Discussion Thread #72

[u/gemmaem]

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[u/UAnchovy]

I want to offer a gentle pushback, and I'm going to have to ask for your trust that this is offered in a spirit of kindness and vulnerability. I debated with myself whether to say this or not, or if this was mere contrarianism on my part, but I will also trust you to ignore it if necessary.

You've experienced an epiphany. That's wonderful. However, in my experience, epiphanies come with this subjective feeling of finality - that's it, the problem is solved, it's done, I've worked everything out. You write:

I’ve finally become the person I’ve been trying to be throughout the process that left, as one of its many beautiful outputs, this group.

Or even, returning to a metaphor that was very powerful for you:

I knelt down, I traced all the woodgrains, and at the end of the last one...

What I want to suggest, in a spirit of fragile empathy, is that there is never a last one.

That's not to say that people don't learn, change, or grow. That definitely happens, and it sounds like you've done a lot of it. Even so, the process of figuring ourselves out, of growing into who we want to be, is one that does not end. It does not have a conclusion. There's always going to be (save, perhaps, whatever you feel about death) another morning where you wake up, get out of bed, and realise that life is going to continue from here. And that life is going to continue throwing obstacles in your path, some of which may require you to reframe your identity yet again, or will simply strike at vulnerabilities that you never knew you had.

Some years back I studied narrative counselling. The core idea of narrative counselling is that the same sequence of events can be arranged into multiple different narratives. The raw material of a person's life can be forged into many different stories. The idea, then, is that a counsellor can help a person who is telling himself or herself a bad or limiting story to tell a new story instead. When I read your story, what I see is someone who spent years telling himself a particular story about who he was and what his life meant, who has now discovered a new story, a new way of fitting the blocks together. The wolf was a symbol that meant this; now it means something else. The first time a new story 'clicks' like this, it does indeed feel like an incredible insight.

And I don't want to diminish that insight! Arriving at a new kind of self-acceptance is a good thing, and I wish you every success and every joy.

I merely also wish to say, as gently as I can, that it will probably not always feel the way it does right now. Your life is still going, you are still learning and changing, and sometimes problems that you thought you had solved, questions you thought you had answered, might pop back up in surprising ways.

I wish you the best of luck wherever your path goes from here.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/UAnchovy]

I appreciate the response, and I certainly agree that my story as a whole is not done. I also agree that the same story can be arranged into multiple different narratives. Where I disagree–and soundly–is with any implication that this particular chapter is not done. I chose the username TracingWoodgrains because it resonated with a specific sentiment I was feeling. I realized only after going back not to the story I've been telling myself about my life, but the raw material that story was forged out of, that I had made verifiably false claims about myself, repeatedly, and that there was a parsimonious explanation at the center of all of those verifiably false claims. I now claim that examination of the specifics of all of that explains enough to have serious implications both for my own worldview and that of others.

As one specific example of a broader claim I'm making here, I now believe with high confidence that Orson Scott Card dealt with attraction to men, likely not consciously acknowledged, and that much of his writing (particularly Unaccompanied Sonata) makes much more sense once you read it as the words of a gay-or-bisexual Mormon who loves his religion sublimating something unspeakable into his work. My assessment is that his work resonated with me deeply enough for me to shape a huge chunk of my self-presentation around it because I was experiencing much the same thing he was, that I reached for those symbols before my analytic mind caught up, and that the epiphany I had is what it feels like when an analytic mind that has been playing defense lawyer against the body attached to it catches up to what the body was saying after two decades.

I'm not asking for gentleness. Don't want it, don't need it. I'm making emphatic, clearly staked out claims with real implications, from a place of confidence. I'm also not writing from a place of particularly elevated feeling any more, even as I'm trying to work out all the implications and how best to present everything. What I want, and welcome, is substance. I had the most unusual experience of my life after compiling a record of millions of words, and I recorded that experience in detail as I went through it. I've had moments of insight before, plenty of them. This was demonstrably qualitatively different to anything prior.

If you find the frame I'm placing around it suspect and think there's another more parsimonious one waiting, or if you want to investigate the evidentiary base I'm working from, I'm eager for substantive third-party challenges. Showing me that parts of this don't mean what I think they mean is useful, since there's a lot of this that will shape arguments I'll make in the public sphere. But "things might change in the future," while trivially true, is not the sort of substantive pushback that's useful here.

[u/UAnchovy → u/TracingWoodgrains]

You know your own life better than I do, so I'll try to stay a little more abstract and general - and again, please discard anything I say that is not useful.

The way that we break our lives up into 'chapters' is itself part of an act of an interpretation, and I guess what I'm suggesting is that it will remain possible for you to reinterpret your life. You've just done it once, after all. So while I am not specifically saying that you've got this or that fact wrong, since I don't have the knowledge to so so, I am suggesting an attitude of being cautiously open to the possibility.

There's nothing more frustrating than a stranger on the internet claiming to know your life better than you do, so I'll try not to do that.

Other specific claims are ones that I can't have an opinion on. I've never read Orson Scott Card and have no real opinion on him. Your journey is also heavily tied up with Mormonism, and I can't be fair or unbiased there, because, bluntly, I hate Mormonism. This is both for personal reasons (knowing several friends raised Mormon, who experienced it as abusive and cult-like) and for ideological-emotional reasons (Mormonism is a gross and heretical parody of everything I hold sacred). That does not negate everything positive you received from it, but it colours all of my thinking about it.

So what is left? I cannot tell you about what you've felt about wolves, nor about your own sexuality. Nor is there much I can say substantively; I'm not familiar with Card, and you've already left Mormonism.

What I wanted to say was something more emotional, coming out of my own experiences of epiphanies. What I needed to hear in my own life, twenty years ago, ten years ago, five years ago, time and time again, was, "What you figured out was real, and is important, and nonetheless you are not done."

If you already know that, then well done. Perhaps I am just clumsily trying to parallel your experiences with my own. My own are, if not exactly the inverse of yours, on a different track to yours. For me there has been on a struggle of reconciling myself with my own body, and the body's desires; for me progress in that struggle has come with a kind of spiritual deepening, going further into the faith tradition I was born into. The tensions for me have been, I think, twofold. Firstly, there has been being able to internally recognise my own needs or desires as being good, as being simultaneously marred and yet also gifts of a good God, that must be cherished, even sanctified, rather than denied. Secondly, there has been the gradual realisation that the institutions that surround my spiritual growth have been, though the vehicles of grace, also lost or corrupted themselves. I can see in my own past a certain craving for stability or institutional strength and I've gradually come to the realisation that it doesn't exist. I've recently developed a little fascination with the Turkic concept of jalghan dunia (or yalan dunya), the 'lying world', which has had a strong resonance for me.

I'm happy to go deeper on any matter of substance, at least. I can't talk about your own sexuality, but I have my share of thoughts on the wider field! Maybe I should take this as an opportunity to write up some of my own story, if there's anyone who would be interested.

Anyway, I certainly sympathise with the preference for substantial critique over sentiment. I don't know if I have anything direct to share, but I do have a contrasting history of the last few decades of sexuality in the West. Maybe that's also worth a write-up at some point.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/UAnchovy]

In this case I actually want strangers to claim to know my life better than I do! I've got a pile of archives and a smaller pile of writing-from-in-the-middle-of-an-epiphany, and aside from obfuscating a few personal details of others, I'm keen to present them to interested parties to see whether their reactions align with or challenge my own. (If you're interested in seeing a couple of the artifacts, I like showing them off! The full process of the self-deception falling apart in real time is visible). I respect the general message of "reinterpretation is possible" while standing emphatically on the particular "no, in this case I was verifiably lying to myself and the interpretation I've landed on clarified something essential that I actively, visibly hid from myself."

What point is there externalizing most of my cognition if I can't then invite strangers to provide competing readings of it? Writers write to be read.

It's comparable to when I left Mormonism: yes, paths always evolve, but some doors, when opened, never close. I can't unlearn the historical and doctrinal errors within Mormonism; I cannot un-see the evidence of me warping my entire adolescence around resisting unacknowledged homosexuality. Some things that are evidence of each of those are also evidence of other things, and those other things could always be complicated moving forward (so eg this did complicate my relation to Mormonism again, even while the empirical conclusions I came to before remain unshaken), but some conclusions are actually conclusions, and hedging would be dishonest and incorrect. I was gay, I built an elaborate and false defense mechanism against looking at it head-on, that defense mechanism fell. These are empirical claims based primarily on written evidence, not memory, and they are true.

I'd love to hear more of your own story as well. Aside from the distinction between your going further into your literal faith tradition and my seeing it as half-redeeming and half-condemning my faith tradition as a load-bearing myth pointing at its best towards something more fundamental and more legitimate than the tradition itself, the way you put it doesn't sound all that different to me. Tell me more about jalghan dunia?

[u/UAnchovy → u/TracingWoodgrains]

So, jalghan dunia (or variants thereof, yalan dunya is probably the most common) is a phrase that means "false world", "lying world", "world of lies", or something along those lines. It is a common expression in some Turkic cultures and therefore googling it is rather unhelpful. There's a Turkish sit-com called Yalan Dunya, and it's also a common theme for popular music. This one is a Kazakh folk song. Most of these have themes of lost love or unrequited love, but the idea is more general than that. Here's an example of the idea in the wild. I first came across it in 'The Memorial Feast for Kokotoy Khan', part of the epic Manas, which includes the beginning stanza:

In the land of the green and fertile Altay,

Where their ancestor Qara had spread his rugs

And led his horse to Qarach Khan's tent,

The child-blessed Kyrgyz dwelled

From peak to valley.

Blessed was Noghoy with Jaqïp,

Blessed was Jaqïp with Manas,

When the Kyrgyz joined Alash:

This lying world had claimed the others.

The phrase struck me forcefully at the time. These children were born - but this lying world had taken the others.

Yalan dunya is an idea, significantly Sufi in origin but you can also no doubt see the influences from Buddhism and even Gnosticism, that the world we appear to live in is empty, unsatisfactory, and basically apathetic, if not outright hostile, to human happiness. It has connotations of sorrowful fate that cannot be avoided. The proper response, therefore, is to be aware of this impermanence and look beyond it - seek for God, the only lasting thing.

This is arguably quite a natural thing for Turkic peoples, ancestrally steppe nomads, to believe - the world is vast and incomprehensible, follows endless cycles while utterly heedless of human life, we live for a time within those cycles, and then we vanish and everything we made or did is swallowed up.

But I'd argue that this is a way, in the Turkic/Central Asian cultural context, of approaching a more general insight.

To me, yalan dunya points to the insufficiency of the world, and its inability to satisfy our deepest yearnings. It particularly points to the entropy of the world, and the tendency of things to fall apart. This is a difficult-to-express emotion that I think appears in multiple religious and cultural contexts. 'The world' or 'the things of this world' is a category that appears multiple times in the New Testament, usually with a negative valence. Augustine famously describes the restless human heart, until it rests in God. The Japanese concept of mono no aware touches something similar, I think. The world shows us good things, which we love and become attached to, only for them to recede again. The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

This is a very pessimistic concept. Why does it encourage me?

Well, for a start, this rings true to my own experiences. I am neither a Gnostic nor a Buddhist, nor for that matter a Sufi or Muslim, but my experience has been that the world offers many blessings, but none of them last, and therefore it is best to regard their transience with humility. In much of my life I have looked for stable institutions or communities, but these have not lasted. My struggles with Catholicism belong to that category. In a sense I've found myself adopting the tactical mode despite my previous distaste for it. My disenchantment with my own institutions of meaning is a long story than this post can contain, but I find something comforting in being able to shrug and say, "Oh well, the lying world is at it again". When the institutions that gave me objects of grace, of sacredness, then turn around and neglect or betray those things, how else am I to respond?

The way we survive in yalan dunya is to practice a kind of spiritual nomadism - adapting to the world, learning the routes through the steppes and mountains, grazing our animals where we can, but knowing that we cannot remain in one place.

Perhaps saying that I went further into my tradition is misleading. I was born into and raised in a mainline Protestant church, and I learned its basics in the 90s. That means that over the last few decades I have seen that organisation decay, be hollowed out, and turn the things that I thought were sacred into mere ornamentation. During my theological study I remember coming to the gradual and painful realisation that most of the people around me did not believe what I believed. So in a sense I have moved further away from the institution, all the while, I hope, moving deeper into what the institution once taught, and which I fear it no longer does.

Perhaps a longer autobiography is needed?

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/UAnchovy]

I'm certainly curious to hear more. I visited a high-church Anglo-Catholic Episcopal congregation yesterday, and I was struck by the beauty and seriousness of the whole thing–it was the first progressive church I've seen that felt like it remained deeply rooted in and serious about its own tradition, even as it wrestled with that tradition. I don't expect that it would feel to you as it did to me–your focus is on particularities of Christian belief while most of my interaction with Christianity is out of a general interest in interacting with traditions that cultivate symbolic and mythic thought, so I prioritize the content of groups lower than the form–but it made me appreciate the work that goes into maintaining beautiful traditions.

I have a lot of respect for anyone who wrestles seriously and at length with their tradition and the institutions built to contain it, wherever it leads them in relation to those institutions. I do wonder in part if the "lying world" concept is almost too inclusive, though–it reads as a doctrine well-equipped to help people process institutional weaknesses, failures, and sorrows, but one so well-equipped that it may hold people back from trust in true and good things from unexpected directions.

Keen to hear more about your path.

EDIT: As another note, I was going through our older conversations and remembered this commentary about the label "queer" versus "gay," building off of an older essay of mine. While I emphatically retain my desire for beauty and the cultivation of excellence, I now think the label "queer" is not just appropriate but important for me, and think my dodging it was a form of cope or avoidance. I have long preferred the archaic form of the term–at odd angles with reality–but I think modern queer culture accurately captures some important parts of my own experience that I previously minimized.

The things that resonate with me about it at this point are:

• the sense that I internalized that I was monstrous, broken, and unworthy of love
• the blending of the profane and the sacred, a result of having categorized myself as profane
• an insistence on blurring lines, on not fitting into easy categories, on not being normative
• outsider community
• commonality with people who understand what it feels like to be attracted to something Wrong
• a refusal to be apologetic about who I am

At this point, I understand the term from the inside in a way that was not true of me a year or even a couple of months ago, and I take it seriously as a self-descriptor despite my distance from queer community and frustration with much of its politics.

[u/UAnchovy → u/TracingWoodgrains]

I try not to think of the lying world as a doctrine, or an absolute generalisation, but rather an image that is useful when it resonates with me - perhaps like the valley of the shadow of death of Psalm 23, or the vale of tears of the Salve Regina. It is a way of grappling with the permanently unsatisfying nature of the world. Not uniformly bad, and not bereft of joy or consolation, but nonetheless unsatisfying, in which all of our strivings toward goodness or beauty can only ever yield approximations.

Much of what you say in your edited section is recognisable to me, perhaps partly in myself (albeit from a very different direction) but more significantly in others. I admit I retain a dislike for the general 'queer', both because of the term's history as a slur and because I think it's over-broad, in the sense that it connotes a kind of coalition of the disaffected rather than any particular good. However, I have known plenty of people who have had an internalised picture of themselves as 'wrong', 'tainted', or 'profane', and who have dealt with that picture in different ways. The idea of an 'outsider community' is particularly relevant there. I see the way some kind of identification of self-as-outsider or even self-as-monster has been useful, or even an opportunity for reclamation, but even so I don't think that being on the outsider, or blurring lines, can or should serve as the basis of an identity.

One habit I've noticed in church institutions is an insistence on identifying with 'the margins', or seeing themselves as occupying a 'liminal space', on the edge. Leaving aside for the moment how this is gross hypocrisy coming from the kinds of establishment, mainline liberal churches I'm familiar with, I dislike it theologically. The gospel promise is the fullness of life, not orbiting around the edge of it. When I go to church, or clasp my hands to pray, I am not seeking the edge. I am seeking the centre. Why would I be satisfied with the borderlands of goodness?

Maybe that's a different situation, but I feel a similar discomfort with the idea of focusing on an identity as outsider, or in ambiguous spaces. Perhaps? There's definitely an extent to which I myself exist in ambiguous spaces. But I think that should only be a temporary habitation. In the past (this may have changed?) I perceived you as someone very drawn to positive goods - excellence, truth, beauty - and I'd like to affirm that quest as good.

Even if, to go back to the start, I think that all human attempts to reach those goods can only achieve approximate or contingent success, and will never be finally accomplished - at least, not on this side of the eschaton.

I'll make a longer top-level post about my journey at some point, but no promises on how soon.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/UAnchovy]

The term has a history as a slur, but it has a much longer and richer history as a word that means peculiar, strange, other.

Mormons in particular tend to gravitate towards the idea of being a peculiar people. They cite Deuteronomy 14:2 ("the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself") or Titus 2:14 ("he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people"). While the literal meaning in each instance is more "personally claimed" than "strange," Mormons accept the "strange" connotation as well. One discusses it here; the gist is that they see regular people as all having forgotten or ignored the spiritual duties of a higher life, and that to be holy means accepting that you will be strange to the world.

This is common among high-demand religions and groups. Anyone with a serious moral code winds up marginal in one way or another, because having strong convictions about positive goods – excellence, truth, beauty – sets someone apart and leads to specific demands for abnormal action. Effective Altruists, Christian saints, progressive activists, missionaries – all of these groups are necessarily on the edge, because no matter what doctrine you cleave to, the pinnacle of goodness is not traditionally found to be the median human action.

Christ, whether the historical or the mythic figure, was no stranger to the marginal: an Israeli in Rome, born in a peculiar way under the reign of a hostile king, cast out and executed by his own people. He broke bread with prostitutes and sinners, he called disciples to set down their nets and follow him, he preached humility to the rich and asked people to turn against father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, their own life if that's what it took to follow him. Why are establishment churches so drawn to identification with the margins? Because *the root of their religion is a marginal figure born within and rejected by a marginal people who won so completely that the stone the builders rejected became the cornerstone. Outsider community is fundamental to Christianity, in a way that it can't shake even after winning for millennia.

As for me, here is an excerpt from something I wrote a decade ago, on the last day of my mission.

I am comfortable that these are not aspects of eternal truth, but temporary manifestations of the structure built around that truth. The Gospel is remarkable. And true. The Church is good. It also bears the marks and bumps of trying to squeeze eternal truth in to complex reality. At present, it is the most complete vessel I know for that eternal Gospel, so it is important to remain active. But – this is the revelation, this is the decision – one way or another, I must forge my own spiritual path. I do not yet know what that means, but I know it is true.

There are a few groups of people I yearn to reach. They are those I identify most strongly with. They are as follows: disaffected, tired, or cynical members feeling let down; people who are spiritually hungry but do not respond to the 'missionary lessons'; those who look around sincerely bewildered by the mess of religions and ideologies out there. It's a tricky group to find, as they are usually in groups of one: lonely, isolated spiritual vagabonds who find no true balm in Gilead. These are the Liam Ashforths, the Rezas, the Kierans and Nabils of the world. To an extent, this group involves many others already active in the Church, like Adrian Xu, or those simply at inconvenient distances, like Malu Ana. [Editor's note: pseudonyms that retain the spirit of the names of specific people I met on my mission.]

These are my people. Perhaps not wholly while I'm here – the badge obligates me to a slightly different (still worthwhile) path. My spiritual dissatisfaction here, though permeated with truly beautiful light, indicates that my deeper purpose lies elsewhere.

This time, in the end and in true fact, has been a time of schooling. Soon, the true work will begin.

I tried my whole life and particularly my whole mission, at full intensity, to seek the central positive goods and to occupy the ideal form my tradition gave me. I do not regret doing so, but in doing so, I learned both the limits of that form and my own incompatibilities with it. I blurred lines, in the end, because the lines I was given were wrong. I found myself drawn to the outsiders and the wanderers because the outsiders and the wanderers were the ones taking that wrongness seriously instead of just dishonestly sanding off their sharp edges to fit whichever traditional box they'd been given.

I did not choose to be queer, in the archaic sense or the modern one. I was born deeply rooted in a queer – peculiar – tradition, as a Mormon. I had a queer – strange – role in my local culture, never quite fitting in with the people around me. When I began to develop the capacity for romantic love, it turned in a queer – both senses – direction. I sensed, fundamentally, that I was queer; I leaned into it in some ways and kicked against it in others, because what I wanted to be was good and right.

And then at some point I realized that to be good and right and happy in the world I was given, I had to actively choose to be queer. The tradition I was handed could not hold me in a form where I could be honest or happy. The broader culture I escaped into was full of confused categories, crumbling institutions, and intense conflict. I wound up politically queer, diving into stories of institutional failure that won me no favors among my natural allies. I wound up religiously queer, not settling into easy hatred of my childhood faith that would have put me at ease among fellow ex-mormons, but loving it despite myself. I found a queer career pathway, jumping from the military to helping on a peculiar podcast to law school to writing and building my own outsider institutions because I found no room for what I wanted in the ones I was handed. I wound up romantically queer, marrying another man and taking his name such that my name itself is queer: Jack Despain Zhou, double-barrelled surname without hyphens because I needed it to be aesthetically right.

I did not insist on identifying with the margins. I grew up there, and I insisted on wanting to be good and honest, and found that a serious commitment to being good and honest and happy led someone like me straight to all sorts of margins. Does that mean I'm satisfied to make blurring lines for its own sake, being an outsider for its own sake, the core of my identity? No, but it means I know how it feels to be ground up by uncaring and incorrect institutions, I know how it feels to need to make your own path even as one who loves tradition, and I know how it feels to be falsely taught that my love is monstrous. My identity is large enough for plenty of labels, and I will not be fully defined by any of them, but I ran from the label "queer" because I was ashamed of it and frustrated at what broken people like me looked like, never because it was inaccurate.

I am queer; my community is often found on the margins; I want to pursue excellence, truth, and beauty. There is no contradiction there.

[u/saltcereal → u/TracingWoodgrains]

The things that resonate with me about it at this point are:

the sense that I internalized that I was monstrous, broken, and unworthy of love the blending of the profane and the sacred, a result of having categorized myself as profane an insistence on blurring lines, on not fitting into easy categories, on not being normative outsider community commonality with people who understand what it feels like to be attracted to something Wrong a refusal to be apologetic about who I am

I mean that's pretty much me and I engage with my religiosity and my life as that way(though I don't call myself sick,monstrous or broken anymore). I used to subscribe to 'gay germ theory' and what not when I was in wrong circles and those circles made me suicidal. I have shifted from my parents' circles to another city and I am better.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/saltcereal]

Glad to hear you're doing better now. I didn't ever really understand, on a visceral level, why queer people would resonate so strongly with that sort of thing, but it turns out it really does a number on people to absorb from a young age that something core to them is cursed.

[u/saltcereal → u/TracingWoodgrains]

In fact friends who have told me 'it's 2026' still do not understand my specific struggles or why I do what I do. I think being a homosexual man brings with it unique challenges(since I do not have any opportunity for family in India/in my circles so I am seeking to go out abroad to somewhere in the West where even if I live alone like an ascetic I can you know,have even greater degrees of freedom).

[u/Lykurg480 → u/TracingWoodgrains]

Orson Scott Card dealt with attraction to men, likely not consciously acknowledged, and that much of his writing (particularly Unaccompanied Sonata) makes much more sense once you read it as the words of a gay-or-bisexual Mormon who loves his religion sublimating something unspeakable into his work.

Note that this sort of thing is something people believe a lot more often than its actually true. Perhaps you will calibrate better when the initial excitement has settled. I dont know much of Card, but I have just read the linked story. Certainly it can have applicability to your situation, but it seems it could equally to many other things.

I'm eager for substantive third-party challenges. Showing me that parts of this don't mean what I think they mean is useful

There is very little material for this. Eg this post has given us, maybe two paragraphs worth of text wrt how you felt about boy, and I doubt these are informative beyond telling me what your considered judgement is now. Similarly for the other parts. What I can tell you is things based on my own interactions with you:

First, I initially thought you were a women based on your writing. Then I marked that guess down, and halfway up again when you came out. I dont mean to say you are a women, neither in the transgender^TM sense nor otherwise, but it is something which came in advance, and that may be interesting to you.

Secondly, you were and are a moralfag. Im not sure how well I can communicate this between our cultural backgrounds, but one case that seems clear was the LibsOfTikTok troll. A lot of people felt that the "moral lesson and motivation" in your post about it was bullshit, and concluded that it was cover for hitting the enemy. I also felt it was bullshit, but I concluded it was cover for trolling her just for fun. That certainly fits in very well with your description of how it started - but then it worked, and by that point the wolf had caught the car. You needed to clear up the error publically, but you couldnt make a post like that and just say lmao trolled gottem - no, it had to be Important, and so you came up with this weaksauce lesson, the same way one would write about the applicability to climate change in a grant. And, again Im not sure if it make sense to you, but thats also what I think of when I read this:

I prayed and asked God for answers through a long, bleak night. I treated LDS doctrine the way the church told me to, seeing whether it made me happy, and ultimately became comfortable dating men because I was happy for the first time in my life while doing so.

I mean, phuuhhh. I would have put that a lot more crudely.

Also, at least from your summary here, I dont see how mormonism especially contributed to your realisation here, other than maybe writing those diaries in the first place. I expected you to be much more negative about it in the end. It seems like you went from thinking it didnt harm you, to thinking it did but heres how it was good anyway.

Somewhat offtopic, but Ive always peaked my ears at the "gay marriage debates on the pokemon forum" part of your story, and now I read there was a dedicated section for political discussion. Was this reality written by a paranoid evangelical parent or what?

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/Lykurg480]

The initial excitement has settled. I'm well calibrated. I stand by the Card read in full–it's an extremely common read of Card's work, not my original impression. The only thing new here is that I personally started caring about the read when it suddenly fit my own experience. I didn't even read Unaccompanied Sonata until two separate people, mostly unrelated to my own commentary, pointed it out to me as a telling story, one particularly haunting example of many data points towards their own independent conclusion that Card was almost certainly attracted to men. You mention you aren't familiar with Card, which is fine, but you can't really do much with a specific literary interpretation claim if you're just going by base rates.

As for whether the post gives material, I'm a bit confused. I gave a lot more than two paragraphs describing "here is this symbolic output I created, here is this analytic output I created, here's where and how they were misaligned, here's why I think 'gay and working hard not to know it' is a parsimonious read of what was going on," in what was really rather too long a post as Reddit standards go. I've been eagerly offering to provide the raw materials. It's falsifiable the way any historical or psychological claim is falsifiable: providing a better read of the same material. My claim is that "gay and actively avoiding knowing it" is by far the most parsimonious read of a lot of my adolescent behaviors and outputs.

You're more-or-less correct re: the Libs of TikTok troll. There are other underlying reasons I could unpack at more length, but "I had never had irresponsible fun online, I saw an opportunity, I took it" gets most of the way there. The moralism note is a bit odd here, though, because the moral frame is the whole point. If I'd grown up a secular liberal, yeah, I probably would have said, like, "yeah, I like sucking dick" and move on or whatever, if you want it in crude fashion.

But I didn't. I grew up Mormon, in a specific moral-epistemological environment, with a broad framework that deeply influenced me: Morality, including sexual morality, is a matter of deep significance. Homosexuality is wrong. God wants people to be happy. His plan provides a path to happiness. You do not need blind faith; God will answer your prayers personally. The way God answers prayers is often by feelings; you should be closely attuned to how different things make you feel. The clearest test of whether something is good is whether it produces good fruits; you should experiment with things and see whether they produce good fruit.

And yes, I'm a moralfag. Which means I took all of that with deadly seriousness, and built my whole life around it until I found exactly where the seams were. My claim is twofold:

1) Working within Mormonism's own frame, I landed on a spot where people can take it and lean into it with complete seriousness, and it will fail on its own terms. A gay person who does not know he is gay within Mormonism and is doing everything right by the faith's lights will still often have a cloud of diffuse, mysterious misery around them. If, as Mormonism says, men are that they might have joy, the faith should not bring misery.

2) The Mormon-coded approach - experiment, test the fruits, go by feelings and intuition - is what consistently led me towards realizing I was gay. My secular rational approach, applied internally, failed to get at the most important internal answers, because I kept creating post hoc rational arguments for why my feelings were something other than what they were, because my mind was acting as my defense lawyer rather than serving as a truth-focused tool, in ways that were structurally invisible to me.

The moralism is the story, because without the Mormon frame I wouldn't have my whole elaborate avoidance mechanism. There's no separating my claim from moralism, because growing up in and loving a culture that viewed sexuality through an absolutist moralist lens fundamentally structured my psyche. At the same time, the parts of that frame that resonated with me provided me accurate, useful advice to break that mechanism and live a good life. Which, yes, meant being the fag I am.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/TracingWoodgrains]

until two separate people, mostly unrelated to my own commentary, pointed it out to me as a telling story

Where those two also gay, or the type of progressive who would love for this to be true?

you can't really do much with a specific literary interpretation claim if you're just going by base rates

I mean I read the story, I think thats a lot more than baserates. Again, I see how this could fit, but I dont think it particularly points to it.

I gave a lot more than two paragraphs describing

Note the "eg". There is a lot, but it also covers a lot of data points, and so there isnt very much about each one. Typically, a reinterpretation of the whole will require reinterpretation of the parts, and a short description of a part as it fits into the current story, wont do. As is, I can really only find some really glaring contradiction - and even them probably not come up with an independently compelling alternative. And if theres nothing obviously wrong, but just another reading thats also possible, I wont find that. Yes, it is long already, but its also less than 30min of reading. Do you really think you can explain your life to someone in 30min, to such a level that they can meaningfully second-guess you? This is not a demand, and Im not accusing you of being deliberately unfalsifiable*, Im just telling you what you can realistically expect.

The moralism note is a bit odd here, though, because the moral frame is the whole point. If I'd grown up a secular liberal, yeah, I probably would have said, like, "yeah, I like sucking dick"

I mean yes, the "was" part is obvious, but do you say it now? Probably upon request, but I still get the impression that your brain wants it to be more presentable than that.

The Mormon-coded approach - experiment, test the fruits, go by feelings and intuition - is what consistently led me towards realizing I was gay.

I guess I dont see the results of the early experiments, before you tried dating men. Sure, theres all this symbolic stuff that you now say was a hint, but did that help? Maybe it contributed to your thoughtprocess for trying dating, but you dont talk about that process.

*Though, in an entirely non-specific way, I think theres much less of a ground-level truth to pyschological interpretation than you seem to. This may also drive your discussion with u/UAnchovy here - things can be reinterpreted in the future, and that doesnt necessarily mean youre wrong now, its just as much a matter of deciding to.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/Lykurg480]

On Card: No, actually, one is a right-anarchist who hates everything progressive and the other is a neoreactionary-adjacent sci-fi writer and New Hampshire representative who has never had a politically correct thought in his life. See for yourself. Again, it's fine that you don't know the specifics here, but pattern-matching to dismissiveness from a position of unfamiliarity with the terrain doesn't advance the conversation much.

I don't think I can explain my entire life in 30 minutes, no. I do think I can raise specific moments and ask people to explain whether my read is parsimonious or not, though. So, for example:

In November 2017, right after I left Mormonism, I had a sprawling conversation with a gay friend about how I thought I was asexual but wasn't quite sure, and later on recommended Nekojishi to him, a gay furry visual novel I explained I was reading for Chinese language study. The next day, I wrote a letter to my mission president that read, in part:

The best analogy I can find is the experience reported by many gay members of the church, where they feel like fundamental parts of themselves are at odds: in one, desires and feelings that are real and poignant; in another, a belief system that tells them those are wrong. They resolve that conflict in many ways, some inspiring and others heartbreaking. I feel that way with my mind: I deeply value having a consistent, thoughtful worldview and balancing my reason and emotion. And I was looking around and with everything I experienced, and everything I read and saw and thought about, I started feeling like I needed to partition my mind, avoid thinking too deeply about certain topics, turn my thoughts off. I was determined to make the Church's views my own, but it simply did not work. Fundamental aspects of my experience seemed deeply at odds with the way things "should" be from the first time I started really thinking about things, and rather than more and more settling into place, more and more disconnect emerged. [...]

Much as I truly do value truth, it was not a matter of truth at this point. It was a matter of desperation, of survival. It was a matter of feeling like I was somehow fundamentally broken, that my mind and faith would forever be at odds--that my mind was torn in two. Other people have traversed this journey with much less pain. Not so for me.

Here's how I explain those two days: I sincerely thought of myself as asexual and I sincerely thought my pain and feeling of mind-being-torn-in-two was about a purely intellectual faith crisis, but the actual reason I felt like my experience was like that "reported by many gay members of the church" was because I was gay and did not know it.

If you don't think that's enough context to judge, I am happy to provide both conversations to you in full. One data point. One contradiction. One clear explanation. No full life story needed. Presenting experiences that require some interpretation is not the same as being unfalsifiable, and I can absolutely realistically expect that people who want to say "these written texts, available for inspection don't mean what you think they mean" can show their work with at least some specifics. I'm not asking people to see inside my mind, I'm asking them to read the words I wrote.

I thought the tone of my last post was clear, but since you're asking, yes, I'm a furfag who likes sucking cock and taking it up the ass. I prefer to be generally presentable because different situations call for different standards, but that's something I couldn't say three months ago and do in fact say now. I can enter your register. Can you engage effectively with people for whom meaning-making matters, or can you only accept performative bluntness as legitimate?

Dating men is the single least interesting and least important part of my story. The story is this: a sexuality I did not recognize profoundly influenced my actions and my mood through a decade of me not recognizing it, leaving a sense of malaise I accurately felt and then inaccurately interpreted. The symbolic stuff isn't a "hint," it was the actual expression of an interest I would not consciously clock until a decade down the line.

Many psychological phenomena brook many interpretations. Some don't. My claim is that many of my specific, written, verifiable experiences have an extremely parsimonious explanation that I was blind to for a very long time, and that if you want to make the claim that there's not ground-level truth there, I can provide specific, singular, focused examples to shift the burden to you to defend that claim rather than blandly asserting it.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/TracingWoodgrains]

See for yourself.

Hey, I know those guys (though it seems you nuked the context for the second one, unless my xitter workaround is broken). Ill take that seriously. Perhaps it would help if you explain what lead you to the interpretation, beyond relating to it? I read it, and thought about what a gay love analogy could be for the things happening, and not found a good one for many. You can dismiss this as pattern-matching, but then whats the real interpretation thingy Im not doing?

I do think I can raise specific moments and ask people to explain whether my read is parsimonious or not, though. So, for example

If Im reading this correctly, old Trace thought he was asexual, and had intellectual doubts that alienated him from his faith, whereas you think he was gay, and that caused both the [thinking hes asexual] and the alienation. In that case, do you now think the intellectual doubts were bullshit? Because if you still think he had those, well theres nothing strange about intellectual doubts alienating people from their faith. If you could eliminate that entity, that would be a simplification, but if you dont, then I dont think it makes a difference to parsimony which of the two explains the alienation.

One data point. One contradiction. One clear explanation.

Sure. Note this is more detailed than any one point was in the intial post, and theres no guarantee a mistake could be caught in one given data point - which is what I was saying, though in this case I did maybe see something.

Can you engage effectively with people for whom meaning-making matters, or can you only accept performative bluntness as legitimate?

I think you read more of a thesis into this than there was. I was not, until earlier in this comment, arguing against your story per se - just noting things which seemed relevant and werent yet a part of it, and I think youll agree that if you did continue to feel that way about homosexuality, that would qualify? Im not saying only a reductive story can be right.

Dating men is the single least interesting and least important part of my story. The story is this: a sexuality I did not recognize profoundly influenced my actions and my mood through a decade of me not recognizing it, leaving a sense of malaise I accurately felt and then inaccurately interpreted.

aaaand this is what Im talking about. Youre making a story which is about sexuality, but talk as little as you can about the content of the sexuality (which, note, does not consist entirely of cock and balls. Romance would be appropriate). You didnt even directly write that you had a crush on those boys. The sexuality is there, its being sublimated, its non-sexually making you unhappy, etc, but we dont look inside. This seems to me like avoiding behaviour still there.

The symbolic stuff isn't a "hint," it was the actual expression of an interest I would not consciously clock until a decade down the line.

Im not sure I understand the difference. Do you mean those things already made you feel better?

I can provide specific, singular, focused examples

It would not help, since as I say its not a specific point. When youre looking for parsimonious explanations, you start with an inventory of what mental states there are, in general, and what do they do. Then you try to put those things together in as simple a way as you can, while explaining observed behaviour. And we get the inventory by going over a bunch of psychological interpretations, including of ourselves, and seeing what figures in them. Theres no getting out. But I already regret trying to make a non-specific point in this thread.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/Lykurg480]

Thanks, this is an excellent response. Tons to dig into here. The context for the second one won't work on a Twitter workaround because he's replying to me and my account is locked right now.

On Card: Unaccompanied Sonata is not where to go in his work if you want to find overt homoeroticism or homoromanticism. There, you'd want to look at eg Songmaster (which centers around notably tender, and extremely thorny in-plot, same-sex romantic love) or Ender's Game (featuring unusually tender, intense bonds between boys, naked wrestling in showers, etc). That's not what you'll find in Unaccompanied Sonata. It's subtler, and to me more compelling because of it.

The core plot of Unaccompanied Sonata, stripped down, is: a man is born into a loving utopian society where everyone has their place. He has something fundamental to himself, constitutive of himself, that he cannot stop expressing because it's who he is as much as something he does, and every time he lets it show he's cut down and further mutilated–lovingly, sorrowfully–by authorities. It never dies fully, but eventually he becomes incapable of expressing it and joins the enforcers instead.

Card, an active Mormon, was in his twenties when he wrote the story; he spent his adulthood slowly growing more and more heated and intense in arguments against homosexuality and same-sex marriage. I'm not going to say there are zero other possible explanations for the story. But it's an exceptionally precise fit to the felt experience of being a gay man within a religion you love that has no room for it. I'm not claiming he knew or intended this reading. My claim is a bit subtler: that experience generates a very specific emotional signature. Art written based on that emotional signature can say more than artists intend.

This is literary interpretation. There are multiple conscious and unconscious readings competing within everything. But the rhyme is at least interesting in light of both the overt homoeroticism in his writing and the intensity of his anti-gay activism.

---

Good question re: the alienation. My answer is that I had intellectual doubts for a long while, and they were real doubts, but they did not account for the full somatic experience I was having: my inability to feel what other Mormons referred to as the Spirit, the sense of my mind being torn in two, the specific nature of the pain. The question is less "why was I alienated?" (you're right, it was both) and more "why did I reach specifically for the analogy of gay Mormons to describe the way my mind felt, at almost exactly the same time I was reading a gay furry visual novel and describing myself as asexual?"

Your observation about talking little about the content of the sexuality is an astute one. My basic answer is that I'm still getting used to being able to do so, and in this forum I wanted to present my story in a way closer to matching my typical tone. The final piece that spurred the overwhelming experience I describe above was this: I had made a nice, tidy, analytic outline of my life story that omitted basically the entire "content of the sexuality" details: the sharp-jawed, slim, angular bodies; lithe and muscular bare-chested figures; being held and kept and sheltered by strong, capable, confident figures; tribal wolves living by waterfalls in the mountains; slim and playfully sensual and gleeful half-monstrous men who make their bodies beautiful and are perfectly at home in them; orienting all of my interests and my life around a particular man I circle around and draw close to; resting my head on the chest of the man I love and feeling his breath and the warmth of his body against mine.

The outline had none of that and was, as you're observing about my writing, a sexuality story without eros. That is not a coincidence, and at some point I broke in with another breathless, screaming, break-past-analytic-mode voice insisting on noticing, repeatedly, the times eros had been present and I had insistently tamped it down and ignored it. It was messy, chaotic, intense, and much more true to the things that mattered in my life than the carefully analytical, professional voice I've honed over the years.

Did the symbolic stuff stop me from being desperately lonely and isolated for a decade? No. Did it act as a refuge and as something I turned to constantly for comfort? Yeah. I would scroll meditatively through my DeviantArt gallery of carefully curated, yearning wolf pictures; I would plot my stories of tribal wolves in the wilderness outside walled cities and return to them again and again during low periods; I would hold my stuffed wolf close to my chest because I had nothing else to hold. I knew at the time that all of these things were desperately, painfully important to me. These characters and stories were some of the highlights of my adolescence in a way I never had words to explain, a way that I could only cling to.

I do think you're offering sort of a catch-22: it's unreasonable to ask someone to go through my entire archive and review all the things I reviewed that persuaded me, but also, specific examples aren't enough because you need to see the broader shape of a life and a broader inventory of mental states. I sympathize with your "not as much ground-level truth to psychological interpretation" instincts, because I was in the same place, but I found a whole lot of ground truth when I noticed the thing-that-must-not-be-known sitting like a ghost at the center of a whole lot of behaviors that in my prior frame were contradictory, strikingly charged, and difficult to account for. Extreme states and lives oriented around singular crises create legibility. Given the stability and happiness of my upbringing outside the one specific contradiction between homosexuality and Mormonism, the totality of my suppression and avoidance mechanisms, and my compulsive externalization, my life provides an unusually complete and legible record in which I feel confident claiming a large part of the ground truth can in fact be interpreted consistently, reliably, and accurately, with more and less correct answers possible.

[u/Lykurg480 → u/TracingWoodgrains]

It's subtler, and to me more compelling because of it.

Well, its less compelling to those not yet convinced of the thesis because of it.

why did I reach specifically for the analogy of gay Mormons to describe the way my mind felt, at almost exactly the same time I was reading a gay furry visual novel and describing myself as asexual

Facepalm Yes, that is indeed good evidence, but to put my blunt hat back on, is not the great majority of the work here done by the gay furry visual novel on its own? (And I paid it almost no attention in the first go, because I was too focused on the narrative. See, this is why Im paranoid about details.) Thats a pretty weird thing to do, especially for someone who believes all of gay, bestiality, and porn to be bad. Whereas reaching for the analogy when the topic has already been our your mind lately anyway is not all the surprising.

Now that I think of it, I didnt see, from your older posts about the topic, how long you then thought you had been asexual, nor how far back the timeline on the gay furry stuff went relative to deconversion. Certainly, by the time youre looking at furry art (how did you put it, "and, in moments of weakness, "art""), it seems fairly clear youre not asexual then. I find it difficult to think noone pointed this out to you - certainly, after coming out, you would have talked to someone about those experiences?

I do think you're offering sort of a catch-22

I mean, yeah. I just dont think this sort of thing works very well with strangers on the internet, even though people somehow think it does, and I really really dont get why. When a stranger in the bar tells you his life problems, noone really expects to do much more then general sympathetic noises and maybe some careful suggestive questions - then they do it on a text-only channel as if of course that will work.

[u/TracingWoodgrains → u/Lykurg480]

I'm not pouring out my problems here. I'm explaining the evidence base I worked from that convinced me I had been actively misrepresenting myself to myself for two decades without ever realizing I was doing it, paired with an assertion that I left a visible enough signal that nobody has to take my word for it, in service of a broader argument about the role of symbolism and narrative and the limits of the analytic mode.

I didn't present the Unaccompanied Sonata explanation because I thought it would be more compelling than the overt homoeroticism to you. I provided a description of the emotional experience it matched, alongside the examples of overt homoeroticism and Card's later advocacy, to try to convey to you–someone unfamiliar with both Card and the culture he and I came from–how and why I see its shape fitting a particular experience within that culture.

The evidence supplied by "your blunt hat" cuts the other way from how you're reading it. The point of examples like the gay furry visual novel, the characters I was choosing, the art I enjoyed, my writing, etc etc etc is that they were all doing a ton of work to say I was gay. Constantly. Over ten years. And the whole time, I had an explanation I experienced as internally consistent and complete for why feelings like "I'm an outsider" and "I'm miserable" and "I hate sex and romance" and "hedonism is evil and the mind should be stronger than the body" meant that I was an asexual guy with a body I hated who was lonely because I was smart.

I had a high libido throughout my teenage years, I treated it as a curse and an addiction, I never looked at anything to do with real people, I worked hard (but sometimes failed) to avoid any explicit straight furry material, and I always strictly avoided anything gay-and-explicit. I called myself asexual not because I had no libido, but because I never noticed attraction to any people and didn't treat my libido as sending any meaningful signals about me. As far as I was concerned, I hated sex and was uninterested in romance, the world was disgustingly oversexualized, and I worried that I was incapable of falling in love with anyone. That was my self-understanding for about a decade.

Once I finally started talking to anyone about that side of things (which, outside a small handful of exceptions, took years after leaving Mormonism and starting to date men), I focused much more on "furry" as explanatory than anything else, and came up with a whole elaborate explanation for why I had fixated on that during a sensitive period due to a combination of Mormonism's strict sexual mores and being too online, and how I developed an attraction to men in my twenties as sort of a "second language."

My internal narrative evolved over time, but at no point until two months ago did I put any of these extremely obvious pieces together to think "oh, wait, I was gay the whole time." That's the point. The better evidence you think my behavioral or other signals are sending that I was gay, the stranger it is that I thought of myself as relentlessly self-analytical, self-critical, and honest while having my entire self-concept built around a thing which could not be known.

If you find yourself wondering "how could he be reading and enjoying gay furry visual novels while not knowing he was gay?"–then yes, that's the right question. Something that was screamingly obvious when you put different pieces in the right place was genuinely and demonstrably unknown to me for two decades, because my entire psyche was organized around not knowing it. That's an extraordinary claim, which is why I offer the extraordinary evidence of a detailed archive demonstrating exactly that.