Living With DaMan Or: A Piercing Look At Yourself
I moved in and things got weirder. DaMan is used to symbiotic relationships where people feed off the negativity of each other, whether that means belittling the people you’re with, the people on TV, yourself, your family, your coworkers, it doesn’t matter as long as you keep the vibrations low down and you aren’t honest about anything. Just keep everything around you down at a lower level than you are and that helps you feel not as bad about the level you keep yourself at. Really weird thinking there, but again, it’s not uncommon and it’s not special.
I did my best to express how everything should be talked about, all it takes is desire and some courage. I talked about my previous homosexual experiences and oddly enough DaMan thought that none of them were good experiences and even went as far as calling some of the people I encountered as horribly fuckedup. That ended up applying to him, as projection often does, at least always a little bit, if you’re being honest. He did not see that his own actions mirrored the actions of the people in my story, and he thought all those people sounded terrible and horrible. The people aren’t, but the actions and experiences might have been.
We talked about sexuality because I then understood that my cousin had sold me as something, and I didn’t know what that was. And that also partly plays into what kind of reputation my cousin had with people he called his friends. I shared that I’m about 10% gay and 60% feminine. DaMan never said or did anything to confirm that he understood what that meant. It’s possible all that mattered was turning 10% into a higher number. If that was his goal he failed.
When talking about his sexuality he said that being gay was a thing he “figured out.” This was one of the most beautiful statements I had heard. He admitted it was a decision he made, something he had to figure out, a personal truth of his. He decided he was gay. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with that, because it’s good to know yourself, but your sexuality is only a little bit of yourself, it sure isn’t the whole thing. But that was as far as DaMan was willing to go with his personal insight on himself, other than he’s been a perpetual victim for most of his life, always treated unfairly and unkindly by most everyone and being gay would be the dominate reason for his turmoiled life.
I’ve had recurring dreams throughout my life and so did DaMan. One that he shared with me was very interesting. It was him and his dad in a car and his dad was driving. They were driving down a road or street and everything outside the car was in a vortex of chaos. He described it as tornadoes picking up everything and throwing it and crashing it and destroying it. And DaMan was always so afraid. He wasn’t driving and had no control. He’d try and jam on the breaks in his dream, but he wasn’t driving so there was no way for him to stop the car. There’s an amazing amount to unpack here, and I’m not going to take the time. Broadly, it’s a dream about someone feeling out of control, while control is still being had, and everything around them and outside of them is drastically and dramatically changing.
While living with DaMan, I had several dreams about him. One was a confrontational dream that mirrored an interaction we had in our waking life. There was one where I took him to an alien structure or spaceship and tried to get him to see it. There was one where he, a mutual friend, and I were sitting in a living room and a woman with color changing hair showed up that I introduced them to. There was even one where DaMan was gold plated or golden skinned and much taller than he physically was. Every dream that featured him was interesting. I’d tell him that I had a dream about him, and he never asked what any of them were, but I shared some of them with him.
When I confronted DaMan in real life, it was after I had spent the day with our mutual friend, the same woman who allowed me into her home for Thanksgiving. We had gone to this town called Quartzsite and looked at gems and rocks and crystals and that sort of thing. In the time I was gone DaMan was drinking his face off, like he liked to do. When I got back he wasn’t interested at all in how the day was or anything like that. No. He was emotionally hurt and was in a massive drunken huff. He told me “I have a friend coming over so you need to get in your room” and this was one of the most non-violent insane things I’d ever heard. None of it made sense.
I understood he was talking about having gay sex with someone, but did that start in the living room? Why did I need to go to my room? There was something there that DaMan was obviously not comfortable with, so he possibly accidentally did his best to make me feel uncomfortable as well. I did as I was told however, and took myself and my dog to our room. And I told her “We just learned there’s a safespace in this house, and it’s right here.” I was fucking livid. People treating other people like things and less as people is wrong, a mistake. And that’s how I felt I was being treated. And maybe because I wasn’t gay enough for DaMan.
His friend never came over. DaMan passed out shortly after his flourish of emotion. Not before hurting himself, however, and I quickly learned that was a common practice of his when he was drunk.
It was the next morning when the confrontation occurred. I woke up before him, which was normal, but I got dressed and went downstairs before him, which was unusual. And I intentionally wore all white. I was doing my blinding best. He ended up coming down later than normal, for reasons of regret and embarrassment. I learned he would “forget” anything he wanted to and also “have no idea what you’re talking about” on a regular basis. This is a pretty common thing, in my experience.
He went about his routine, doing his best to ignore me as I did my best to be an elephant in the room. After our fake platitudes to each other, as he was finishing with the dogs, unable to look in my direction, I spoke up. I didn’t yell and scream but I made my feelings well known. I told him he had no right to treat someone like he did, that I was paying to live here as an equal human being, and what he did was incredibly inappropriate. We both knew that this was justified and deserved and so that possibly made it righteous. After I got the anger and disappointment and frustration out of my system his response was to cry that I “thought so little of” him. But I just expressed lots and lots of thoughts turned to words directly to him. What he was crying about was I didn’t ignore his actions and I directly called him out. It wasn’t even until days later that he confirmed that no one even came over that night, and then tried to make that sound like a good thing. It didn’t bother me a sexual partner was ever coming over, but it was the way he went about it. But I’ve also learned that it’s a closeted lifestyle choice. It’s a path or a journey that he got on to years ago and isn’t proud of. Not his sexuality, but the never ending and never fulfilling string of booty calls and hook ups. Twenty or more years of it left him feeling very confused emotionally and with severe anxiety. He was referred to as a hummingbird, and that is not an inaccurate description. He does behave as if he slowed or stopped for too long that he would explode.
That’s not to say he couldn’t watch movies or TV shows. He could and he would also be distracted. Keeping his attention was another difficult task for him, and combined with his drinking, jeez, just a mild nightmare. There was a time early on we were watching What We Do In The Shadows, a really funny TV show about vampires, and an episode finished and he had at least one drink in him and then he put the same episode back on. That was probably the first time I called him out.
His reaction was total denial. He pretended that he didn’t just watch the episode instead of admitting a mistake. And this was also how he was choosing to live his life. Unapologetically. And that’s a thing in the gay lifestyle but it’s also a pretty common thing as well. He would not take responsibility for his actions and would not say “I’m sorry” or even a simple little “Oops.” There was no acknowledgement of a mistake or an accident even though we were both sitting in it.
More people than ever are sorry today and they’re silent about it. That will keep growing until these people finally admit that they are in fact sorry. A person might be able to lie or deny a thing their whole life but eventually they stop.
The TV episode call out was very different from the “friend coming over, go to your room” confrontation. He was drunk for all of it though.
If you remove the drinking, you remove the unwanted advances, and it would almost have been a great time. Except for the dog stuff. The seven small dogs that were there with five living in a little washroom. They had space in their cages but the room itself was small and cramped. It was so weird.
I tended to the dogs quite a bit, letting them out multiple times a day to run around outside, weather permitting. I ended up feeling a lot of empathy for the dogs. They would howl in unison multiple times a day because they were forced to be kept separate from the rest of the house. The little guys just wanted to be a part of everything they could, which is like a lot of living things.
The five that were kept in the cages were all related, except for one. The two that were allowed to roam the house were also brother and sister. The sister of the two house roamers, Lily, had been given six months to live when I moved in, and I think she lasted about five months. She was completely blind in one eye and was going blind in the other. She had heart medicine to take every morning and her lungs had fluid in them. She was in rough shape.
I quickly understood how fake the environment was and how the dogs were treated. This is weird for me to express. They weren’t beaten but they were abused. DaMan would get drunk and have fights with the small dogs, so they all had very aggressive relationships. He’d hit them but not in a very terrible way, but in a way where he felt it was justified. I didn’t agree with it but did not do or say anything about it.
Lily and her brother Toby were the oldest dogs and had health problems, with Toby’s being much less than Lily’s. Toby basically had allergies, but in the time I spent there he ended up developing a cough and started doing the spitting up of fluid that his sister did, and this was after she passed away.
The month before Lily passed away I asked DaMan about scheduling a vet appointment. She really didn’t seem to be doing well to me, and I think she even experienced rapid weight loss as DaMan started saying she looked very “svelt.” DaMan said he’d look into it and then didn’t, which was pretty typical of him. He was already residing with her dying soon and was just in denial, like he was about a lot of stuff.
The day that Lily did pass away I practically had to shove it in his face that it was happening. I had to tell him she wasn’t doing good, and he pretended she was fine, and I had to insist she wasn’t. Basically she staggered into my room and had the worst worn out look on her. When I told DaMan he checked on her and apparently she took a poop in my room and he thought that was the greatest thing, taking her unexpected pooping as a good sign. I explained to him that pooping like that is a thing that happens before dying. He took her downstairs and put her outside. I was pretty worked up and didn’t go with him. A few minutes later I went downstairs and he told me that Lily had passed away outside.
He ignored his sick and dying dog all the way to the very end and even removed her from inside her home before she passed. This was so weird and cruel to me and almost exactly like my aunt. A running away from real life-changing events. I get so bugged by that type of behavior. It might root from my own not being there when my mom passed away.
I took a rage induced walk and DaMan buried Lily in the backyard under a stone she liked to sunbathe on. I later learned that when he was downstairs with her that he called the other guy who used to live there and tried to get him to do something. That guy told DaMan to just stay with her, which he did his best at doing.
There ended up being six dogs now, as well as mine, so seven dogs in total still. I also believe that DaMan was doing his best here, and he’s not that great with heightened emotional situations, which is a pretty common thing. Some people put in more effort when they can see how a situation will benefit them and that makes doing challenging things easier to take on sometimes. He was heartbroken when his dog passed away and he was helpless to do anything and that’s a pretty relatable situation to be in for a lot of people, the loss of a loved one, human or otherwise.
For the longest time I thought that personal loss was going to be a conscious unifying factor in being human. Like, we would all realize that we had all experienced the same kind of loss and that would calm us down. With the ongoing pandemic though, and a war going on, it does seem more clear than ever that we haven’t chosen to unite to prevent further loss, but as long as we exist so does our choice.
It’s possible for people to go through life in phases of riding high and crawling on the ground. When I met DaMan I was in a very in-between period, and he represented himself in a very low period. After living with him, it seemed like his low period had been going on for a while, for years, and the only high points were caused by other people. What I mean here is that his way of finding his happiness or contentment or satisfaction was always through another person and never with himself. That something had happened at some point, possibly even multiple times at different points, that caused him great duress and the only key to his happiness was found with another person. As I’ve mentioned many times now, that is pretty common for a lot of people.
What ended up happening was our mutual friend, my Thanksgiving friend, decided to move to the East coast. This person also happened to be the only thing keeping DaMan remotely close to being honest. She was a friend and surrogate mother to him, someone he opened up to as much as he wanted to, who did her best to be honest with his decisions and what was happening in his life. Her moving was another huge emotional blow to DaMan.
She asked for help in her packing and cleaning and moving on and DaMan was unable to show up for her. I believe it was emotionally too much for him to face, a friend who he valued more than he could admit, was leaving him. He never helped her with her moving, but I did. I also thought her moving was pretty abrupt and it was a bit surreal for me. At the same time she was desperately needing a fresh start and lots of people accomplish that by moving to a new place.
Thinking now, a fresh start is something I’ve not yet really done. I’ve felt like a new person before, but it’s always been with continuing going and putting my troubles behind me. The whole concept of “wherever you go, there you are” and “you can’t run away from yourself” applies when I think of things like fresh starts. We’ve all got years of experience that we take with us, stories, and the better we’ve processed and handled those, with our best honestly, makes us comfortable with ourselves and it can change the idea of a fresh start from escaping something to some kind of adventure.
In the case of DaMan’s friend, it seemed to be a bit of both. She set her bridges on fire and was ready to accept whatever was coming next. The whole burning the bridges built over years seemed to me like the escape part, which is a thing I can relate to, and her excitement for her next chapter was also relatable. After DaMan’s decision to be unable to help her move, after being friends for a decade, she burnt that bridge too.
With her moving away, DaMan now had no one to keep up appearances to as much as he did before. He let his former everything-partner move back into the house, unofficially, which is something our mutual friend would have raised hell on him about. It took me a bit to figure out what was even going on.
When it came to his former partner moving back in, that was an idea that I came up with on my own, and it was when our mutual friend was still living in the area. What I realized was how deeply DaMan cared about his former partner, so I suggested if the partner dude made an agreement to change his lifestyle habits-the drug use and the drinking-then him moving in and everyone moving forward together was a thing that I would be supportive of and on board with. DaMan appreciated my suggestion but made it clear that his former partner had no interest in changing any of his habits that contributed to his lifestyle.
With no desire to change anything that led to a SWAT team being called on his home before I moved in, he allowed his partner to start living there again. Things just got incredibly strange and uncomfortable for me at that point. Because almost the entire time that I had been living there the narrative was that this guy was crazy and on drugs and horrible and selfish and basically a total nightmare but he’s really great too because he’s so attractive. It makes sense, but it also doesn’t.
When I finally met the former partner, he reminded me of myself and our birthdays were even a day or two apart. It was really funny to me how similar I thought the two of us were. And it was through him that I learned and confirmed that DaMan played a much bigger role in the drug use and activities that ended up with the SWAT team being called. And that made a lot of horrible sense to me too.
I found myself in a situation that I had no idea what was really going on, other than DaMan was super hungry for sex all the time. I had no idea how honest these guys were with themselves or with each other and there was no agreement about not doing drugs or commitment to improving or changing lifestyles or anything like that. I’m aware that my presence there was a change in itself, but not being able to get honest, straight forward answers or confirmations was a big issue for me. I legitimately didn’t know what was going on and DaMan pretended he didn’t know, so I decided to stop paying rent and move out. I had no clue where I was going to go, but leaving a situation that was rooted in dishonesty, to be as kind as possible, was something I was more than happy to walk away from.
With all of this said, there’s the possibility of a very happy future that the two of them can have together. It requires commitment from both of them and the changing of destructive habits, but it is absolutely achievable and attainable for them and I truly hope they succeed in a happy future. If they admit the desire to allow beneficial life changing things to happen for themselves and each other, they will.