Feeling Different by Donny Kaye

In the poem, Self Portrait, by the Irish poet David Whyte, the verse invites; “it doesn’t interest me if there is one god or many.  I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.  I want to know if you are prepared to live in a world with its harsh need to change you.  If you can look back with firm eyes and saying, this is where I stand.  This is where I stand.”

I don’t think that I started out feeling different but it seems that the world often exists with a harsh message and need to change a person.  To have me be something other than what I am.

• Men don’t kiss men,  my brother declared when I was ten and he was thirty
• Don’t sit like that-you’re sitting like a girl.
• You sissy!
• Ok, Donny you can be on my team says the leader of the pick-up sandlot game as he selects from the two remaining kids to be chosen, the other being a girl.

I’ve existed with a sense of feeling different since about the age of ten.  I began searching for ways for me to feel accepted.  My interests served to be too much for others, after all, who really cares if it is a ‘55 or ‘56 Dodge Royal Lancer or that the Buick Roadmaster has four holes and not three.

Because of my feeling different, I always worked to overcompensate. I was determined to cover up the differences that were felt.  So, I wasn’t the best ball player, I put my energy into achieving—always working harder for an A or A+ to earn my mother’s praise, which she wasn’t capable of giving me in the way I needed it—other than in a sideways kind of way; always wanting to stretch my performance to be even better.  My achievements only seemed to reinforce my feeling different.

I polished my perfectionistic skills with the intent that the world wouldn’t see my imperfection, after all I was different.  That word I had heard said once too often, you know the one—sissy – yeah that one, I was different.  I felt it inside.  Unfortunately my perfectionism only served to separate me even more, after all who wants to be around someone that strives for perfection to the extent I was capable.   

Feeling different has served to develop some essential life skills.  My sense of being different resulted in a successful career serving others.  An impressive resume and on top of that, I’ve enjoyed happiness and fulfillment raising three children and being Papa to seven incredible grandchildren and as a life partner in a married relationship for  forty-two years.

I also recognize that the truth about me, as a result of feeling different, has been denied and repressed.  It’s interesting at this point in my journey to realize that I owe a lot of my happiness and success to withholding the truth.  It’s typically thought that the truth will set one free—when in fact the truth has served to imprison me.

Feeling different?  Yes, I am—Different and yet the same as any other being existing on the planet.  Before this experience called human life, I came from a place where there was no sense of difference, only oneness.  This life experience has been about allowing me to know the attributes (if you can call them that) about feeling different.  In coming to know different, I better understand not being different, or what I call the quality of unity or oneness with everything.  Not separate.   

The change?  The truth.  Accepting me, all of me.  The good and the bad.  The up and down.  The in and the out.  These opposites allow me to recognize the qualities of just being who I was created to be.  Realizing the longing to not feel different is merely the longing for a return to the place of oneness with everything and everyone.  This seems to be the heart of life’s lesson for me, this sunny day in mid August.  Might I finally be realizing the lesson? Enough with feeling different and into the differences that make me this individual experience called Kent. 

About the Author

Donny Kaye-Is a native born Denverite.  He has lived his life posing as a hetero-sexual male, while always knowing that his sexual orientation was that of a gay male.  In recent years he has confronted the pressures of society that forced him into deep denial regarding his sexuality and an experience of living somewhat of a disintegrated life.  “I never forgot for a minute that I was what my childhood friends mocked, what I thought my parents would reject and what my loving God supposedly condemned to limitless suffering.” StoryTime at The Center has been essential to assisting him with not only telling the stories of his childhood, adolescence and adulthood but also to merely recall the stories of his past that were covered with lies and repressed in to the deepest corners of his memory.  Within the past two years he has “come out” not only to himself but to his wife of four decades, his three children, their partners and countless extended family and friends.  Donny is divorced and yet remains closely connected with his family.  He lives in the Capitol Hill Community of Denver, in integrity with himself and in a way that has resulted in an experience of more fully realizing integration within his life experiences. He participates in many functions of the GLBTQ community.