Hello there. This is the author’s commentary for ‘An Approximate Narrative.’ I am glad you came back for more. This was an exciting project and incredibly rewarding. I would like to share with you some of the behind-the-scenes aspects of its creation. My understanding of this narrative has changed quite a bit since I originally wrote it, so I will try to do my best to explain what I was thinking when I wrote it, as well as what I have realized since then. Oh wait, here we go…

One of the more important considerations for me was to make this story compelling. I was anxious about the people who would be reading it, and so I wanted to firmly grab people’s interest right at the beginning. That is why I spent so much space creating the scene and trying to set a tone.

Private school was a rigid place, and full of a lot of anxiety. I used a couple devices to communicate that feeling. Watching and judging teachers are mentioned, and uniforms were added here to convey the distress of being externally regulated.

I struggled at Carden, which was unfortunate. Carden was suppose to be a solution to the problems I had in public school. It was one of those situations where things are supposed to be different in a new environment, but the problem doesn’t really go away. It just reinvents itself.

I didn’t realize this when I was writing this piece, but I think it is fair to say that right here I am establishing the subject and the context as actors, and then beginning to talk about their relationship to each other. We can talk more about this later.

Here I was thinking about one particular memory. I was in the middle of a circle of bullies and was wildly swinging my book bag in the hopes of being able to break away. The logistical problems in public school were too complicated to represent appropriately, so instead I chose this memory which I would consider an emotional breaking point.

That part I didn’t quite get right. I was trying to outline a shift in antagonistic relationships from those with fellow students to an institution, my new private school.

Oh, here’s Jeff Lee. This is really important, but quite complicated. Its not here in the original narrative, but the fallibility of my memories about Jeff Lee is an idea that I talked a lot about in the process of my Senior Thesis. I honestly don’t remember if he was in 5th grade or not, and a lot of the details provided here were invented to flush him out as a character. I do remember that he was popular, and I do know that I felt something along the lines of at least envy or admiration. My Senior Thesis talked about the artificial injection of meaning into community mediated narratives like coming out. When people would ask me about my research, I would always tell them about Jeff Lee, a shorter version of this story, more or less. I would then explain how these stories are socially constructed and reinforced.

Okay, so here I am talking about attributes of my childhood, but contrasting them against Jeff is a bit artificial. I am mostly using him as a contrasting character to illustrate the social expectations I felt, and the ways in which I felt so awkward. In terms of attributes, however, it is interesting that I never used “Salt Lake City”, “Gay”, or “Mormon.” These are undoubtedly important details, but I can’t explain why they are not here.

I was originally looking to provide a timeline based narrative, but found that frustrating. Instead I decided to write about one particular time and then contrast it with how I view myself now. I didn’t want this to be too deterministic, so I presented a fuzzy definition of my present self-conception. This seems to speak to the ways in which my multiple identities can only be statically articulated when they that exist in the past.

When considering my current identity during this narrative, especially when comparing it to the past, any of the defining identities I could now use seem arbitrary at best. Narrating my past comes with an implied cause and effect, and so I would generate a concept I felt was true, but then instantly start questioning and contextualizing it.

I could have spent a lot of time researching the development of my personal sense of agency and control. I tried to address this here, but mostly as a means of eliminating any opportunity for the audience to place me into some definitional box. Instead I chose to make a comparison with the past, acquiescing to the only cause and effect I was comfortable with: That somehow, even if in nondeterministic ways, my present operates across casual references to my past.

It is interesting to consider the placement of myself relative to the contexts in this narrative. I spend time talking about a personal evolution, while not noticing that I have made the contexts static. This may be why I resolved on the word “affected” to describe my self-representation. I was thinking through all of the dynamic ways in which I represent myself across these un-evolving contexts, and was inundated with all the choices that emerged.

That is why I chose to explain the past in questionable terms. It is easy to remember the past, but in the process of re-membering its memories is to reconstitute them through the understanding of my present day self. Perhaps, given my inability to limit my current self to any stable understanding, these past memories receive the same treatment. They are questioned and contextualized with information that only exists now, reshaping the memories in ways that permanently distort the past.

As I said earlier, this is an area that I have approached from a different angle in the past. Jeff Lee was the example I used when explaining how personal memories are remapped in the presence of community expectations (gay coming out stories should include a first crush), but it is only now, in this commentary that I am beginning to understand the ways in which the agency of adulthood can dismantle memories from a period time when I lacked personal, intellectual, and/or contextual agency.

This section was emotionally difficult to write. I exposed painful attributes that had been assigned to my childhood (by myself or others) in the hopes that by presenting these static definitions while arguing an arbitrary nature, that their stigmatic sting might be lessened a bit.

It is interesting to note that I chose three examples that enumerate the emotions of the subject followed by their expression relative to the context. I never talk about the determining ability of the environment. Perhaps this is because, once again, I consider the context to be static and am unable to historicize my own surroundings. I am personally mediating thecontext, and therefore I always have full responsibility for the outcome. Even when I talk about the bullying school children above, the cause is linked to me as a subject. “Socially variant,” I say, as if that somehow that explains the school yard dynamic. Sadly, however, it does. Instead of enumerating the contexts in which my experience existed, I presumed or trusted that the readers would apply the right contextual knowledge (of the schoolyard, or Utah, or a homophobic culture) and give the correct meaning to the story.

All of these conditions are frustrating enough to make one want to throw up his hands and refuse to play. If this last example was an accident, it was a good one. Reading over it again, it seems to appropriately represent the need to flee the constrains imposed on me, while at the same talking about the teachers who would track me down for what I am now sure was liability issues. I described them via their cars, reemphasizing the power relationship between myself and the contexts in which I existed as a child.

At the end of writing this narrative, I really didn’t have conclusion to make. These static contexts from the past provide a definitional framework against which a dynamic self is defined. But any interrogation of these contexts exposes their constructed nature. All I could state with certainty were the hard facts.

And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Where does that leave me relative to my past? And what if the memory can’t be analyzed into some greater understanding? After all, even those “hard fact” might only be the illusions of an overactive mind.

Carden Memorial School, 1990. The halls of that conservative Christian private school were eerily quiet. Not dark, but emotionally empty, filled only with the occasional line of quiet students shuffling off to their next age-appropriate, regulated and approved, childhood experience. The unacknowledged anxiety was only amplified by the watchful gaze of teachers at the end of each line, the silence only torn apart by the deafening sound of
starched uniforms in movement.

Carden was supposed to be my haven. As a boy, socially variant by nature and by my parent’s unintentional design, public school had presented challenges that I didn’t have the means by which to navigate, save the elaborate choreography of dodging punches thrown in taunting circles. But where public school lacked an institutional structure that would have saved me from the creativity of others, Carden imposed a structure at the expense of my own.

Amidst this bleached environment, however, was Jeff Lee. Jeff Lee was the most popular boy in my 5th grade class. Jeff Lee and his dark wave of conservatively fashionable hair left me in awe. I wanted to be his friend. Everyone wanted to be his friend. Where I was a chubby, gender-variant, social misfit, Jeff was athletic, assured, and surrounded by a constant circle of admirers. Jeff Lee was my first crush. Jeff was who I wish I could be. Jeff Lee was the personifications of the expectations placed on any young boy, amplified through a latent sexuality.

I can’t look back to that time without making a comparison to the present. That anxiously excitable child has been replaced with an equally extreme adult who has never the less found strength in his exceptions, and contexts in which his peculiarities can reside. The past appears as a series of snapshots in my mind, a slow thematized progression into a tepid maturation. But on a day to day basis, my governing self seems far more arbitrary.

Adulthood has granted me the tools with which I am able to claim my free-agency. I can make choices about my gender, sexuality and body. And I do. My sense of self is no longer constrained by an external system of which I have no understanding. The choreography of the playground has transformed into a social dance in which my self-concept is now presented, re-presented, and ultimately affected.

In some ways, those past memories are resistant to this type of examination. They were encoded with a childhood comprehension, and when subjected to the scrutiny of adult reasoning, their logic of qualitative logic begins to break down. Yet they are reliant on this adult knowledge as well. I write with the knowledge that when reverse engineering my past, my memories have no integrity. Despite what I remember, I didn’t have a crush on Jeff Lee. I was not physically mature enough to have the emotions I lend to this narrative. My crush on Jeff is an example of the constant and elaborate revisionary practices of an over-active mind, socialized in a highly conforming community.

So who was I? I was a mildly gender variant child with ADHD, who was frequently depressed and would protest an hour of institutionalized mockery in the form of PE by walking slowly around the perimeter of the field, making sure my required three laps consumed the entire period. On the other hand, I might have been the middle of middle children, desperate for attention, desperate to be involved with the activities of his older siblings, his sisters, not understanding the gender based prohibitions. Or perhaps I was an angry child with diagnosable Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder, who would abruptly leave school at the drop of an insult, grabbing my book bag and walking the five miles home only to be hunted down by the automobiles of Carden Memorial School.

All of these variations are constructed with information I did not have, and as such, hold little integrity. When I strip back the contents of my adult assumptions, and brush away the remaining conjectural debris, all I am left with is this: In 1990, I was going to a private school, and there was a boy named Jeff Lee.

You know, his name might have been Jake.