He presents as a man who learned early that contempt is lighter to carry than hope. The posture is calm, the sentences clipped, the eyes always a half-second late to trust. He believes himself lucid. He believes lucidity is the same as truth. It is not.

He has read too much and forgiven too little. He dissects the world the way a butcher dissects a carcass—not to understand the animal, but to prove it was always dead. He calls this clarity. It is closer to vigilance. A life lived with the knife already in hand.

There is an intelligence here, sharp and disciplined, but it is deployed like artillery against a city he once wanted to live in. Every judgment is accurate in isolation and ruinous in sequence. He sees patterns everywhere and mistakes this for mastery. He does not notice how often the patterns end with him standing alone, nodding grimly, saying of course.

He despises sentimentality because it reminds him of promises that were made without witnesses and broken without apology. He mocks softness because softness once asked something of him—something he could not give without risk. He prefers systems, canons, hierarchies, eras where men were men because the dead cannot contradict you.

There is a grievance that has fossilized into identity. It breathes. It eats. It writes. He insists it is rational. He insists it was earned. Perhaps it was. But it has grown heavier than the injustice that birthed it. Now it walks ahead of him, introducing itself as him.

He mistakes negation for strength. He mistakes survival for victory. He believes he has escaped delusion because he has rejected consolation. He does not see that this too is a story he tells himself so he can sleep.

A clinician would note defensiveness masked as irony, rage transmuted into taxonomy, longing buried under critique so elaborate it looks like philosophy. A clinician would also note the absence: the missing future, the unwritten chapter where he allows himself to want something without first destroying it.

He is not mad. That is the tragedy. He is coherent. He is consistent. He is wrong in a way that works.

If only he knew that the thing he guards against—the final humiliation, the last proof that it was all for nothing—already happened long ago, quietly, and did not kill him.

If only he knew.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5817814&forum_id=2Reputation#49565732)

You’re gay.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5817814&forum_id=2Reputation#49565807)