Exceptional
And a draft that sat an exceptional amount of time.
I had the pleasure of sitting next to a fellow Buffalo Bills fan at this year’s Sitka Pride variety show. It’s always strange to me, these meetings with someone from Western New York. Here we are, almost as far as we can get from our respective corners of the continent1 sharing an instant connection. I've only ever been to Buffalo once. Thanks to sports, I have an immediate ice-breaker with anyone I ever meet from that region. I inevitably learn a bit about what it’s like for a person to have grown up in Western New York. I discover the things people love about it, why they left, and what they do when they go back. At this age, sports is community to me. It provides story lines from on the field or ice, but I most enjoy the stories from the fans.
In San Diego I learned to adore the Chargers well before the Buffalo Bills. On Sundays we mostly went to church instead of football. The old men wore suits, the pews were rigid and terrible, and the only saving grace for a small child was the occasional lemon drop given to us rowdy boys in an attempt to get us to stop fidgeting. On at least one occasion I remember our dad sneaking into the back row with his canary-yellow Chargers t-shirt. He saved us from the torment of church hell that day to watch a real, live football game.
It was at games like this, at Jack Murphy Stadium on Sundays, that I learned what real passion was. The worship session started out in the parking lot. Families and friends gathered under gold and blue flags tossing footballs, cooking food, and enjoying an occasional taunt of an opposing fan. Eventually we’d move into the stadium, and while my attention would occasionally be on the players way down below us, I was fixated on individuals in the crowd. Ken, Bill, Rip, and Gary joined nearly 60,000 strangers screaming at the top of their lungs. When things went well, their exuberance and celebration were like nothing I had ever experienced.
There weren’t 60,000 other fans cheering along with me at my first ever Pride, but the day was full of impassioned celebration all the same. At noon, my family and I joined a large group of people downtown for the parade. As the event proceeded, I found myself again fixated on the many individual faces. Some were strangers — folks I somehow never remember seeing in this tiny island town. Others were members of the community I had grown used to seeing over the years. There were people I have loved closely and those I have admired from afar. Seeing them all… seeing us all celebrate each other was invigorating.
The timing for being invigorated couldn’t have been better. I had taken a few trips the in the months leading up to Pride. Generally, I enjoy travelling. Airports are my favorite spot to see people that look drastically different than me. Much like the day full of Pride, each face is an opportunity to experience more of the beauty, uniqueness, and sometimes strangeness the human race has to offer.
But I’m older now, and these trips were packed with activities. Much of what we did centered around Audrey Saiz’s graduation from Oregon State University. The experience was epic. I loved the speeches. I lost my voice trying to make sure Audrey could hear me from the top deck (she didn’t). And I love visiting Corvallis with its beauty and its people and its gyros. (Big shout out to Common Fields.) Sleeping on floors and occasionally in airports, long drives, and sitting for hours on end wore out my body.
And wore out is definitely a reason for not writing. It is not the reason, though. The reason is that I’m stuck on one topic. One draft has been taunting me the moment I sit down to start. It’s the thing that I won’t talk about, but that I need to talk about because it’s all of my thoughts whenever I open the editor.
I was recently on the podcast Hyperfocus with Rae Jacobson. The interview was a lovely experience, but I found myself with bit of apprehension about how it would present once it was edited down and published. It felt like we talked for an hour and a half, and I know that the episodes tend to be around a third of that. How would they choose to tell my story?
I knew there would be a lot of focus on me growing up a boy with inattentive ADHD. The reason I adore this show is that I relate so much with what the host, producer, and guests talk about. Listening to others’ stories about struggles and successes help me gain perspective on my own existence — which, frankly, has been quite a struggle of late.
I am not sure I’ve been in a position to figure out if I liked how I sounded or not. I’ve listened to it twice2, and both times I got hung up on how I described visiting my parents for the first time since before COVID. The first time since the January 6th insurrection. The first time since Roe was overturned. The first time since trans folks were told (again) they couldn’t serve in the military.
“The visit was super awful” does not sum up all of what I say in this episode, but it’s all I could hear. It might also be all my mom heard, I’m not sure. (We don’t really talk.) It was also an incredibly honest thing for me to share with the world, and the sentiment behind it has had my fingers tied up each time I try to write something meaningful in my recent drafts.
It’s now six months from starting this draft. I can tell because I put a picture somewhere up there from the summer solstice, and we’re days away from turning around again [and now we’re past it]. All those months ago I titled this post Exceptional because I could not get past how incredible my kids are. (They’re not “kids” anymore. I just cut up veggies for my youngest as they made stew from scratch in an apartment they help pay for whilst gearing up for their final three semesters of college.) This exceptionalism I see isn’t in juxtaposition to my own life or how I currently feel about it. But we do our best as parents, often only hoping that are kids are going to build on our strengths while shedding the incredible weight we can often dump on them. It seems my kids are managing that. I hope my kids are managing that.
I think my parents succeeded in gifting me some of their greatest strengths. I love deeply. I want what’s right for the people close to me. I speak my mind in nearly every situation. I want to serve those around me to make their days lighter. (I recognize these can be “weaknesses” at times, but fucking hell it’s worth it.) The weight I feel, that I do my best to shed, is that I am exceptional to them. That is, if I weren’t related to them, I would check many of the boxes of people they deem undesirable. (One could argue “hated people” is a better word here.)
I’m prone to feeling rejected. The first article about ADHD I ever read was on Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD)3 and it quickly snapped into focus so many interactions I’ve had in my life. There’s no doubt my RSD plays into feeling like an exception to my parents, however, it’s hard to whistle past the vitriol that is voiced explicitly and implicitly from that household.
Lately, instead of trying to figure out if I’m “correct” to feel like I do, or if my feelings are “enough” to warrant my spending any time drafting something that calls attention to it, I’ve been trying to think about my own behaviors reflecting towards my kids. How do I talk about the strangers whose actions and decisions I disagree with, often vehemently. How do I think about them? Am I challenging my own thoughts and feelings when I see a particular body type, a skin color, clothing choices, whether or not someone flosses? (Listen, I work pretty close to the operatory and sometimes I can’t overhear patient discussions. I don’t judge. I try not to judge. Also, I don’t floss much.) Who’s actions and words do I hate, and how do I treat them?
In my family, relatives seemed to have always been (mostly?) immune from the criticisms of race, queerness, political affiliation, gender, disability, weight (or perception of weight), etc. It’s hard to hate people that are in the circle. “Hate the sin and love the sinner” is what was told in church. The saying literally starts from a place of hate.
I don’t want to grow to be a person that hates anything about my children. It feels crappy to be an exception. I don’t want hugs while the radio in the other room is spouting hatred toward my Hispanic heritage or my queerness. I don’t want my socialist views to send spittle of disgust flying from someone just before or after I’m told I’m loved. What things like this am I spewing at my own children that makes them feel like the exception?
My favorite follow on Substack, Kari Bentley-Quinn, wrote a lovely piece about RSD that I relate to immensely.
And I had a comment in my head that sat for an exceptional amount of time! LOL. Super proud of you for publishing this, and I know what you mean about being an "exception" to the rule...but it's like...maybe their rules suck? Also, if you are thinking about these things with your own kids, you're probably doing just fine. <3