What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Blacker

by Damon Young

But I wrote this to examine and discover the whys of my life instead of continuing to allow the whats to dominate and fog my memories.

If you maybe wanted to be seen as so straight, so manly, so masculine that you gave no shits about gay men, you’d perform tolerance and enlightenment with ironic homophobia. If you maybe wanted to be seen as so straight, so manly, and so masculine that your heterosexuality was too pure to risk a homosexual contagion, you performed hatred, adopting a rigid and unceasing animus toward gay men that you didn’t quite understand or maybe didn’t even really believe.

And I could make my brokeness less conspicuous by telling people I’d made the conscious decision to “write for a living”—adding a shake of nobility and laudable self-determination to the reality that I’d only decided to write for a living because I got laid off and couldn’t do shit else and couldn’t get hired to do shit else and could use this stretch of unemployment benefits to temporarily subsidize my listicles about chicken wings and Kanye West.

You are decent, not because you do things that actually matter and actually help, but because you don’t do shit.