Finding the Right Life

It's more important to be alive than to be happy.

In what I somehow still didn’t know then would be the final days of my straight life, I made a list of the pros and cons of ending my marriage and coming out. On the positive side were the things I’d begun to see on the horizon as thrilling possibilities, but they were all amorphous and hypothetical, distant question marks. “A holistic sense of self,” I summed up, feeling simultaneously like that was the most important thing a person could want and that I was insane to consider throwing away everything I already had for it. Because the negatives, by contrast, were terrifyingly concrete, certain to commence within hours of making the decision: turning my life upside down and starting over, and all the psychological, social, and economic struggle that would entail.

By the time Pride month came around a year later, everything on both parts of the list had come to pass. Coming out had gone better than I foresaw; my family had taken it as well as could be expected, I had made more friends than I ever imagined having, and I finally felt, after years of always being an outsider, like I belonged. I had approached my assimilation into gay world with a fearlessness of which I hadn’t previously believed myself capable. There was so much more of everything, everything wonderful and awful and overwhelming; I couldn’t believe, from the other side, how etiolated my previous life had been, how I had survived so long inside it. At the same time, the cons manifested themselves almost as powerfully. There’s no way that losing everything you’ve known as your life can be anything but excruciating, especially losing the person you built that life with and knowing you’re the cause of their pain. On top of that, I was alone, alone in a way that made everything I’d previously regarded as loneliness seem unworthy of the name.

Once in a while during the first few months, I would try to draw up a kind of balance sheet to prove to myself that my new happiness outweighed my new sadness, that it had all been worth it. I was trying to survive in any way I knew how, I suppose, but it quickly became apparent that cost-benefit analysis was a category error, the wrong method for the experiment. My original pros-and-cons list had counterposed fundamental matters of selfhood and identity, that I could grasp only abstractly while still in the closet, to practical, everyday-life matters that are important but fungible, capable of being undone and redone as the deeper turns of life require. The question of whether it was “worth it,” and even of whether or not I was happy, was absurd.

The rightness I’ve felt ever since is probably beyond the reach of language, but I’ll do my best to at least circle around it. It is something like relief, like the feeling of blood circulating again after standing out of an awkward position, like suddenly landing on the right shape after struggling to fit into all the wrong ones. Relaxation from a strenuous bracing you were unaware of, exhalation of breath you didn’t know you were holding in—a whole web of visceral, quasi-physical discomforts in the world that, astonishingly, seemed to vanish into thin air. It is something like coherence, like the dots connecting, the missing outline coming into view, the parts adding up to a whole. Like passing from a perpetual bewilderment into understanding. And, with apologies for the mystical overtones, it is something like destiny: like joining with something bigger, deeper, more powerful than your own choices.

The “worth it” question is meaningless in the face of kind of rightness that defies calculation and stands indifferent to the ebb and flow of ephemeral states like happiness. At some point in those first few months, I underlined this sentence in E.M. Forster’s Maurice, about a gay man who lived a century before me: “He had awoken too late for happiness, but not for strength, and could feel an austere joy, as of a warrior who is homeless but stands fully armed.” It seems to me now that far more important than being happy is being alive, and it is impossible to be alive in the wrong life. Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falschen—Adorno’s enigmatic, untranslatable declaration that haunted me for years—something like “there is no right life within a false life,” or “wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Having to choose one’s own life is both the blessing and the curse of modern humans, and finding the right one is arguably the most overwhelming, even impossible challenge most of us will ever face. It’s terrifyingly easy to get into the wrong one; after all, we have to make crucial, defining decisions long before we are capable of understanding their consequences, and out of the materials—all too often paltry or shoddy—that we inherit. The choice gay people face of whether and how to live as what they are, whether and how to reject the alternatives, is not a wholly unique version of the universal struggle of finding the right life. Anyone can live in the wrong place, take up the wrong career, enter the wrong relationship—wrong, that is, for them given their own makeup, the understanding of which is a lifelong challenge in itself. But it is perhaps an especially intense, bewildering, and lonely version of it given that it requires charting a course outside society’s deepest-worn grooves.

That aspect of gay experience is worth underlining lest we fall too easily into thinking that the extraordinary advance of LGBT acceptance the last two decades has abolished it. Before I came out, I myself was unaware just how common my own experience was, how many gay men—I’ll stick to my area of expertise—still marry women, how many struggle painfully with their religious beliefs, how many harbor prejudicial stereotypes and lack any positive example of gay life as it actually exists. How many are still closeted to their families well into adulthood or struggle to be seen and truly accepted by them. Even the ones who faced no such obstacles frequently ask, only semi-jokingly, why being gay is so hard. Taking a stand on one’s life is difficult under the best of circumstances, and all the more so when it is required in such fundamental way, so at odds with the models and resources most readily available. To muster the strength to choose the right life, even if that choice is only the beginning and hardly settles the many questions that follow, is an achievement. I’m not proud I was born a homosexual, a matter in which I was given no say, but I am proud that I chose to be one.

And sometimes I think there’s a gift—or maybe a consolation—in choosing the right life only after having lived the wrong one. There’s an experience lots of good Christian kids talk about where they feel almost cheated out of the experience their religious tradition dramatizes and celebrates—that of the sinner who finds salvation. In church before we could walk, we were never lost sheep or prodigal sons, or any of the figures that populate Jesus’ parables that celebrate rescue and redemption. Those parables themselves even seem to endorse a kind of “prodigal privilege,” to denigrate those who made the right choice from the beginning, like the one about the shepherd of a hundred sheep who leaves ninety-nine of them behind to search for the one that is missing: And if it so be that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more over that sheep than over the ninety and nine which went not astray (Matthew 18:13). Our hymns, too, trumpeted the link between the catharsis of salvation and the depth of the preceding lostness: I once was lost, but now am found/Was blind but now I see. But a church kid like me never really got the chance to be a real sinner, so we’d always wonder if we were truly saved; we were left to magnify our insignificant foibles into the sort of depravity that seemed requisite for a salvation that mattered.

Maybe, long after that sort of salvation ceased to have any significance for me, I finally understand something of what those parables and hymns celebrated. The relief, the joy, the aliveness a true sinner feels upon their rescue, the drama of a change of course one didn’t previously believe possible, or wasn’t previously even capable of conceiving. At my first Pride parade, I spotted my best friend in the crowd on the street in Providence, Rhode Island; it was his first, too, even though our paths there could not have been more different. When I put my arms around him I started sobbing—violently, uncontrollably, like I’m fairly sure I had never cried in my life. (That, too, was new: all the crying, the seemingly bottomless emotion.)  “I’m fine, I’m fine,” I assured him, “I’m happy, I really am.” My tears were partly gratitude for him, what he meant to me, everything we’d been through together. But the overarching feeling was astonishment and disbelief—that somehow I had survived, I had made it here, that this was really my life, that I had been found after coming so close to being lost.