| Apr. 10th, 2008 @ 06:26 pm Coming out |
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Feels:: quixotic
I'm going to start off this post with a little information about this post. This is important. No, I'm not gay.
It is an easy thing today for people to get too much information. Perhaps you Google something that happens to be named similarly to an unfortunate fetish; perhaps your friend tells you about his nether grooming habits; perhaps a prospective employer finds your blog; whatever the case, we are all bombarded with things we might rather not know about the people around us. Here's my take on that:
There is no such goddamn thing as too much information.
Really, there isn't. Give it some thought. You may have some personal hangups about sex, or about religion, or about whatever, but is ignorance really any better, ever? I say it is not. I say that while there may occasionally be call for some secrecy - always temporary - there is never such a thing as too much information. Information is what separates humans from inanimate objects. Information is what lifted us out of the ordinary struggle of evolution and made us more. Information is what crowns us, and what destroys us, and what makes our lives worth caring about. Everything you know, even the things you assume so deeply you don't think you know them, is information. The very genes that encode you are information. You are information, a self-sustaining continuous reaction.
That said, our society seems to have become shit-scared of certain types of information, and I think that's crap. People ought to be free to live their lives however they damn well please within the rules set up by society to give us the maximum possible protection of our basic rights. People ought not fear reprisal for things that are their own private business. Making this so will require normalizing information that might today be considered "TMI," and so what I'm going to do is tell you too goddamn much information. I encourage everyone to do this, but I'm certainly not going to twist your collective arm. All I can say is that, in addition to supporting a good cause, it will be cathartic. Like Confession, only with pride instead of guilt, and with the Internet instead of a priest, and with you actually caring instead of just doing it because that's what you think you're supposed to do.
My hope is that you'll start reading this with that "internet trainwreck" mentality, where you just can't look away, and you finish reading it inspired to live your own life more openly and honestly. That's ambitious, but all I can do is try. If you're not ready for open talk about sex and religion, well, don't read this; I don't know what to tell you other than that you probably won't take anything away until you're ready to do this yourself.
I'll warn you now that this is liable to make you uncomfortable. You'll get over it. "Uncomfortable" never hurt anybody. I'll also warn you - those unlikely few of you to read this that aren't my friends - that trying to use any of this against me will get you soundly laughed at and not much else. If you're a prospective employer, well, what the crap are you doing here, anyway, you friggin' snoop? Mind your own damn business, as per federal anti-discrimination law.
So, here we are. You ready? Like I said, you do NOT have to do this. I want this information to be available and open, not to cram it down anyone's throat.
So that's it. That's me. |