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Wellness Wednesday for December 28, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Bonfire of the Insecurities

Next week is the traditional moment for new starts, new resolutions, improving ourselves. Let’s take this moment going in to talk about all the weird little things we worry about in life. The nagging mosquitoes that prick at us when we aren’t aware. Admit, and exorcise.

— My wife is extremely successful, and I do all I can to support her, but I worry sometimes I’ll end up like a penny-ante version of one of those 19th century art adjacent women who get biographies in the NYT Book Review as the muse and aide to a famous artist but her own works are all lost. I love her for who she is and I’m proud of her and I want her to be great at what she does, but in some circles I’m already more Mrs. FiveHour’s husband, even if I’m equally professionally successful in my own circles. I worry how I will succeed as a husband without compromising my self-respect in the long term.

— I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none, and I worry that I’m wasting my potential at anything through a desire to be well rounded. In general my aspiration is to be Heinlein’s Competent Man, but what if I’m just making myself universally INcompetent? I can’t stand the idea of being bad at anything, and that might keep me from ever being great at anything.

— I want to spend more time with my parents, more time with close friends, more time by myself, more time with my wife, more time with my dog, more time traveling, more time at home. Somehow there’s never enough.

— What opportunities have I missed? What will I miss if I don’t wake up and smell the coffee?

These are all absurd and minor in the grand scheme of things, but it’s what I need to be honest and acknowledge before moving forward.

Would probably be quicker to list the things about my life that don't bother me.

  • No relationship, few friends, little prospect of fixing either. I've always found it hard to socialize and it feels even harder post-COVID era. Relationship status is doomed. People judge me as attractive and I don't have difficulty picking up guys but I'm pretty scared about having sex. I have very little sexual experience, particularly for a gay guy, that I'm very self-conscious about.

  • Job is pretty shitty, a slightly-above-minimum wage job doing manual labor. I do actually enjoy it, though, and I don't really have much hope of anything better. And any day I'm not working I'm probably going to be miserable.

  • Don't really have any valuable skills or hobbies, besides lifting.

  • Kind of hate lifting - well, not so much lifting as myself, for being so weak and being so bad at it.

  • Feeling generally unproductive and lazy. I don't really take good care of myself, or my things, or my space, or my life. I kind of end up doing the bare minimum and coasting when it comes to anything other than work or the gym.

Pardon my curiosity, but is lack of sexual experience a major demerit in the gay community? I'd think there's a lot to do with it.

I'm pretty hetero, so idk if there's a difference, but our kind tend to kinda fetishize inexperience? Like even just casually, I made a new friend recently, and we're both objectively slooooots, and it's like we're looking for the Elias Sports Bureau "Tom Brady is 0-7 against the Jets at Night when a Democrat is in the Whitehouse" levels of virginities to take. Like anything I haven't done, that's what she wants to do, no matter how obscure.

Virginity isn't really fetishized - partially because there are so few virgins. If anything it probably overlaps with ephebo- and pedophilic tendencies. But there's also very little sense that your 'first' is special. For an embarrassingly large number of gay men, including myself, their 'first' was probably not a long term girlfriend with months of buildup and anticipation. It was probably a forgettable hookup, one of a long line.

So it's not that it's some black mark - but it does feel alienating to hear gay guys talk about their sexual exploits (note that this isn't bragging - having a four digit body count is not an accomplishment for a gay man) and have nothing to offer yourself. And it kind of leaves me at a loss because I don't really know what I want or what would satisfy me. So that's all on top of being very introverted and constantly grappling with the thought that there's something wrong with me.

Huh, guess it's the straights that aren't ok after all. It's interesting how the feelings you express are things I would have identified strongly (and wrongly!) with my senior year of high school: I lack experience compared to the partners I'm seeking, and if I need experience to get a job I'll never get experience, and I'm doomed!

Hope your 2023 brings clarity on what you want followed by bringing you what you want!

Gay hookup culture has drawbacks as well as advantages. And it's not that I can't get experience. It would be pretty easy for me to get laid. Despite my anxiety about my appearance and physique, men are attracted to me.

Thank you for the positive thought, though.