I. Am.

Every time I return to Texas I think about the complexities that make human beings who and what they are.  Of course I reflect more specifically on my own life and my own intricacies as a person.  It made me think about those universal questions that the Greeks invented their myths to answer: Who am I?  What am I?  What is my purpose here?

Don't worry, I'm not going to delve into all three of these questions but I am going to hybridize the first two somewhat and discuss those a bit.  I also hope to help what may be seen as a blurry line between those two questions (the "who" and the "what" questions) become clearer.  It does seem as though who and what we are are one in the same but I don't think so.  This will be my attempt to sort all that out.

When it comes to who we are, I think these are innate things like our gender, our bloodlines, our race, our sexuality.  I AM a straight white man.  This is who I am.  I am a Frank, and though I don't know our exact ancestry just yet and will probably have to resort to some nifty website for that information, I know that even if I'm not very connected to my forebears my family lineage does play a role in who I am.  As much as we don't think so there are some characteristics we exude that are embedded in our DNA and our body's chemical makeup.

To some degree, it can even be argued that some of who we are can be things like how we choose to make a living or the passions we pursue.  These areas are the more gray ones or that fun football-shaped middle part of a two-subject Venn diagram.  I admit, this is the tricky section, but you have often heard some people say things like "I AM an athlete" or "I AM a musician/dancer/actor" and so on.  Sometimes what we pursue in life stems from who we are through the character traits we develop.  If you believe that you cannot live without expressing yourself and creating things, you can safely say you ARE an artist of some sort.  Often people do find it hard to exist in total wellness without being able to live as a professional athlete or a teacher or whatever their true passion is.  We've all seen it: the people who become lost without that piece of themselves being actively expressed.

Shifting to the "what" we are is also more easily defined.  Just because it's easily defined, however, doesn't make what we are simple.  People are a conglomerate of so many things that make them what they are.  Just as easily as I can say that who I am is an athlete (or more like was an athlete), I can also say it's what I am (or was), too.  But when I really started to reflect on what I am, a process prompted by returning to Texas, the place that for the majority of my life shaped me and helped mold me into what I am, I realized it's a complicated story.  And one of the biggest travesties in life, to me, is how so many people seem to want to simplify all of humanity into a few neat little categories.  Man.  Woman.  White.  Black (or some other "color").  Republican.  Democrat.  Liberal.  Conservative.  Gay.  Straight.  All of these delineations help people figure out who is "us" and who is "them" so that they can also then apply their society's rules to decide how to treat the people they encounter.

So as for what I am, well, it's a hodgepodge not many people could or would want to understand.  As I said, who I am is a straight white man of some type of Germanic and probably Eastern European lineage.  But what I am is a mosaic of life experiences.  I am a Texan AND a New York City man.  I love guns, the outdoors, fishing, good BBQ, football, wide open spaces, up to 85 MPH speed limits, giant grocery stores, and friendly people.  I also love subways, people moving with purpose, good sartorial choices, walking places, having everything delivered, and more clearly defined seasons (relatively speaking).

I am a fan of the way Texans value their individual freedoms and don't want the government telling them every little thing they can or can't do.  I like that Texans think of themselves as very able to take care of their own business.  I always joke to my girlfriend that if we had to survive in the wild I feel confident I could do it having my outdoorsy background and all.  On the flip side of this, as I watch the Texas political machine from a very different political landscape, I scratch my head at why my state still seems to be a place where folks still want to tell certain people what to do or how to live.  All of this individual freedom seems to only apply to gun rights, not uterine or relationship rights.

I am a fan of the way New Yorkers value diversity more and think more progressively about gender identity or sexual orientation or relationship rights or trying to find ways to provide programs that help people who need it.  The resources I found in NYC to help me transition are basically non-existent in Texas.  I do applaud people who live in Texas and stand strong in their beliefs about who and what they are because it's not an easy thing to do in Perryland.

This makes for a good segue into more about what I am.  I'm not a Republican or a Democrat because those two things are more of those neatly defined boxes people seem to love so much.  Say you're a Republican because your key ideal is fiscal conservatism and the next thing you know you are a gun-crazed, abortion doctor killing, xenophobic Creationist.  We have only the current "Republican" nutjobs to thank for this because those people are simply hateful, bigoted, insecure white men who just don't know any better.

Say you're a Democrat because your key ideals are equal rights and governmental recognition for all American citizens  and suddenly you're a knee-jerk liberal who thinks the government should redistribute wealth while everyone runs around in their Birkenstocks having abortion parties and taking away every last gun in America so as to destroy a large percentage of the population's way of being.  I just don't like these labels, and neither of them works for me in isolation.  I'm a little of this, and a little of that.  Usually that means you have to say you're a Libertarian but then everyone thinks all you want to do is smoke pot and dismantle all government agencies so that's not good, either.

What I am is a human being, a person who is finally comfortable in his own skin.  I'm a HUMAN BEING who happens to be a man who happens to like the show Sex and the City, and who happened to cry when the chimp hugged Jane Goodall goodbye then found her way back home in the wild, and who happens to curse out the TV when the Cowboys lose close games they should have won.  I will tell my female friend her manicure looks awesome and tell my male buddy that his wife should not try to rid him of his new paisley tie because it rules and well, it's a man's right to have his own favorite tie that bugs his wife.  I'm a man who likes to cook and make silly songs about my cats and play ball and lift weights.  I'm a guy you can't box in and I love that, because if you think about it, a box is a prison.  I'm a guy who is outside the lines and that means I can run and skip and jump like a Sparkle Pony singing "Everything is Awesome" from the LEGO movie if I want to and no one's going to make me feel badly about it.  Sometimes I'll just lumber around outside the lines with the grace of a caveman, but either way I'm free to move about as I wish and that's a freedom that so many people will never know.  They'll never know it because they're too busy building their little boxes to live inside so everyone can just read the label and know what they're getting.  If that's the case, why get to know someone?  Boooooorrrriiing!!!!

Of course all of my readers know I am a trans man but that's only because my body didn't get the memo.  As I said before, who I am and have always been is a man.  There will always be people in my life who refuse to accept that and that's OK with me.  They like their cozy little boxes just fine.  But the real bottom line here is the ultimate WHAT in terms of what I am.  I.  Am.  HUMAN.  And that's the only label we should be worrying about in this life.