The Human I'm Becoming

"Human Becoming”—the phrase I’ve chosen to use as the title of my next concept record—has haunted me since I heard SueAnn Shiah say it in the fall of 2016, during our first meetings to dream about what this project could be. It haunted me the way prophecies do—the way you’re haunted upon noticing a detail of foreshadowing in a movie that makes no sense yet. The obvious play on “human being,” which describes a static state, seemed a too-appropriate descriptor for the narrative threads I envisioned running through a record about intersectionality, community, and the trajectory of the human experience.

Such goals were lofty and naive. My favorite kind. I recognized from the beginning that this project would require a lot of emotional labor from me. SueAnn—a Christian, queer, Asian-American woman activist—demanded with her very existence in the world and her trust to keep me in her orbit that I fight to see her as she really is, unencumbered by my projections. As I worked to do that with her, I worked to do that with every friend who agreed to participate in this project with us. This work involved deep and constant interrogation of my own socialization. It involved shadow work. It involved transgressing the boundaries set up around me by my church by engaging several queer friends my faith leaders had explicitly forbade me from having contact with. It involved testing my capacity—hopefully a universal human capacity—to hold several different, and sometimes contradictory, beliefs in my head and heart at once. It required actually digesting stories that betrayed my palate. It required defenseless listening, without trying to protect any worldview or any god. And when I began to realize that this process was changing me, I became terrified. As hard as I tried to summon another concept record about others’ experiences ex nihilo, what emerged from the void this time was a house of mirrors.

I began to realize this while writing a song about my friend’s experience in conversion therapy. I was driving along Ellington Parkway in Nashville as I conjured a line in the second verse: “What they call freedom feels more like abuse.” It was a perfect fit in the narrative, but did it sing right? I tested it. I opened my mouth, and tried to push the words out—but they wouldn’t come. They got caught. My chest tightened. The words felt too raw, and I felt too afraid what they might do once they’d emerged from my lips. I’d conjured them on my friend’s behalf, to defend him against the church’s abuse, but unexpectedly, in the same stroke of the pen, I was being confronted with the abuse I had also received and had refused to reckon with. What I didn’t anticipate was how the practice of listening to others taught me to listen to myself. As I asked my friends in the margins who they considered their “people,” the project was leading me into a desert of abandonment from my own faith community as I finally accepted my sexuality as it was, unencumbered by any of their or my projections. And it suddenly seemed that all at once, right here in the middle of Human Becoming, I wasn’t sure what sort of human I would become. 

Though I’d had countless conversations about my sexuality with others throughout my adult life, I only first fully came to terms with my gay identity in a journal entry I wrote in September of 2018. It was an afternoon one month later that I sent that entry to my pastor to read, and only then because I felt confident I would take my life later that night, and I wanted someone to know why. The fallout was immediate and severe. Word quickly spread through the web of church leadership, and meetings were arranged. I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything more terrifying than the ambush of older, white, cishet men in positions of church power that met in a wealthy neighborhood living room to shout and snicker at me, trying to reframe my experience, convince me I wasn’t actually gay, and tell me I didn’t “know the first thing about pain.” I initially responded as I was accustomed to as well, allowing their voices to drown out my own. But it was too late—I’d already become the kind of human too practiced at listening to ignore my own voice, too committed to justice and equity to exile my voice to where I’d kept it in the margins, and too well-acquainted with empathy to gag my voice again.

When my compassion for others finally informed the compassion I was capable of having for myself, those church leaders called me self-righteous and abusive. After a cross-fire of hurt feelings in which no one was innocent, I found myself mostly alone. And the question at the core of the record suddenly became the question at the core of my life: who are my people?

I underwent a deconstruction of faith during this process. This isn’t an uncommon experience for people my age, but what was perhaps more uncommon in my case was that I wasn’t deconstructing a faith I inherited. It was one I built myself. And that was hard. Since my parents weren’t at all religious—not even nominally—it was a lonely teenage version of me who began creating the structure of my faith brick by brick, and it was brick by brick that adult me took it back down, not thinking, as my friends were prone to think, “my parents were wrong about this,” but instead: “I was wrong about this.” I will still stumble upon a piece of debris that I particularly loved. I’ll find myself squatting down over it, reaching, and wrapping my fingers around it, cradling the rubble to my chest and weeping, wondering if I might be able to build something new out of it. Is there any cosmic drama written by capable and loving hands? Does the arc of human history bend toward justice and harmony?

Two of the first songs I wrote for Human Becoming were the beginning and the end, the starting and ending songs on the record. To end this short update, I want to announce that because of unforeseen monetary woes, Human Becoming will take longer to finish than I anticipated, but also that I will finish it. And lastly, I want to share some of the words to the song that will close the record out—a piece of debris I’ve refused to release just yet.

wake up from your sleeping, sleeper

friend and brother

rise up, let us shake the dust off

from each others’ burial clothes

see there? the sun

the dawn is breaking

night is over

and nobody here is colorblind

our hearts are true, our minds are kind

the tombs that loosed our bodies

kept our hatred inside

the only tools you have left are those that build love

if you never learned to use them then

you got plenty of time now to catch up