Missing the Big Picture

my story to help others who don’t love themselves. No matter your situation, nothing is worse than hating yourself. I believe that if Jesus Christ walked the earth today, he would be most disappointed with people not loving themselves. There is so much hatred in the world—genocide, discrimination, war, and so forth—but I believe the most horrible of these is self-hatred.
The only one person you are guaranteed to be with for the remainder of your life is you. Imagine being with somebody for the rest of your life and hating him or her.
So how is self-hatred measured? First, it involves putting other people’s intentions, which are not going to help you grow and develop in any way, ahead of your own. Second, self-hatred can be measured by the feeling that you have to conform to preconceived notions of how to act, instead of just being yourself. I wanted to write my story to make people examine their own lives, feel good about themselves, and stop putting others or themselves down. I also wanted to help all the young men out there. In 2005, soon after George W. Bush started his second term as president, Laura Bush said that she wanted to do more for boys, since they are now trailing behind girls in education, and when you factor in inflation, will earn less than their fathers.1 Bush has said “I feel like, in the United States, that we’ve sort of shifted our gaze away from boys for the last several decades, and that we’ve neglected boys,” “We believe the stereotypes that boys can be self-reliant, that boys don’t cry,” she adds. “And the fact is, all young children—boys or girls—and all adolescents do need a lot of support and a lot of nurturing from their parents and their teachers and the whole community.”2
I wanted to show that young men do struggle with the same issues as girls: self-acceptance, peer pressure, body issues, and relationships.
A friend, Judi Clements, once told me that with confidence and a sense of humor, we can handle life’s greatest challenges. This is my story of how I developed confidence and used my sense of humor to face my issues. I hope you enjoy.

To my darling mother, who did not know what the hell was going to happen to her after she noticed her period was late in 1982.


CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1: BEFORE THE DISEASE
CHAPTER 2: SCHOOL OF HATE—WITH BROTHERS LIKE THESE, NOBODY NEEDS ENEMIES
CHAPTER 3: HIGH SCHOOL, THOSE WEREN’T THE DAYS
CHAPTER 4: THE MIND GAMES BEGIN
CHAPTER 5: COLLEGE—THE BREAK
CHAPTER 6: OOPS, IT HAPPENED AGAIN
CHAPTER 7: NEW BEGINNINGS—2003 AND BEYOND
CHAPTER 8: MALE WHORE
CHAPTER 9: ALL GROWN UP
EPILOGUE


CHAPTER 1
BEFORE THE DISEASE
Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.
—Unknown
I was born in February 1983. Ronald Reagan was still in his first term as President, Pat Benatar was convincing the world that “Love is a Battlefield”, and I was trying to escape from my mother’s uterus. My mother always remembered my birth being the same weekend that one of her favorite singers, Karen Carpenter, died. She was a single mother, and all during my life my father was a very sensitive topic for us to talk about. Even on my birth certificate, the section under “Father” remained blank. My mother did have a relationship with my biological father, but he didn’t want to have children and quickly left my mother after she became pregnant. One question I always had for my mother was, “Why did you name me Luke, knowing that everyone for years after would say, ‘Luke, I am your father,’ and I never met my biological father?” As a child, I would embarrass my mother by asking, if she said hello to a man in the supermarket, “Is that my father?” Or if an older man quoted that famous Darth Vader line from The Empire Strikes Back—“Luke, I am your father”—I would sometimes reply, “You are.”
My first four years I lived in a house in Albany, New York, with my mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, and two cousins—all under the same roof. On the first floor, there were two bedrooms. My mother, grandmother, and I all shared the same room. The other bedroom was my grandfather’s. My grandmother and grandfather had a rocky relationship—to put it mildly—but did not believe in divorce, so they slept in different bedrooms.
The upstairs consisted of an in-law apartment with my two cousins in one room and my aunt and uncle in another. They had their own living room, bathroom, and kitchen. My cousin Alex was only nine months older than me, and his sister, Elise, was three years older than me. They quickly turned into my surrogate brother and sister.
My grandmother always had control over all the family, but it wasn’t because of her personality; it was her mental illness that dictated how my family lived, specifically her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). My mother never even told me what exactly my grandmother suffered from, but I figured out on my own that she had OCD along with the horrible anxiety that comes with it. She routinely saw a psychiatrist but was noncompliant with her medications. Some of my grandmother’s rules were that my grandfather was only able to go to the bank on Friday at 9:20 a.m. My mother was only allowed to wash her laundry one day a week, Sunday at 7:40 p.m. If we came home from grocery shopping at a “bad time,” which was just not a good time according to my grandmother, we would have to wait in the car until my grandmother said it was safe to come in. Nobody ever questioned my grandmother—we were