how does one write one's life?

"Every three years I discover again
that No I knew nothing before.
Everthing must be dragged out,
looked over again, The unexamined life
is the lie, but still
must I every time deny
everything I knew before?"

Dorothy Allison, "The Women Who Hate Me."





i have been proofing a narrative project for dev and it's really stunning. she does a really good job in attempting to capture the essence or shall i say essences of her life. how we come to know ourselves as subjects is an enigma to me. as i was reading dev's narrative i was putting myself in the place of the author. how would i write my life...to me it seems like a psychic version of cleaning my apartment...overwhelming. hopefully one day, i will have the chance to try but right now i wouldn't know where to begin.
i know from experience that many gay/lesbian/queer/transgender/transsexual persons start with coming to terms with identity. to be sure, coming out stories are a really good place to begin because it seems that seeing at least through what appears to be dissonance is key to rooting oneself in "place" even if this "place" is extremely mobile or transient.
i thought to myself, where would i begin. would i begin at the coming out intersection. by comparison, my coming out was not so much surrounded by dissonance than by complicity. i never felt compelled to jump out of the closet...i just opened the door and sat down in the open. my mother pats me on the shoulder and kisses my cheek while my father tells me that there were a lot of "gay" guys in the marines and it is no big deal. i guess i feel fortunate...can one begin a story from a point of consonance? i don't know...so i look, i look for dissonance to begin a story.
i do remember when i knew that i was "different" from the other kids in my school. 7th grade for me was the kicker. i had a crush on john miller...i was also attending a very strict, fundamentalist, bob jones university supporting "christian" school. my social science teacher, mr. laws (i'm not joking that is/was his name) brought out an article where two men were "gay bashed" in our town by a group of sexually repressed skin heads. mr. laws told us that god didn't like violence per se, but he could understand why someone would want to bash in a gay person's head...and he balled up his fist as he said this and i felt as if i were a sheet of paper being crumbled up in a hand. as he went on about the job of rationalizing his feelings to make it fit with his christianity, i thought to myself, "wow, i better keep my mouth shut or else i will either get seriously hurt or killed." i can remember that moment as truly feeling what it meant to be afraid.
i never told my mom or dad. i graduated from this school, so it wasn't like this was the first time i would have to endure homophobic tirades or calls for violence upon difference. but i remained silent.
i grew up methodist and my parents were not religious fanatics. they put me in this school because they somehow knew that i probably wouldn't make it in public school...not intellectually but physically. this christian school was also known for its academics...and to be fair, i did receive a good education. by the time i graduated i had the equivalent of an a.a. degree from a community college. academically, my education helped me advance in the university setting. but the silence that i learned was and is most profound. the most valuable lesson that i learned in life was invisibility and silence...to walk into a room and not be noticed, to be gentle, to be kind but most of all be ready to run if i needed to. which, come to think about it, was why i probably liked track in high school...especially cross country...i could out distance most if not all of the jocks, i knew i could run for a long way and not stop...sometimes i feel as if i haven't stopped yet.
so maybe if i am to write about my life i need to write from a location of silence... or, perhaps, maybe that is why i can't.