Oubliette

There is a word that I learned a long time ago.  I’m not sure how I was exposed to it; maybe I learned it from one book or another.  The word is oubliette.  It’s a French word and, if memory serves, means “place of forgetting.”  In a practical sense, it’s basically a very isolated dungeon cell. 

I don’t know why this word has stuck with me over the years.  Words tend to do that to me; I learn the most random word and its etymology and it’s permanently carved into the tissue of my brain.  But this word, oubliette, is one that has been especially bewitching over the years. 

It’s human nature to want to forget things like embarrassing experiences.  We all have those “I just wanted to crawl under a rock and die” moments, as if the underside of that rock would become a metaphysical clinic for specialty brain surgeries.  Once we’re checked in, the world famous French surgeon, Escargots à la Bourguignonne, would skillfully work his medical magic and remove the mortifying memory.

The thing is, though, that even if we could remove the memory of our embarrassing blunders, other people would still remember them.  And isn’t that what makes an embarrassing moment embarrassing—that other people were there to witness our screw ups?  We feel embarrassed because we are worried about how people will judge our words or actions. 

When I was a completely awkward and totally uncool teenager (as opposed to the perfectly uncoordinated and exceedingly maladroit adult that I have become), I remember one painful incident in which I said something and walked away wondering when exactly I had become the social disaster I had just witnessed.  I grew up in a small, rural community.  In our community was a store on the corner of the intersection that boasted the only stoplight in the entire county.  This was “The Merc.”  Merc being short for mercantile, an all-purpose store that sold everything from paint for your kitchen to long underwear for grandpa.  For some reason or another I had just stopped at “The Merc” before heading up the street to the county fair where, as luck would have it, I would run into my much cooler cousin and one of his friends from the upper echelons of our class at school.  For some reason that cannot be explained, that completely defies logic, that still makes my inner self cringe and curl up into the fetal position, I told my cool cousin in front of his super cool friend, “You should go to “The Merc.”  They have pants on sale.”  I am not exaggerating when I say my cousin and his friend exchanged a look and my cousin literally did the slow, “Okay.”  I said a hasty goodbye and walked away, looking for a place where my humiliation could be forgotten. 

It wasn’t so much what I said, though I suppose that was the catalyst for the embarrassment I felt.  It was how my cousin and his friend saw me in that moment that was the reason I felt embarrassed. 

This isn’t an example of an oubliette.  This is an example of what everyone deals with.  Now let me show you what a contemporary oubliette looks like.

When someone is gay and either hasn’t arrived at a time and place in which they can come out or simply is trapped in a life where coming out isn’t an option, that person is literally locked away in a dungeon inside themselves.  Sometimes the dungeon is of their own making; more often than not it’s the prison which was created by religion and perpetuated by society.  This isn’t about worrying about how people react to the things we say and do.  This is about being terrified at the prospect that people will react poorly to who we actually are. 

Psychology tells us that the prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain behind our forehead, helps us control the things we do and say.  These are our “social breaks” that, as a rule, keep us from saying or doing stupid things at the wrong time.  It’s what helps us from constantly producing episodes in our lives that would force us to seek out the skills of Dr. Escargots à la Bourguignonne

Psychology also tells us that we can’t control our sexuality.  Whereas there is a part of our brain to help protect us from perpetually living out embarrassing moments, there are no “sexuality breaks” to keep us from being attracting to any socially acceptable gender. 

We can learn to cope and recover from embarrassment.  I mean, eventually I was able to look my cousin in the eye again.  When we are trapped in the prison of a sexual identity we can’t admit or express, we truly find ourselves wanting to forget.  We become walking places of forgetting.  We repress, we deny, we compartmentalize—all because we realize there is something about ourselves we cannot change that could or would cause unmitigated damage if it were truly known.

So, like a prisoner locked away in that deepest, darkest dungeon who eventually forgets who they are and what human contact is and even that the love of God touches them in the most abandoned recesses of the most abysmal prison, too many LGBTQ people, trapped in their own private oubliettes, begin to forget these fundamental needs of survival.  We are convinced by well-meaning people that God does not love who we truly are.  We put up walls that prohibit human contact we are programmed to desire lest we betray ourselves.  We desperately try to starve and even kill the part of us that makes us who we are because we can’t possibly be someone that everyone from society to our own family tells us is not acceptable.

It is the most isolating prison imaginable.  It is a prison without walls, where anxiety is the chain around your neck and fear is the jailer.

So why am I writing about this?  Why would I talk about something that’s so depressing?  Something that, thankfully, fewer and fewer people have to struggle with because our culture is finally changing?  There are a couple of reasons.

The first is that, in writing about this, I hope that it gives you a glimpse into the struggle that nearly every LGBTQ person moves through at some point in their life.  Most people find a way to be pardoned, or at least paroled for periods of time.  Others live their entire lives locked inside of themselves, watching the world experience all that it can while they languish in their oubliette. 

The second reason is that I hope this serves as a reminder.  With all of the success and progress of the LGBTQ community in the United States, it’s sometimes difficult to remember that there are still pockets in our country in which this progress is denied and even undone.  And that’s just in the United States.  Think globally.  Think about the places around the world where to confess who you truly are is to literally risk death.  For all of our progress, we still have a long way to go.

What are your experiences, either with embarrassment over something said or done or with being locked inside of yourself?  I would like to hear your story.  Share what you’re comfortable with.  And remember, if you are locked in your own oubliette, you are not alone.  People are here for you.  I am here for you.