To Find His Own Way

I am going to call him Democrat Dylan because he would not want whoever reads this to know his real name. I did not tell him I am writing this because I can predict his reaction. His screams and complaints resonate automatically in my mind, and I know he thinks any attention is bad attention.

When I met him at a friend’s birthday party during my senior year of high school, I did not notice anything out of the ordinary. He was a reasonably attractive boy: slim and tall and built like a runner with shaggy blonde hair obscuring some of his face in a cute and boyish way that made me smile. His soft eyes were pretty average, as were his other features. He was not gorgeous, but he was far from ugly.

However, it was not Dylan’s looks that made me notice him. There was a certain way in which he carried himself that emitted energy from him in waves, or maybe spikes. Intuitively I felt he was not afraid to go against the social norms. He introduced himself as a democrat and proudly made my attention focus on his shirt that read “Friends don’t let friends vote Republican.” He made me laugh and feel comfortable enough that I did not notice how he sometimes stuttered and uncertainly peered at people though his hair. Actually, his enthusiasm created a façade of confidence that caused me to mistake him for a high school upperclassman so I was stunned to realize he was a freshman at my high school.

I began to know Democrat Dylan about two months after I first met him on the day I handed him a Christmas card. He looked at the card in his hands and asked, “Is this really for me?”

I gave him a confused look. “Who else would it be for? It has your name on it, doesn’t it?”

He smiled, and thanked me profusely. Something in the way he almost caressed the card made me think he was touched. I was confused. It was just a card, what was the big deal? From the personality he presented when I interacted with him, I assumed he was popular enough to always received Christmas cards.

A few days later my friend Sam told me Dylan had left a gift for me at her house because he went out of town for Christmas. When I went by to pick it up, I was delightfully surprised to find a very soft Godiva teddy bear. Even though I was confused by the kindness, I ignored the feelings, assuming the teddy bear was the result of a random splurge of kindness from someone I vaguely knew. Before long I realized that the action was merely the first few snowflakes that marked the onset of a storm.

One evening I received a phone call from Dylan, he wanted to talk to someone. We ended up talking about our lives, our passions, and the little things that made us happy. He told me about his church and the people there. His sincerity towards the kind old ladies at his church showed me the extent of his kindness. When he spoke of them, his voice gained a buoyant rhythm, undulating up and down with a steady sense of love and excitement.

That phone conversation set the precedent for the later conversations, including the one in which he told me his secret. With Dylan, secrets are kept very private but sometimes he would slip and accidentally mention something. Usually, he would cover it up, but oftentimes he would be unsuccessful. That’s what happened when I found out.

It was another one of those conversations. He was talking and suddenly stopped himself from saying something.

“Keep on going. You wanted to say something and then stopped,” I said to him.

He told me he couldn’t tell me. “You’ll hate me if you knew. And plus, no one knows.”

“I promise I won’t hate you. I don’t hate my friends so easily.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Not even if I promise to never tell anyone?”

He refused again, but I kept on pushing the subject, coaxing him to give me clues. Ultimately, he yielded and surrendered the clues to uncover his secret. He thought he was bisexual. The discovery did not shock me, nor did I start hating him. However, his hesitance and obvious fear of anyone else finding out did provoke questions regarding his cheeriness: how much of the Dylan that I knew was a carefully crafted front?

One of the first personality quirks most people notice about Dylan after meeting him is his generosity. For Earth Day, he decided to give plants to all his friends. In the weeks prior to that, he had gone around and asked everyone what they wanted. Then, he went to a nearby nursery and spent hundreds of dollars to purchase plants. On Earth Day, he frolicked through the hallways, passing out potted herbs, miniature trees, and infant flowers to everyone.

I once asked him why he was so eager to do nice things. The only part of his answer I remember is his firm belief that he is a horrible person deep inside. “I used to be really really mean. Like, I would manipulate people and all this other horrible stuff. That’s why I have to be nice now. If I’m mean to people at all, then I’ll become a horrible person again.” I was speechless. How could someone who seemed so sweet insist that he was a horrible person? How did he acquire this much self loathing?

Once I became conscious of his self loathing, I began to see it in everything he did.

Dylan hated accepting things from others. When we started hanging out, I tried to buy him little treats like candy and soda. He always refused, waving his hands frantically and telling me, “No, no, no! I can’t accept anything from you! It would make me horribly materialistic!” Even when I tried to explain to him that giving and friendship is mutual and it does not make him materialistic in the least to accept things, he never took anything.

In addition to never feeling he deserved gifts, Dylan often called himself ugly and held an irrational fear of becoming fat. He often complained to me about his hair and face, calling himself ugly. No matter what I said, he would insist he was ugly. There were also days in which he would only eat a few hundred calories and then run multiple miles. When I confronted him, Dylan merely brushed it off, saying if he was on the cross country team, he should look the part. I tried fruitlessly to get him to take care of himself to no avail. I never figured out why he was so self-conscious. What happened in his past to eat away his self esteem so much?

His self loathing also manifested in his attitude towards his sexuality. Later on in his freshman year, he slowly told his closest friends that he was gay. It was a secret that only we knew. Even now, after Dylan’s sexuality has become common knowledge amongst our group of friends and he has had a clandestine boyfriend, he has not embraced it. He has found numerous ways to hide his sexuality, including consciously playing odd word games during communication. Dylan’s insistence on these games reflected his hesitance to embrace his sexuality. He often made loose links between concepts and communicated though twisted wordings to hide certain aspects of his life.

Recently, I called him because he was complaining to me about how one of his friends was mad at him. He had refused to hug her and could not explain to her what had happened. The only clue he gave me was, “Let’s just say something happened and now I’m more positive I prefer Skittles over M&Ms.”

“That’s an interesting way to put it.”

“Well, you know, Skittles, ‘Taste the Rainbow,’” he explained with a sheepish sounding laugh. Rainbow was the keyword. By referring to Skittles versus M&Ms, Dylan successfully thwarts most people from understanding the meaning buried within his words.

Oftentimes I wonder how Dylan came to be so insecure. In my group of friends, he is most comparable to Rik. Both are gay, slightly neurotic, and come from religious families. However, unlike Dylan, Rik has embraced his sexuality. He is not afraid to tell his friends and even acts a bit flamboyant. When I tried to figure out why Dylan and Rik ended up so differently, the biggest difference I noticed between Dylan and Rik is that Rik knows those who mean the most to him will not stop loving him because he is gay. His Catholic parents even told him explicitly, “This is your life; we don’t care what you do. All we want is for you to be happy.”

Dylan does not have that reassurance. Growing up in a conservative area, he learned to view homosexuality as something bad, maybe even evil. He told me once that the little old ladies who he cares for deeply would probably shun him if they knew his sexual orientation and his parents would probably disown him. Despite the fact that he proudly presents himself as a democrat in a town nearly saturated by conservative Bush-supporters, there are certain lines he is afraid to cross. In the end, who he is and the sense of identity he developed as a child are in direct conflict. In the town of almost homophobic republicans, Dylan has too much to lose for merely being who he is.

Dylan is a good kid. That’s why so many of his friends want to solve his problems, but sometimes things are much harder than it seems. This fear Dylan has for his sexuality and the odd tension that exits between his identity and the environment in which he grew up causes a huge rift in his personality. It visibly distresses him and I do not even know if he fully understands the reasons. Franchan told me that he “re-enforces his self dislike with the slightest un-nice thing that happens to him.” He is so insecure that he cannot accept who he is. We cannot solve these problems for him. Ultimately, he needs to find his own way.