There’s something sickly about resolutions. I think it has to do with the way they’re made; either uttered furtively or pronounced with great enthusiasm (but always as a shamed self-reprimand), and they’re always precipitated by something arbitrary. I mean that as: it isn’t your weight, or how you feel about your size, but the time of year that drums up your resolution. It isn’t your generally aloof nature, or your family’s naturally sparse dynamic, but the death of a cousin that makes you resolve to stay in touch.
So it’s precipitated. And I guess that’s the foundation of my qualm. Making a deep, personal change, but awaiting a slight impetus? That makes me a little anxious. Actually, a lot anxious. New Years Resolutions are one of those benevolent, temporal superstitions that people indulge in together, which means they’re ritualistic, and so it’s powerful and I acknowledge that it’s positive behavior on the whole. I won’t condemn it broadly. It just doesn’t sit well with me. If I’m making a private contract with myself, I can’t have the psychic soot of everyone else smudging up the print.
Psychic soot. I like that.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing this way, it’s because everything said in my head is being pronounced by Maggie Smith from Downton Abbey, because, yes, I have just watched two episodes of Downton Abbey.
And do you know what? I do have a resolution, but it’s a protracted resolution that I’ve been trying to fold into my character for a while. It is: don’t flex my stereotype.
The gay card. I have it, I’ve used it, and it’s opened up many social strata, but I’ve been quitting it since I realized the specific poison it brings to how I see myself. I can’t reasonably criticize people who reduce me to a token identity if I’m not going to dissolve the same reductive thinking in myself. It’s dissonant and hypocritical.
There are lots of prescriptive gay behaviors. A lot of them are petty. Not all, mind you. They’re practiced and honed like anything prescriptive and, noticing this faculty in myself, I’ve grown weary of housing it the more I realize I don’t need it. It’s how I imagine all those hyper-masculine teens feel when, finally, they admit to themselves that they really don’t like playing football, or thinking about women as they might a chunk of meat, or crushing cans of beer with their faces. Meanwhile, I don’t really like shopping arbitrarily, and I don’t think it’s funny to starve myself. Or gossip. Or wear cute hats. Actually, I really mistrust anyone who wears hats too regularly.
And I also mistrust people who wear those shoes to the gym that have toes. My god do those stress me out. Anytime someone approaches me with those shoes on I am literally waiting for them to spring over my head and onto the wall behind me, lash out some serpentine tongue at a fly, and then scamper into an air duct.
I wish you could hear Maggie Smith reading the above. It’s marvelous.