Breaking The Illusions - An Autobiography - 3. Chapter 3

Becoming the Mask

My middle adolescence to my young adulthood was a time of me finding my footing in a world which no longer had Jackson in it. He had been, in many ways, the figurehead of my ship; the compass needle pointing the way to go.

But I still had Timothy, and we were, in many ways, a pair of survivors trying to catch their breath. With Jackson eventually moving out of his parents' house, getting a job and being around less and less along the way, Timothy and I started hanging out a great deal more, just the two of us.

There was not a shred of anything intimate between us in any way that matched my fantasies. I want that to be abundantly clear. Despite my attraction to him, he did not reciprocate. We never talked about what happened between us, or with Jackson. I don't know if we avoided the topic on purpose, or if we just assumed the other one knew what would be said and didn't want to address it. Possibly some of both, though I really can't be certain.

It was something I needed, however, and I think the same was true for him. He'd lost some friends along the way as well and lost his anchor, Jackson. As much as we'd suffered from him, he had been our leader, and now we were forced to fend for ourselves.

Timothy and I continued to play Dungeons & Dragons a bit, and other roleplaying games, recruiting other people when we could. It didn't really matter who we could find. We were desperate to hold onto stories, because those illusions had helped us find something good in a harsh world.

We played a lot of video games together, often cooperative, and I learned a new way to cope with the loneliness; as that became a metaphor for my life. Codependency. Timothy was my first codependent friend; for as much as he had been my bully, he was also the one person who had the understanding I needed for me to have emotional stability. He understood my need to withdraw, to put the world away and get lost in fiction. He helped me do it willingly, because I could give him the same thing.

As time wore on, his personality bled into mine in many ways. I started noticing that I was picking up traits of his, but I wanted to be like him anyway. He was attractive—at least in my eyes—and funny, and he had a certain confidence about facts and data, which made me want to be smarter than I was. That's one of the first points of positive encouragement about something I was actually interested in that I can remember. My parents did it on occasion, about a couple of my interests, but the pursuit of information has always been a passion of mine, from the time I was very small.

I picked up personality traits like a sponge, oozing them out of me whenever I was pressed by some new source. They were similar to Jackson's personality traits, in some ways, but they were a bit better. There was a cognitive empathy to them, as if they at least understood how emotion was supposed to work, even if they didn't always understand how to feel it.

This was a much more comfortable place for me than the emotions I'd been feeling previously. Where before there had been nothing but pain, at least now I had something more than that. Simply being understood by someone was refreshing, and something I had only experienced in short stints throughout my life. While I do not know, nor do I imagine I ever will know, whether or not Timothy considered me a true friend, during that time when he was practically my only one.

School remained a challenge, at least the social aspect. I was still a loner, though I did have a small group of kids I walked home with. The three of them were friends, and I'd known them in elementary school, and been friends with them at various points, though I was not close with any of them now. They mostly tolerated my presence on the walks home, though eventually they did engage me in more conversation as we continued to share space.

It's difficult for me to imagine what trajectory my life would've taken, had I not begun walking home with these people. While forming friendships during class time was still difficult, getting to know these three was a different experience altogether. Timothy, being a few years older than me, did not go to the same school as me, and that meant I was completely anchorless socially. These three peers gave me a shred of the stability that I craved.

But after I made it home from school, it was still Timothy I would turn to. I didn't know how to do anything different, and there I felt safe. Plus, I was able to be close to the person I was most attracted to. My hormones were rather single-minded at that age; my fantasies were as well.

Of course, time and age change everything. When Timothy reached an age that he could get a job, he eventually did. I saw him less and less in my afternoons, though I still often spent time with him before he left for his night job. Unfortunately, I knew what was coming, and that he would inevitably abandon me like everyone else did.

Meanwhile, the three friends I walked home with were changing as well. One moved across the city, so he was never with us anymore. The other two had a fight that ended their friendship, and they stopped walking home together. That left me with only one of them, and suddenly I was needed again.

I believe that's at the core of my codependency. If the other does not need me as much as I need them, it doesn't work out. Timothy had found other means of stability, through his job and friendships with a couple of his coworkers. They were closer to his age, so it made sense, but it meant he was starting to move away from me.

But Glen wasn't like that. He, as well, had been abandoned by people his entire life; close friends especially seemed to be in short supply. As we hadn't gone through the exact same traumas, as was the case with Timothy and me, the way Glen and I related to each other was different. Since we had gone through many similar emotional challenges, however, we had something to talk about.

And so we did. The conversations I had with Glen privately became much more personal than they'd been when we had others with us. We talked about life, about meaning and purpose, and what might exist outside of the illusion of society. It was the first time in my life that someone had genuinely wanted to hear what I had to say, about anything of any importance.

Glen kept inviting me over to his house, and I kept refusing. I didn't want to risk forming yet another deep friendship when I feared it would fall apart. Finally, on Halloween of our freshman year, he started pulling me toward his house, and only when I refused yet again did he let me go.

No one had shown me such eagerness to have me in their life before. When I went home that afternoon, I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do next. Eventually, I put on my coat and walked to his neighborhood.

It didn't take me long to find his house, as he had described it to me in detail. We spent the evening together, and I ended up sleeping over at his house. It was only the second sleepover I had ever had at someone else's house, and the first with people who actually enjoyed my company.

While I would love to say that this was the friendship that healed me of my trauma, and which fixed everything that was wrong; unfortunately that friendship was a two-edged sword. While Glen did finally become my truest anchor in this life, and still is today, there were certain ways in which our friendship locked in some of the things I still struggle with.

It began with my codependency, as so many things have since I developed it. I wanted to spend all my time with him, because he made me feel like I wasn't alone. It was to the point that I spent every afternoon at his home, slept over at his house most weekends, and when my family went on vacation, I called him every night because I didn't know how to be alone with myself anymore.

I was attracted to him, and unlike with Timothy, I let him know fairly early that this was the case. Glen welcomed my company, but not my attraction. As I continued to obsess over him, and he continued to reject my advances, it became a major sour point between us.

Every behavior I had learned from Jackson about how to control others was brought to bear against Glen. Thankfully, he resisted them all, for he had dealt with controlling people his entire life. And, when I finally crossed the line, he let me know with certainty that I had fucked up, and that my abusive behavior would not be tolerated.

This was when things started to change for me, the beginning of a path that would take nearly 17 years to reach a point of freedom. It began with a single decision, when faced with losing the only friend I'd had, who wanted to stay in my life and actually could. I apologized, and made a firm decision and commitment to change.

It definitely didn't happen overnight, though some of my behaviors I managed to stop right away. My attempts to control him through pain, for instance, were let go immediately. That I had even crossed that line at all was sickening to me, as soon as I realized the similarities to how Jackson had treated me. My obsession took longer, nearly a decade to disappear completely, but it did fade bit by bit, and I constantly strove to do better than I had before.

Glen bore it all because of our mutual codependency. We gave each other exactly what we craved, when it came to emotional needs. Mental stimulus and understanding filled all our conversations. We'd often spend the last hour of our daily hangouts sitting in his living room simply talking about things.

This is still the cornerstone of our friendship. It is why, even though we have enabled each other's habits throughout the years, I would never think of leaving him. He offers me a level of understanding I have scarcely found elsewhere, especially in such abundance.

What Glen offered me was stability, the ability to work through the masks I wore, and to wear the one in which I felt the most comfortable without any judgment. Without him, I'm certain I would've deteriorated into chaos, or become so consumed by apathy that I would have willingly fed myself to the void of my depression.

I'm going to speed up the tale a bit here. Much of this is important, but the specific details less so. In high school, Glen and I became close friends with another pair of guys who were similarly bonded due to their trauma. The four of us together became a family of sorts, a brotherhood linked by a shared distaste for authority, an appreciation of mental exploration, a lack of emotional understanding for most people, and an insatiable desire for stories.

It was Dungeons & Dragons that brought us together at first. The four of us—the two separate pairs—came together at a party for a mutual friend and learned that we had all played the game before, but we each did not have enough people in our lives to keep playing. We decided to get together to remedy that.

The four of us became inseparable, and for a codependent like me, that was the greatest experience I had ever had. In addition to Glen, I had gained two people I could rely on and trust. Having a true friend had been life changing, and having three finally helped me find a place in the world where I wanted to be.

This, as well, did not solve all my problems, of course. While I trusted these friends in almost every way, there were still a few things that I held back from them. Many were the insecurities that I had learned to hold against myself due to Jackson and Timothy. Glen knew about my sexuality, but I didn't tell the other two until we were in our early 20s. I had told Glen about the abuse, but I kept it from the others.

From the age of five when Jackson had first introduced me to the world of illusion, which he had weaved out of his words, I had learned to create false selves. While I gave more truth to my three best friends than I had ever given to anyone before, I still felt the need to create a persona by which I engaged with them. I pretended to be wiser than I was, to present myself as some moral being who understood the way the world was supposed to be. I bluffed my way with much bullshit during the course of my later teen years and young adulthood.

All four of us wore masks, even around each other. There were moments when we gave each other glimpses of what lay beneath, tiny flickers of vulnerability which are the true reason why we stayed together. We knew there was a real connection between us, even if we still kept each other a layer away from whom we really were.

But they gave me an understanding of what I wanted in life. The three of them helped me see that I wanted a life of emotional intimacy with a small group of friends, who would have my back as much as I had theirs. This was the case for a long while with them, and in many ways it still is, although some distance has grown between me and the two who came later. They've gone on to form families of their own, and I'm happy for them. All of our priorities have shifted, and thankfully I learned and accepted that this is simply what happens in life. People often grow apart, despite best intentions.

They remain my brothers, even if I don't get to see them as often as I used to. My world would be a much darker place if I had never welcomed them into it.

But as it was, I was the first one to leave. I can't say I fully understand my own motivations at the time. It seemed necessary, from a sense of self-preservation. Over the course of my adolescence I had learned to keep my opinions to myself around my family and community. While I did not believe in their religion, I was still forced to participate in it.

In high school I investigated Buddhism and Taoism and loved them both far more than the religion of my youth. I was a self-proclaimed secular Buddhist while attending Mormon seminary, and told others that I found certain aspects of Buddhist philosophy peaceful and applicable to my Mormon life.

But there is a point in a Mormon boy's life where he has to make a certain decision, which will affect his entire future. Every Mormon male is expected to give two years of his life to missionary service, immediately after high school. They leave their homes to travel either across the country or to other parts of the world, to recruit others into the Mormon faith. If someone decides not to go, they are often ostracized by their community and put at odds with their family.

Fearing the repercussions of declining to perform my expected duty, I decided to pursue missionary service. I made a mental decision that if I did not get sent somewhere interesting to me, then I would decline and leave the church. As fortune would have it, for better or worse, the church sent me to South Korea.

I could not give up that adventure, no matter how little I wanted to be a missionary. But it meant saying goodbye to my three closest friends, for two years, and thereby being unable to see them or even communicate outside of letters and emails. That was the hardest part, and it nearly destroyed me.

Completely without any of my codependent anchors, I entered Mormon boot camp (the MTC, or "Missionary Training Center") where I spent the first three months of my missionary service. All three of them wrote me letters while I was in the MTC, with Glen writing me once a week, and the other two writing me sporadically.

But, as I had grown used to spending the bulk of my time with them, it was jarring to no longer have their presence. As I have always done when being separated from those who stabilize me, I sought something else to satisfy my need to be needed. The brainwashing techniques used on missionaries in training proved to be quite effective for my mental state at the time. By the end of my three months of training, I was a zealous disciple, ready to get to Korea and teach and baptize as many people as possible.

It was another persona, a means to survive a world that didn't make sense to my true self. I buried the things about myself that would cause the most trouble in my religious service. My sexuality, which only Glen knew for sure, was the thing I tried to suppress the most. Being surrounded exclusively by males during my missionary service made that difficult at times, though thankfully I was never particularly attracted to any of my companions.

When I arrived in South Korea, the now current president of the Mormon church, Russell Nelson, was visiting in order to speak at a conference for the Mormon membership in Korea. Due to certain circumstances, he was staying at the home of my mission president. At that time, he was part of the leading Council of the church, but not the leader of the church itself, and thus was well regarded by all of my missionary peers.

We were honored by the opportunity to eat breakfast with him, but to say it was a lackluster experience for me would be putting it lightly. By the end of the meal I had been reminded of all the reasons why I did not believe the doctrines of the Mormon church. And yet, there I was, in a foreign country where I had committed myself to teach about the church for the next two years.

I allowed the persona I had constructed in the MTC to dominate me. My true self, the one beneath the masks, was still yearning for the codependent bliss of my friends back home. It would do me no good, being over there, and so for the next two years I gave everything to the role, and I was an excellent actor.

But the war within myself went badly for who I really was. I ached to be true to myself, and at times this manifested in unexpected ways. I hated attending required church meetings, and hid it by simply falling asleep during them and claiming that I wasn't sleeping well at night. The method I would use to proselytize was to advertise for our free English class, above teaching anything about church, because I found such teaching sessions to be far more interesting, and satisfying, than anything to do with church doctrine.

I had a brief romantic affair with a young man who was a member of the church in one of the areas where I lived. He was a couple of years younger than me, but not so young as to be inappropriate as I was only nineteen myself. This was, at that point in my life, the only mutually invested romantic relationship I had experienced. For the two months that we met in secret it was wonderful, and certainly confirmed my sexuality, but the relationship was impossible to maintain. Neither of us could ever go public, and I'd be leaving eventually anyway.

Sometimes, I would climb up to the top of the tallest building I could find, and look out over the city. This was especially therapeutic for me at night, when the lights from all the windows would shine, to remind me of all the different people living their lives. It made me feel less alone to see the world lit up like that.

I loved the culture of the Korean people, though I know that my experience is somewhat tainted by the fact that I was a white boy and a foreigner. I likely would've had a different perspective on their culture had I been born Korean. For me, there was a serenity there, which I have never experienced in my homeland; I felt as if I could live there forever. The misty, green mountains of Icheon felt like the most magical heaven I'd ever seen.

Some of the people I met offered me perspectives I sorely needed and had been lacking for the entirety of my life. A Buddhist potter, and farmer, taught me humility and showed me what unconditional love looked like in a family. I have often remarked to others that this man in particular exemplified more Christian values than any Christian I had ever met.

Another man, toward the end of my time in Korea, had been a minister for twenty-five years. His old Bible was so worn from the many times that he had flipped through it that some of the words were missing from the edges of the verses on the outer margins. He had read the book many times, every time hoping for a conviction to confirm his faith, but never found it. He'd been an atheist for well over a decade when I met him, and he could spot the hole in the logic of nearly any religious argument almost as soon as it was said. He would listen patiently and respond with reason. He saw right through me; my mask meant nothing to him.

I met a pair of Muslim friends studying at a University, who openly discussed religious theory with me without any desire to prove me wrong, or get into any arguments. How refreshing it was to have people who enjoyed learning about diversity of humanity without any desire to prove that there was only one way to be human! I cherished our discussions for many years afterwards, and truthfully, I do still.

Korea confirmed what I had learned at ten years of age. The world—the real one, not the illusions I constructed—was full of magic. There were people in every culture who were good, and that the willingness to explore the differences in our perspectives was the true secret to peace. I doubt I could've articulated that at those times in my life, but it was a core tenet of my soul then and remains so today.

And through it all, I was forced to continue to wear the mask of the missionary; the mask of the straight boy, come to preach the God-fearing doctrine of some arrogant white man from the time before the slaves were freed in the United States, and the West had not yet been stolen from the people who lived there.

I am bitter about Mormon doctrine, and the Mormon church, and I apologize for my inability to remain unbiased. When I was young, Mormon doctrine convinced me that I was an abomination for the feelings of love I had for other boys I knew. It has hurt others I have known in a wide variety of ways, from homophobia, to racism, to the theocratic influence they have upon the governance of Utah. They have done some good in the world, and there are certain things within their culture that have impacted some people for the better. But this is my story, and in my life they are the antagonists.

When I returned home, I slowly began my transition out of the church. I could not leave immediately, for I still believed I needed to preserve some stability within my family. Glen was there to aid in my transition out, for he wanted out as well. It took a while for us to have that conversation, but eventually we started going to church less and less.

By a year after I came home, I told my parents that I didn't want to go to the church anymore, and that I didn't believe in it at all. I also mentioned the abuse that I had suffered, but refused to give them any details. They wouldn't have understood anyway.

Once again, telling my parents something serious about myself resulted in their complete lack of respect for my true self. My mother would constantly make passive-aggressive remarks about my decision to leave the church, or to try to manipulate me into going back. My father went behind my back to my mission president and told him that I was leaving the church, to ensure that my mission president would meet with me and try to pressure me back into it. Months later, my father gave me printouts of all the emails I'd sent him in which I had declared my faith. He didn't understand they'd all been written by my mask and not by me.

I suppose I should be grateful that I at least had parents who cared enough to try to save my soul, the way that they saw it, but I can't muster up the gratitude. It was then that I stopped caring what they thought of me, or at least what they thought about my actions and beliefs. For the entirety of my life, every time I had tried to tell them who I really was, they had ignored me and tried to convince me that I wasn't who I said I was, or that I shouldn't be that person.

And so, by the age of twenty-two, the foundations of my prison had all begun to weaken. I had escaped the religion, though traces of its dogma still hung on me like cobwebs. I had escaped familial pressure, but the wounds I had suffered on the way out still burned like hellfire. I still bore the weight of Jackson's tyranny, and the codependency that had been shaped from that trauma. I hated myself then, more than ever, but at least I was looking in the mirror. It had been a long time since I'd done that.

Sometimes healing is every bit as painful as the sickness.