The Loneliness of Becoming Fluent in Being Misunderstood
What happens when gay men translate themselves so many times they forget the original.
I asked a friend what he actually wanted.
Not what he should want or what would be reasonable to want. What he actually wanted.
He opened his mouth and had nothing. Not because the answer was too vulnerable or too complicated to explain. Because he couldn’t locate it.
The question landed in a space that used to have contents but now just had echoes of other people’s frameworks for understanding him.
He’d become so practiced at translating his interior into something others could metabolize that he’d lost the frequency he was translating from.
That’s not the same as being closeted. He was out. Visible. Had the vocabulary, the community, and the supposed infrastructure for authenticity.
The problem wasn’t that he was hiding. It’s that he’d become fluent in a version of himself that existed primarily for other people’s comprehension, and somewhere in all that fluency, the original had gone quiet.
The Mechanism Nobody Names
We talk about emotional loneliness in queer life as a problem of being misunderstood. That’s not quite it.