On the Brink of Being Totally Off Topic. Almost...

            " you can live a lie until you die, but one thing you can't hide is when you're crippled inside..."


   One of the things that was really hard for me in figuring out what was going on with my orientation was dealing with what everyone else considered "normal". Growing up, I saw very little representation of gay life and even less of the grey area called bisexuality. When I was really young, before anything really starting coming together, all I knew was that something was different than what everyone else seemed to be. That feeling that you're not "normal" for whatever reason is one of the things that keeps people in the closet, and generally leads to people being very frustrated in their lives. A lot of people go through the motions of what's "supposed to be" in their lives at various points, and completely deny everything that they want or feel normal about internally to fit into other peoples pretty little boxes of expectations. People who are gay or bisexual will sometimes go through their entire lives the way an "average, red-blooded heterosexual" would do it...and this almost always ends in complete failure.

      Maybe it's the shrink in me, but I'm fascinated by this entire idea.

      Ultimately, everyone involved in these weird situations gets completely fucked in the head. (Sorry but really, it's the only way to totally capture the effect.) All these people who allow other people to run their every move, subconsciously or otherwise, end up in these hollow, miserable circumstances. People get into relationships and sometimes even marry into relationships that they don't even want to please everyone else. People will go into fields of study or careers they can't stand for the same reasons. There's almost always some nagging individual that manages to know exactly how to get into others' minds to manipulate these deeds. At the end of the day, how many people wander around in these fake, elaborate lies? It seems like an absolutely awful way to live, especially when coupled with the idea that these people usually lie to themselves and everyone else to kind of "fake it til they make it" (which is a load of dung if there ever was one).

      Then the people who push these expectations and such onto others are really setting themselves up for massive disappointment. Even when their pretty little mice run the maze like they're "supposed to", there's no guarantee that everything works out in these puppet masters' favors. Most of the time, these subjects get to a point where they can't deal with the lie anymore and just crack. Usually in an enormous way that there's no coming back from. Every single shred of the controlling/masochistic relationship goes down the drain for all the involved parties and then everyone is all jacked up.

      How in the holy name of God does that sound healthy/appealing? What is it about people that makes it seem like other peoples' opinions are really worth that much? Is it scarring from psychological trauma and bullying, or is it something else entirely?