Gay Bloggies

(Word of warning: this will not be a ha-ha funny post.)

Nature versus nurture. It's something I had questioned myself, practically every day, for years on end. It's the type of shit that kept me up at night, and I would be lying if I said there wasn't a little bit of me that still wonders to this day.

But I'm not talking about being gay. Let me explain.

I briefly mentioned it a week or two ago, but my sister was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia when she was fourteen. I was four years old at the time. As of the time this post is published, it'll be my thirty first birthday, which means my family and I, as fucked up and dysfunctional as it is, has somehow coped dealt with a family member with a severe mental illness for over 27 years. In that time, I have become the older sibling even though I'm ten years younger, my relatively private parents have had no other choice to deal with people they don't necessarily trust: social workers, psychiatrists, psychologist, policemen. With a steady stream of anti-psychotics and anti-depressants and sedatives my sister is manageable on a day-to-day basis, although my parents have written her off as a lost cause - a piece of evidence for blame on other peoples actions but never their own.

When you ask my parents individually what happened - what was the trigger point that caused my sister to start yelling at the voices of her head in the middle of her ninth grade French class - they would give you a laundry list of possible things that went wrong, usually due to the fault of the other: Handymen that were brought in without my sisters knowledge that started banging on roof with their hammers. My maternal grandmother, a woman who I never met but "had issues." My father's military-based discipline which involved a lot of yelling. A lot of yelling. And because of this - because my sister and I grew up under similar conditions, I had always assumed that there was something inside of me - a mental illness time bomb, if you will - where one fateful day it would go off and I too would be instructed to dump Thanksgiving dinner in the trash because Jesus told me the devil poisoned it. My sister's final dramatic mental breakdown happened in her mid-twenties, and a couple of years ago if anything overtly stressful were to happen to me, I would say something like, "technically, I still have two more years before I go crazy." Later, it became "Hmm, I should have gone crazy two years ago." I'm in my early thirties now, and while I don't want to say I'm 100% "in the clear," well, I think I'm in the clear.

As to whether my sister's mental illness was nature versus nurture: I don't know. If some relatives assessments of my grandmother are correct, then yes, there is evidence of mental illness in my direct family. But do I think my sister's episodes could have been avoided, if my sister and I were in a better family situation? Yes, I do. So I think it's nature and nurture.

And I can see the evangelical Christians having a field day with this one, but I'll say it anyway - I think that applies to being gay as well. The classic Exodus International excuse of "if you have a overbearing father and a mollifying mother, you'll be gay?" I have one. But I've never been sexually attracted to girls, either. So, nature or nurture? I think it's a bit of both. I'd like to think it's nature, but if I die and some Deity taps my on the shoulder and said told me I turned gay on August 18, 1982, I'd be all, "Oh, snap! Figures." And that would be that, because honestly, I'd be dead to you guys anyway, and I'm not sure if they have straight sex in the afterlife, much less gay sex.

The point is this, though: what's done is done. My sister is mentally ill. I am gay. Is it nature or nurture? It just is, and everyone has to deal with it, for better or for worse. We do as much as we can to make my sister's life safe and comfortable, and I'd like to hope that people are doing what they can to make my life safe and comfortable as well. Everyone's lives, really. That's just the human condition.