The Wayward Scholar

(originally written and unpublished June 28^th, 2022) 

By Jayvon Howard 

“We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be.” – James Baldwin, The Creative Process, 1962 

I’ve been searching for ways to be honest about my life. Recently, I’ve been having the tremendous urge to confess. I have come to pinpoint the source of this desire in being exhausted by needing to explain myself. I’m exhausted at never explaining anything about myself at all and I’d rather be the first to destroy what I am most anxious to lose. I am tired. Life has taught me if you’re having sudden urges to make confessions; it is probably the absolute worst time to make confessions. Life has also taught me that there are no good times to make confessions.  

It is currently three am and I’m longing for a humid night. A late night with all the fans on, lights low and windows thrown open wide. There’s something about how reality hangs on the air. A soft weight pressed around you, muffling the senses and offering a nostalgic comfort accompanied by a night breeze. I’m imagining inhaling the fresh outdoors; raw hints of earth and marinating foliage deliciously ripened mixed with a tease of rain. 

 I peer out of my bedroom window. It is not one of those humid nights. The sky is overcast and cloudy, so it’s darker than typical. Chilly. The air is stiff. It’s unnervingly quiet. The earliest birds aren’t chirping and the crickets and other live things typically jittering, jazzing and chiming are silent. It is just me tonight.  

I am lighting a freshly rolled cigar fully aware it is three days into my latest effort to quit smoking. Good fucking job, Jay. You do whatever you want to do, don’t you. I take another pull and cough out loud. “This is to celebrate day four without a drink!” I suspected I would make myself laugh but I didn’t. Instead, I reached for my phone and started writing this: 

Lately, I’ve noticed that when my feelings are hurt or, if I am feeling sad and inadequate, I find that I end up picking fights with people. For a time, I relied on finding the most energy in fighting, debating or arguing with someone. Though I have spent the better part of the past year examining how my rage and aggression have disrupted and been disruptive to my love life and friendships.

At first it was difficult to accept that my anger was anything other than a rare nuisance. I overall justified this rage as a fierce love for the People and a love for the people who loved me. Can so much rage be indicative of this great love?

Can this same rage be the force necessary to provide a protective love and to protect this love? Can love remain safe and thriving in proximity to these cold, bitter and unpredictable conditions?

I justify this rage because as a man I am celebrated and encouraged to express with confidence, strength and power. I justify this rage so I may reclaim the power I’ve lost after decades of allowing any sign of emotional discomfort and opposition to be silenced and repressed. I justify my rage as a tool to distract from my deep feelings of shame and fears of being perceived as impolite or as creating disorder. I justify this rage because as my pulse quickens to match my heavy breathing; a brisk sweat and abrupt alertness following the adrenaline rush remind me that I am a living being.  

Anger and adrenaline can keep you focused and determined to remain alive when you are threatened with a sense of an approaching loss, death or doom. This rage has become addictive. It is my stress, my nightmare and the flashbacks that drive my insomnia. It is the tightening and crunching of being trapped in an invisible container determined to collapse or explode. It is holding my breath until the entire night stands still and silent only speaking out and gasping for more air after fully winded.  

Exercising this rage gives me permission to speak about the circumstances that have dictated my condition and those of my people and neighbors. I’m a kind person but there are times recently that I have been hoping to be less kind.

I find myself paralyzed by anger and with growing more conscientious I fear this rage serves me less in my service to others than I anticipated that it would. I often wish myself to be the antithesis to the dominant cultural norm – cis white supremacist capitalist patriarchy – manifested as a militant rebel and revolutionary dedicated to his cause. When positioned against the norm and the “white correct”, this kind of rebel could otherwise be characterized as a villain.

I have felt in the past to be a true freedom fighter for the People I would need to learn to command this rage and become a villain. That leadership when facing the empire is expected to be aggressive or violent in order to be legitimate, authentic and credible. This has always been in opposition to my fundamental belief that we all deserve to live and thrive free from violence; that violence and the pursuit of using violence to exercise strength or domination is not justice.

In this recent journey I’ve been telling myself that courageous men do not need to fight in war in order to be whole.

I’ve been on this journey negotiating terms with myself on how best to live so when I die, I may die honorably, with integrity and a life full of meaning. A life well lived on my own terms and a death as close to my own terms as I can manage. I wish to feel confident that my spirit may rest undisturbed by the secrets left buried with my body. I believe I am desperately needing to give myself permission to be human.

Confused and angry, I am seeking to confess. I must confess that this is not the warrior that I imagined I would be. I am not the warrior I imagined I would be. I want to be angry when I am angry not because I’m supposed to be or am demanded to be. I want to have the freedom to embrace pleasure, joy, wealth and love without shame, guilt or fear. I want to feel free to release my rage.

It is a strange experience that to be redeemed as a gentleman means ensuring those around me remain safe and comfortable. In a patriarchal society that worships white hegemonic masculinity, safe and comfortable men are heterosexual performing, silent, stoic and inexpressive unless otherwise angry.

Being angry signals to other men and women that men are in fact being ‘real men.’ Others may consider themselves most secure and safest when I am ‘being a real man.” Despite the reality of all men being created equal, our world reality operates on generating distinctions. Stoicism, inexpression and mystery on a Black man can also look powerful, deadly and suspicious through anti-Black lenses.

This requires a tenuous editing and self-censorship to maintain stability and security of my own inner worlds as I navigate from place to place in the external world often harboring the vague sense of being under attack. I am being asked to balance being less than I am (a man) and less than I am (Black) and only this neutered performance of being am I expected to eliminate feelings of discomfort or fear. It is a rage Black men and transmasculine Black men would relate to the best.

In thinking about my love life, I wondered how this role of love has played in revolution. How love brings us back to center and it is the ferocity of love for others well-being that centers revolution. Is it fair that I have justified my rage as love? Was this a similar struggle other revolutionary men shared? In this issue of exploring my love for the People, loving myself and loving men I come to think about the first man I have ever loved.  

My father had come to the city to visit a few of his work colleagues recently and they all had invited me to come along. After the night out and on the ride home we discussed music, health, bourbon, birthdays and I shared with him a bit about my dating life. I mentioned to him the necessary and recent dissolutions in my open relationships.

I explained to him briefly the nature of those relationships but failed to discuss details about who these men were. I gave a brief reductive monologue on the various degrees of intimacy in those dating relationships. I did not provide detail on how they ended nor could my tongue twist into the language to offer reason. Before he had much opportunity to react or respond I instinctively made a joke that pivoted the conversation. Unconsciously avoiding offering answers to those questions of why, when and how. Humor was only feigning my embarrassment and sadness.

Therefore, I didn’t tell him that even though I was grieving, there was a deadness in the emotional range of this grieving that I haven’t experienced in the past. I didn’t tell him I’ve had the same chronic issues with relationships since high school of becoming more withdrawn, avoidant, and emotionally unavailable over time. I didn’t tell him that it was a big deal to me that this pattern hasn’t changed.

I didn’t tell him I’ve been overspending on my worst habits and can’t seem to stop running away from the things that are good for me. I didn’t tell him that sometimes I get mean even when I don’t mean to. I didn’t tell him I’m tired of always chasing something and that I am fatigued at how much work it requires just to be still.

I didn’t discuss with him the challenges of associating my attractions with the expectation of violence or humiliation. I didn’t tell him I brought my rage into the bedroom, in between myself and others. How my desire for justice and activism came first before everything and I dissolved relationships to focus on those things. I didn’t tell him that someone I loved and who I believed loved me described me as dangerous. How they were not the first to use similar words and how distracting that has been for me for months. I didn’t tell him all of the things that I haven’t told anyone. It is now while I’m writing this that I am wondering what lessons has he learned about loving men and being loved by men?

I didn’t tell him how this rolling anger has leaked and lashed out in a myriad of ways. There seems to be this energy transference. It may be better described as a build-up of chronic stress and discomfort seeking to express itself outward. I can recognize the stress building, the swirling headache, feeling hot and glowing like a blinking light. I am due to erupt without warning and without an appropriate release of pressure I otherwise tend to “act out.”

Sometimes acting out is something as innocuous as a small outburst like a random noise or yelp. Sometimes it’s picking fights with others, smoking, binge drinking or compulsory sex. Most often it’s failing to sleep peacefully, it’s breaking out in a great sweat and my heart racing. It is hyperventilating, pacing and panic attacks followed by impulsive decision making to end them. It is disappearing for weeks at a time to calm down.

As an adult Black man in a powerful adult body; my acting out is more often received as a signal that I am a threat and dangerous rather than needing help. This is also an example of how systematic racism and oppressive culture can disrupt Black life. The heightened expectation to be perfectly moral, caring, kind, attentive, giving and just in order to minimize immediate or long-term retaliation. The expectation to be a muppet waiting to be filled with sand and stitched to string before the matinee. Anti-blackness denies humanity to Black being in more nefarious ways than I can conceptualize on my own.  

I reflect on 2020 as I finally begin to wrap up my book and about the collective ‘acting out’ of being tired, of being distracted and disrupted, of exploitation and disrespect. All of this impacted my love life and impacted my friendships – how do you get close to people and love them? How do I allow someone to love me and see me? What does it look like to step out into the light?

What does healing look like for me? Is there room for both: love and revolution? It seems that society has decided on one as a collective failure to bridge the self to the system and how the system exploits us. The personal is political and the undermining of our education continues to leave the masses deaf, dumb and blind.

It is quite difficult to name so much rage as a contingent of love. When as a collective we have decided inaction and negotiating to professionalize our true natures when acting in self-defense. Our suits, ties, skirts, first class tickets to conferences, publications and keynote speakers on 4K is a more credible response than the wrathful and honest voice of the everyday person. Even as the world is set aflame, as rights are removed, prices increase, suppression is tightened, mass shootings are normalized, an on-going pandemic without appropriate public health interventions claims our lives. As police brutality continues to claim our lives, as our water and land continue to suffer poisoning and the industries for the cause of the climate are the only institutions not changing.

We are taught that our anger is disruptive, impolite, unprofessional, deadly and dangerous. I challenge us to ask in the name of justice, equity and liberation. Dangerous to whom? I’ve come to question how anger has become so disruptive, letting it go and putting energy into new things seems impossible. The experience is like being haunted, fraught and fully preoccupied. In the end if revolution does not come to release and free from this prison. Being honest will save me.

Standing in the light, I am reminded that I am not who I am because I am a courageous man who loves revolution, rage and war. Love can be the source of this strength because I am desperately desiring to give myself to be more human.

I want to be the warrior I know I can be but maybe it is more important that I am a just man than a courageous one.