He’s tall, he’s white, a couple of decades my junior. He’s in a key leadership position in the house of worship where my wife and I just started attending. We’re one of the first people to walk in the Christian College classroom now serving as the venue for the ‘welcoming lunch’ for new attendees. Yep! It’s the typical catered chicken and veggie wraps, instant coffee, and tea bag to our right as we file in line to fix our plates. I noticed the tall pastor again—his skin, the poise of his frame, the muscle tone of his lean physique. Everything from his confident smile and the easy carefree extending of his arm to shake my hand assaults me; it screams at me. He is unabashedly telegraphing, I’ve always been accepted. I am not only a prime example of the hetero white dominating male world, I am one of its image-bearers, one of its crown princes holding power. Not because I’ve earned it, but because I am white, tall and belong. I was born into it. He’s the kind of man I’ve learned to fear. He kayaks in open waters, precariously catching large fish. He’s a man’s man, the kind I’ve desperately and chaotically tried to learn how to please.
Gazing down at me, as he tries to slot my accent and darker complexion into a neat box he can understand, he asks my name. Then… he asks me the dreaded questions. “So, Xavier, what do you do? What’s your story?”, so blithely and rehearsed. A thousand incompatible stories flashed through my mind—of dancing into the wee hours of the morning, pressed between the sweaty bodies of black and Puerto Rican gay and lesbian club goers in my hometown’s meat packing district, of all-night studying session in Lamont Library, working to complete my masters, of a life forged in profound complexity and the ever-elusive pursuit of soul searching—none of which I could possibly share with him in this clean, innocent welcome lunch.
I just want to punch this muthaf*ker in the mouth. I just want to yell, Tell you my story! What the f*k does that even mean! And as if, I’m going to tell you... You and your kind have either raped me or bashed me. You have left me used and abused, discarded, monikered me as shameful and abandoned. My story! Well, I'm now in a season of trying to unravel that reality. I'm in a hell journey of trying to forgive and walk into healing and freedom. You want to hear my story! You won’t be able to handle it! Your mind would melt.
But instead, and almost in an instant, I just want to throw up. I’m fighting tears of terror and shame from pouring down my face. I fake a strong stance, correcting my posture, pokerface a calm, tempered voice—a controlled and unemotional voice. I strangle my rage within and with it, the real me dies again. I vanish and Mystique takes over…
We’ve all done it. We’ve all been Mystique.
Who can blame us for not wanting to be like her? Who of us have not fantasized about being her? Her abilities represent a very base human need to blend, to be invisible, to protect our true selves from an often cold and hostile world. Hence why her character resonates, and why her shapeshifting is coveted. We morph and shapeshift to fit in, to be accepted, and ironically, to be seen. I do it more often than my threshold of shame will allow me to admit. I do it when I apply for jobs, when I meet new people, and especially when I find myself in the presence of those I feel I need to impress or from whom I believe I need to protect myself. For me, that is still sadly white men—straight white men in particular. It’s a survival strategy. We create elaborate, intricate masks, often forgetting the true face beneath. We’ve cannibalised ourselves to become other. I have, from a young age, wrongly learned to be the whore to please them, to placate them: “Just don’t beat me up with your eyes of judgment and hate”. But I'm slowly learning how empty this strategy is. It is a void. It is absent of the true and pure power that lies within me, my genuine me.
Trying to decode this entrapment is a more recent, arduous endeavor. The messages for knowing how to unravel and escape from this web have always been there. It’s a message of hope, of good news, hidden in a frequency too often overpowered by the noise of the world and the lecherous voices in our heads.
The penny finally dropped. I am beginning to slowly understand, and the catalyst came from a most unexpected place… in helping one of my dearest students reach his goal.
Isamu came to us from Japan in his 7th grade. His bright and eager smile could warm the coldest of hearts, despite him knowing almost no English. Now, in his final year and as the International Student Captain of his high school, I am preparing him for his 3rd attempt at the SAT to push his score into the Ivy League safe zone. While we were working together, it struck me. As a non-native English speaker, his score on the Reading & Writing section was stuck. He kept falling into the same trap of superimposing his previous knowledge onto the questions. So, we began a slow, forensic process. For every wrong answer, we wouldn't just look at the right one; we'd diagnose his thought process. "Why did this choice seem right to you? What is the question really asking? What is the function of the underlined words? What led you astray?" I would encourage him to “listen to what the text and question are saying, don’t add to it”. Then I modeled the "expert" strategy, thinking aloud in slow motion to show him how to dismantle the questions, see their true mechanics, and approach them clinically, forensically—void of his own assumptions and predispositions.
Ah! I need to do this for myself. I need to be an object clinician to accurately and powerfully diagnose my own traps and undoings.
When faced with a choice to be true, I instead try to guess what others want from me, I deeply and thoroughly analyse to formulate the "right" answer. This especially spikes for me when faced with that dreaded question, "So, what do you do?" I crumple. Internally, I am petrified. Why? Because the true answer is I don't know. I've spent a lifetime trying to hone my masking skill to pass the test of fitting in, of giving the answers I think they want, rather than courageously exploring my own thoughts, finding out what I need, what I want.
I too, like Isamu, need to slowly dismantle my own thinking—forensically, brutally, honestly—this is the key that unlocks the dungeon doors. It’s how we tap into what’s real and true within us. This is the work required to bring the genuine life force within us to the fore. And in so doing, it allows us to create order, destroy chaos, and bring light into the worlds we abide. It is slow, painstaking work, but it is an investment into the eternal as we lay the rich foundation love needs to flourish.