“Taking It” essay via minor literature[s] by Bradley David

(from "Taking It" via minor literature[s]

I don’t want to hear it. Don’t want to write it, nor read it. I’m tired of bodies as the tough meat of easy prey. Don’t want to describe how my insecurity has been insidious and debilitating, strangely motivating. A teacher that led me to teachers. The vellum haze of tracing paper overlaying the sharp lines of fear. I won’t disclose that I don’t take my spot on this planet for granted. That this goddamn gorgeous planet incites rumination on my/its state of stability and survival. You’re such a worrier, they say. Can’t you just smile? Can’t your irreverence, like politics, arrive sweeter than real? As far back as I can recall there’s been a baseline of fear, anxiety, and depression. I don’t want to hear about it. How psychotropics and psychotherapies came along. An overwrought topic that has left all but a few fumes of shame behind. Shame need not worry; I’ve given it plenty of room to roam. I won’t tell it like this:

In the early ’90s I had a subscription to Details magazine. For the articles, one might say, if he were closeted and subscribing to the homoerotic subtext of cologne ads and brief-bulging Calvin Klein models. That magazine triggered a wantful aesthetic. I was as skinny as the edge of its pages. The stuff of its models and the era’s unhealthy body expectations. It’s a secret blissfully revealed here that there was a time when I thought my body’s bitch-chic could be parlayed into modeling. My scrawny hunched form. Skirting through high school hallways, shouting bullies asking me if I had AIDS or cancer. When my hair was in its awkward grow out stages, it earned me the nicknames Tom Petty and Princess Leia. One can do worse than Carrie Fisher.

When I came out as gay in 1998, it was both fleeing insecurity and entering into a new version of it. I was in my twenties and encountering a fresh set of bullies. Life became consumed by the need to seek out safe spaces and people. I took trauma-memory with me, however, which encumbers the joy of setting out on one’s exploration of self-actualization. It holds in the body like brain fog and back spasms. Told in years, fear impinges posture and turns sweetness sour. In the interim, proclaiming identities and finding identity groups was a certain relief, but did not get at the self-work of self-worth.

A quarter century later and I scarcely have use for proclaiming identities anymore. Ambiguous ones are preferred. Identities mostly fog around in the background and lightly moisturize the skin of things. Sometimes I’ll give my byline the he/him and the gay/queer. People may wonder about the gray areas—hair and clothing and vocabulary. That’s okay—I love wonder and I don’t mind speculation. When we swallow our speculation, we feed our shame. We become frustrated and agitated when we feed that inhibition.

I have to hand it to the boys, the bullies, and also the concentric rings of voices—family or friends, ignorant or unwitting—who drove me deeper into the solitude of imagination. They gave me more reading, writing, study, art, nature, escapism, and fantasy. Solitary pursuits that starve inhibition, if only for moments. This very writing is a result of all that and everything since. To know without doubt that there’s a takeaway, value, in all experiences—that’s a work in progress. And I like the work, though it certainly makes me petulant when it pushes against my comfort zone or threatens my good mess of tightly regulated disorder.

Tightly regulated disorder sounds like a hair metal album; but it’s not angsty hyperbolic wordplay. It is the reality of a balancing act—actively attended—that allows for expanding creativity, cautious socialization, and intimate connection with nature. A sense of control over one’s space, time, and needs. It is regulation of sleep and monitoring of mood—monitoring my body—so I can feel a keel; enter a zone of focus that disrupts rumination, or simply a mindfulness that renders all of this… not much at all.

Of course, I’d learned all of this years ago in my social work and wellness training. Suicide prevention work. Learned it, coached and counseled others, and didn’t take my own advice. Regulation was a word for people with diagnoses I didn’t have. I was too stubborn, too ’90s irreverent to maintain structure and regulate the unregulated disorder I thought was cool and artsy. Probably drunk, to top it all off.

Now I’m alcohol-free, drug-free, cigarette-free, meat-free and loving the devotion to those freedoms. I pack enough pills to fill those voids and bring enough diagnostic codes for a lively luncheon. It was a psychiatrist that nudged me, nudges me, towards regulation that embraces disorder. Helps the strayed parts find their way back to one another. I am ever aware that access to good help like that is a privilege. Attending to regulation and biopsychosocial stasis is a recognized and glaring privilege. I better do some good with it. Can this be part of that?

I would not have liked the work of being a model. I don’t like being told what to do or where to place my body. I’m awkward in it, protective of it, and nervous of violations. I’ve kept its ferocity under wraps. One of the few times I took my body to a club someone grabbed its ass and I processed that like a traffic violation. I am gay and don’t touch my fucking body. My body is not for you and not for nothing. It also carries much physical pain but I try not to complain much or let it stop me for long. I do complain, it does stop me. These purpled photos are a tribute to all of it: pain, dysregulation, fear, anger, pride, sensuality, and exhaustion. Rushing into lost time. Coming back to color.

And beauty. Coming out with my body as the possibility of something beautiful. Finally, after treating it so poorly. Talking to it like a bully. Stuffing it in a metaphorical trash can, as once was done in reality. I handed over my power to the trash talk. Allowed other people to discuss my body like an “it.” To weaken it, hunch it, nullify its eroticism. I have let my body feel ugly and burdensome, and rare has been the moment that it has felt desirable and capable. Yet, all along I’ve been taking photos of it. Selfies, poses, happy accidents. Not even realizing that I was amassing a trove of historical documentation. Imagine that. Now that’s some intuitive act of repression, rebellion, and desperation. An act of wisdom and love. What foresight I must have had to prepare my future self for a moment like this. Because all of a sudden, as I looked over the cache of photos, especially the earlier ones from eras I told myself I was nothing if not the embodiment of hopelessness, all these smiles emerged. But haven’t I been telling myself I hate my smile? Turns out, I have photographic evidence that refutes my allegations.

These photos are from my new poetics/image project, “Purple and Dissonance.” I’m wearing a silver-splashed transparent black shirt—enhanced here with color—that I asked my mom to buy me in my earliest days of coming out in 1998. By asking her to buy it, I was asking her to accept the possibility that I would wear something that shows my body. My soon-to-be-out body. But I never wore it. Except for seeing it in the mirror, it never left the house. Then, a few years ago, pulling it from a box of memories, I set up my phone to capture a series of movement photos wearing nothing but the shirt. Modeling vulnerability in the hope that finally, still, I am seen as, I see as, the person I have always been. My body owes my rumination nothing. My body prefers to dwell on the possibility that Its fear has been in service of, a student of, wonder, beauty, and self-actualization all along. Fucking bodies… leave ’em alone.

“Taking It“ was first published by minor literature[s]