When I’m presented with an opportunity to be interviewed I’ve learned to always say yes. I say yes because I know I’ll be asked questions of myself that I’ve never thought to ask myself before. An interview is free self-discovery. It’s free therapy.

Years ago I saw a flyer on a cork board at the local co-op. A college student was looking for gay men to interview and without much thought I ripped off a tab with an email address and wrote him. Days later I was sitting with him in my living room and deeply crying to the point where he became surprised and moved. So much came out of me that day. It was intense! And similarly, so much came out last year when KALW interviewed me about working through COVID at a soup kitchen. And so much came out when Vermont’s NPR interviewed me about growing up gay in a more-conservative area in rural Vermont. And given these experiences I knew immediately to respond to an email I received last week entitled: “I’d like to Interview You about your Male Conditioning.”

And so today I found myself in a stranger’s backyard in Berkeley sipping Earl Grey tea, sitting in the shade of a lovely garden, and being interviewed for two hours about growing up as a boy, being raised to become a man, and what all of that looked like in my experience. This led to the wildest thing happening in my mind that’s never happened to me before. And it likely won’t seem like much, but it feels like a real shift inside.

Movement and singing are two areas from my childhood where I felt perfectly free and later in life I became completely unfree in both. I absolutely loved singing in school as a small child. By 5th grade I came to learn that it was completely unmanly and my voice was lost to me. “Men don’t sing” became an internalized reality. And movement—while I ran freely as a young child, by puberty I became hyper aware that my mannerisms could give me away as gay. I became particularly fearful of running and jumping lest anyone come up with ideas about my sexuality. High school gym class was a particularly dangerous minefield and is still the source of my intolerance for sports. In these two areas of singing and movement I’m still completely bound by fear and panic. They’re largely no-go areas for me.

So naturally the interview found its way to them. When I was asked a question about what it would take for me to become free again in movement my mind showed me the most curious thing. Anyone who’s read my writing knows my healing journey’s sourced from memories of childhood. When I close my eyes the images and movies in my mind’s eye are past, past, past memories; always past memories. And Buddhism has taught me that our thoughts are always of the past or of the future; past or future. And today my mind showed a third way!

I closed my eyes after being asked “what would it take to become free again in movement?” and my mind showed me a vision of an incredibly fit man in light pink ballet tights doing a graceful split leap on a stage. Yet when my mind’s eye wandered up to the man’s face—it was my face on the body! It was pure imagination; a waking dream; and realistic to the core. It was a vision of a pure expression of perfect skill and freedom in movement. When I saw my face on the ballet dancer in my mind’s eye I immediately looked away. It was too much to witness. My body became flooded with emotions. I began crying and couldn’t speak. The interviewer gave me space and time when I insisted that I verbalize what I was shown. It took me minutes to say it aloud; minutes to say that I was shown a vision of myself dancing with the highest attainment of graceful movement. The vision was the opposite of the internal rigidity I’ve felt the whole of my adult life.

My mind imagines things perfectly fine of course. When I thought about how to build the Little Free Library last year I first saw it in my mind before it became a reality. Yet this was different. This image wasn’t powered by me and it wasn’t searched for. It simply showed up and I’ve never witnessed the phenomenon before. It was neither past nor future. It was a bit of both and mixed with something else. It was a gift.

Thoughts of movement make me feel so tight. And right now there’s a small sense of movement inside again; a sense the rusted gears got greased.