I Love You But Youre Being Gross
Transcriber: JULIANA CARLESSI
Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Nine months ago, I sat
in an emergency room on suicide watch.
I felt numb to everything
except for the weight of loneliness.
I had no idea why I felt this way
or why everybody around me
said that I was toxic.
Without knowing it at the time,
I was the living, breathing
definition of toxic masculinity.
I grew up sheltered
in Mitchellville, Iowa.
I went to church, school
and worked on the farm,
although mom and dad in the front row
might argue about how much work
was actually done.
My whole life changed when I picked up
a basketball for the first time.
To be honest, I hate sports.
I never enjoyed playing or watching them.
But my family didn’t have
money growing up,
and I knew that if I wanted
to go to college,
I’d have to find a way to pay for it.
And I found out by complete accident
that apparently you can get your college
paid for by the game of basketball.
I was watching Michael Jordan’s last game.
I was seven years old, and the salaries
of the players popped up on the screen,
and I turned to my dad and I’m like,
“Pops, like, why do these dudes
make so much money?”
And he said, because
they were good at basketball.
And I saw this silly game
as an opportunity to rewrite my story,
to get out of Mitchellville.
So I started going to basketball camps.
I tried out for travel teams
and spent an insane amount of time
trying to dunk a basketball like Mike.
By the time I was in eighth grade,
I was recruited on a national level.
I became obsessed with the game,
and it was really easy to hide
behind that number four jersey.
Deep down, I knew
that I was a bisexual boy
who was terrified of anyone finding out
that I was bisexual and hated sports,
so I covered it up with what I perceived
to be masculine traits,
I wanted to be just like
the other good basketball players,
so I studied them.
I saw how they acted,
and then I mirrored their behaviors.
I tried my best to grow a beard,
wore as much Nike and Jordan as I could,
and even like serial dated girls,
all in hopes of masking my bisexuality.
In the process of hiding
my identity, I lost myself.
My behavior started to shift
when I was a junior in high school.
I started disrespecting
everyone around me.
I was a good enough athlete that I saw
nothing wrong with how I was acting,
and honestly, in my perception,
I was rewarded for it.
I was all-state, I was setting records,
I was in the paper.
I had made a name for myself.
But nobody ever talked about,
like, the real Scott;
they only talked about number four,
because that’s all I let them see.
I accepted a scholarship to the university
at Albany in New York.
Getting out of Iowa
sounded like a dream to me.
And it was a dream
until right before I left;
I received a call
from my girlfriend at the time.
She told me that she was pregnant.
I remember that call,
we were scared out of our minds.
In my mind, I had to maintain this profile
of masculinity, so I acted strong.
In hindsight, I acted like I didn’t care.
I did care, but I was filled
with so much fear.
And I couldn’t let anyone
see that emotion.
My perception of what it meant to be a man
was that vulnerability equaled weak.
So I suppressed anything
that would make me appear as weak.
I didn’t tell my parents,
my brothers, my friends.
It was a dark secret
that I just wanted to go away.
I called one of my coaches and told him.
He said that having a child
would be harmful to my basketball career.
And while the decision was hers
and hers alone to make,
it was pretty clear coming from an adult
the advice that we should take,
and we knew no better.
She drove to Missouri with money
that I stole from my parents.
She had an abortion.
I felt so much guilt.
I was living a lie.
I was so afraid of being exposed
for being bisexual,
for hating sports, for being smart.
And my toxic masculine behavior
had reached a point
where my fear had taken priority
over a child’s life.
I didn’t know how to process
or communicate what I was feeling.
So my response became substances
or running away.
I moved to New York,
dropped out after three days.
I know that we need to be statistically
correct on stages like this,
but that has to be one of the shortest
lived visual basketball careers out there.
And so I moved back to Mitchellville
because it felt safe,
and I needed to feel safe
at that point in time.
And after a few months of working
at a car shop in Mitchellville,
I received a call from Marty Bell,
the head coach at Quincy University.
He said a player on his team quit
in the pre-season,
and he had a scholarship for me.
Literally, anything in the world sounded
better than sandblasting rust off of cars
for minimum wage.
So I moved to Quincy.
My act followed me
and just continued to get worse.
I was trying to numb my pain
to cover up what I was feeling inside,
to stay hidden behind
that number four jersey.
My time at QU can pretty well
be summed up by several points:
drinking, drugs, sex, stealing.
I was broken.
No one knew the real me.
I didn’t even know myself.
I’d reached a dark place
where I stopped caring about everything.
I started shoplifting on a regular basis.
I was drinking during class
to get through the day.
And I was crying myself to sleep
almost every night.
And I wish this is the part of the story
where it gets better, but it didn’t.
In April of my sophomore year at QU
I was arrested on felony retail theft
and aggravated battery charges.
I was 20 years old.
Now, Mom taught me how to be smart,
but I walked into Quincy Walmart
wearing a QU basketball shirt
as if in 2014 the Quincy Police Department
didn’t have the capability
of like Google searching QU basketball
and like seeing me on the website.
So my friends started calling
me, like, “The cops are on campus.”
I had to turn myself in,
and I spent three days in jail.
It broke me.
And this was a wake up call, you know.
I made some real superficial,
like fake level changes in my life.
I did everything I could
to just be this clean cut model citizen.
I was lying my face off.
I was a fraud.
Now that basketball was done
I was hiding behind a new costume
of public speaking.
I would travel all over
the state of Iowa speaking.
I would share my story of how I made all
of these “positive changes” in my life.
I was lying my face off
behind closed doors.
I would realize that I needed
to listen to the words
that I was giving other people.
And I was disgusted with myself,
but instead of changing my behavior,
I just blamed everyone around me.
Of course, nothing could ever be my fault.
All of my feelings of depression,
anxiety and guilt
were centered around being closeted.
All of these emotions that
I had suppressed for 27 years,
finally got too heavy.
I completely isolated myself
from the world.
And the loneliness grew
to a dark place mentally.
I wanted to kill myself.
Lying in that emergency room bed,
I was faced with a decision:
I could either be honest with myself
and others about who I really am,
or I could continue hurting
and projecting that hurt
on everyone around me.
And I chose to feel better.
After checking out of the emergency room,
I signed up for therapy,
got on some antidepressants
and started being purely vulnerable
with those around me.
I came out as a bisexual the week after.
It felt like I let out a breath
that I had been holding my entire life.
While I’m new to this whole
journey of loving myself,
and I am getting better at it
every single day,
one of my favorite ways to manage
the hard days is by writing poetry.
And I wrote this a while back.
When we refuse to learn,
we refuse to grow.
When we choose to learn,
we choose to grow.
And this growth showed me
how to love my genuine self.
Prior to therapy, I didn’t know
what toxic masculinity meant,
and then I learned.
Maya Salam in The New York Times
lists the traits of toxic masculinity as:
suppressing emotion or masking distress.
Check.
Maintaining an appearance of hardness.
Check.
And violence as an indicator of power.
Check.
I checked all the boxes.
But instead of guilting or shaming myself,
I decided to have a conversation
with myself in the bathroom mirror.
That conversation started with, “Hey dude,
like, I love you, but you’re being gross.”
And I had finally reached
a place in my acceptance
where I realized that my problems
weren’t anyone else’s fault.
My problems weren’t toxic
masculinity’s fault.
My problems were my fault
and were a result of me
projecting my insecurities
about being bisexual onto other people.
I’d finally faced
what I was running from …
myself.
After all, you can’t outrun your shadow,
so why not get to know your shadow
a little bit better?
As I got to know myself better,
I started to write.
Whenever I would feel sad,
depressed, anxious or stressed,
I would write down what I was feeling,
and then I started noticing patterns.
And once I noticed patterns,
I would think about what was causing them
and then … guess what cracked the code?
Now I’m much more capable
of thinking about, processing
and communicating
what I’m feeling to other people.
And it’s important to note that I didn’t
just come up with these tools
to process emotion in healthy ways.
It took work, hard work, sometimes
really, really uncomfortable work.
But it’s taught me how
to be comfortable in my own skin.
My first week of therapy
is literally the best example
of getting out of my comfort zone.
My therapist most likely
got tired of hearing me complain
that I had nothing to do for fun.
I’d spent so much of my life doing
something that I didn’t love doing
that at 27 years old, I genuinely
did not know what my hobbies were.
And of course, that was not
a good enough excuse for her,
so she’s like, “What’s something
that you enjoy doing?”
And I’m like, “Well,
I just got a new iPhone.
My old one got stolen at Jordan Creek Mall
at the food court last week.
So, like, I’ve enjoyed taking pictures
on this new iPhone.”
And she’s like, “Go buy a real camera.”
Next morning, hauled out
west of Boyd, like, buy a Canon T6.
I had never shot with a camera before.
And I had a blast
on my first day of shooting.
I walked over 12 miles
throughout Des Moines
just taking pictures
and having conversations with strangers.
But there was one interaction
that left a permanent mark on me.
I was wheeling down a grocery cart
full of stuff for the house [Inaudible].
And I met a man named Hector,
and he told me
that he was a boxer from Philly,
and that life brought him to Des Moines,
and he’s sleeping on the street.
He took one look at my camera
and asked if I was any good.
So I took his picture
and asked for his opinion.
He gave me a hug and through his tears,
he said that that interaction
made him feel more human again.
And I will never forget the next line
out of his mouth; he said,
“You should give these away
for one hug, bro.”
And that inspired me to start giving away
photo shoots for one hug.
And in a way, photography
truly has helped save my life.
It helps me see the beauty in everything.
Things that I would otherwise miss.
Almost like I’m looking
through a different lens.
It introduced me to new friends,
some of which I see here today.
They hold me accountable, they believe
in me and they love me, and I love them.
My life has certainly been a wild ride,
but everything got much more
simple when I realized
that I was in charge
of my own amusement park.
My hope for this community
is that we gain a greater understanding
of what toxic masculinity is.
As men we have a responsibility
to be aware of our emotions,
while also being aware of how we project
those emotions onto other people.
And here’s a crazy idea.
Like maybe we hold each other accountable
on these things as men.
Like we hold each other accountable
to pull up at the barbershop
or pull up at the gym or pull up
at the Y to play some hoops.
Like crazy idea,
but I think it might work.
Thank you.
(Laughs)
I’ve been a lot of things in my life.
A convict,
a college athlete, college dropout,
college educator - shout out DMU.
You know, y’all changed my life.
And even in December, I finished
a 4.0 Master’s in Education program.
(Cheers) (Applause)
But my favorite thing
is being able to look
myself in the mirror,
stare toxic masculinity
right in the eye and say, I love you,
but you’re being gross.
(Applause)