’t hurt because I trusted that God had something else for me, and if He didn’t, it didn’t mean He didn’t love me. From that point on, the point in the bathroom, I had confidence. Odd but true.
And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you. My friend Julie from Seattle told me that the main prayer she prays for her husband is that he will be able to receive love. And this is the prayer I pray for all my friends because it is the key to happiness. God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.