The StoryHere's a little something about a desi like me: the two forces I've struggled with the most in my personality are my anger and my lust.
While most of the time I'm a pretty clean cut, respectable guy, I know that deep down, I'm a raging id. And I was taught, by my mother, that this was the worst thing I could be.
There is a gay artist named Jean Genet. Jean Genet's story is that when he came out as a homosexual, he was violently denounced. As a result, he developed an aesthetic of being "the filthiest person alive," an aesthetic that film geeks will recognize as the central one of John Waters's PINK FLAMINGOS (1972).
While I personally was never a fan of this aesthetic, per se, I could relate. Indeed, the main focus of my therapy has been eliminating this idea that I am somehow a bad person because I have anger and lust. Because the truth of the matter is, /most/ men suffer from anger and lust. They're just at peace with it, which I never was, because my fundamentalist Islamic mother taught that those were the two worst things a human being could have. And I had them both in spades. It led to my porno addiction, my inability to relate to most women, and has gotten me in trouble as months and years of suppressed rage explodes all at once with the slightest provocation.
In recent days I haven't been so angry, however, having made peace with a lot of the causes of my anger and my lust. I'm not as ashamed of it as I have been my whole life, and like Jean Genet, I have embraced that which is supposedly negative about me. So when NPR did the story about how MySpace is the "lesser" social networking site, a haven for "trashy" and "brown" people, I knew I had to reclaim it. Yes, I have a Facebook, which I guess is a good outlet for the face I want the public to see. But MySpace here, I've decided, is now the haven for the real me. All my lust and anger, my pure id, played out for the world. Why? Because again, I'm not ashamed of being me anymore. I won't be as stupid as I was with my journal (wherein I talked shit about poeple I worked with, thus getting myself fired),, but I will be as honest as I safely can be up in here.
Watch out.