I Am Who I Am

Volume 1 2022

WRITING THIS in May 2004 was the milestone of a lifetime. I had been given the keys to the kingdom.

This was long before we began singing this in non-religious popular music. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not even allowed to say this name, let alone write it of myself!’

The sense of peace, and the liberation that followed … well … one of those not-to-be-forgotten moments.

My friend Dragan - in France - immediately sent this well-known image upon reading it.

Part I

I am who I am
I am what I am
I like who I am
I like what I am

There is nothing wrong with me 
I am not damned
I am not an abomination 
in the Eyes of the LORD

I did not choose to be gay.
How could a three-year-old possibly 
make such a choice?!
So if I did not choose 
then it is obvious
I was born gay

It is perfectly natural to have sex with a man 
if you are gay 
It is perfectly natural to have sex with a woman
if lesbian
It is perfectly natural to have sex with either
if one finds a natural yearning in equal measure

I love my work
I love the challenge of doing the work I do
realising that, I am, after all 
cut out for it!

See what a friend texted three days ago:

“I’m glad I knew Ken 1 and I like Ken 2: 

and I’m perfectly happy with what you do as Ken 2

because at this time and era 

Ken number 2 fits like a glove”

Part II 

I want my brain to work
to receive as much information as possible;
to capture all that I have shunned or rejected
for forty years and more
because I wrongly believed 
that I was mentally disordered,
guilty because of who and what 
I was and am,
and desperate to conceal
because not to do so
means, in the eyes of religionists,
I am is an abomination
because, so say, I Am has decreed that
and that, therefore, I rank alongside
the Untermenschen [i]
which means we are both heading
on parallel screeching lines
to the same destination

Part III 

I meet the most incredible people:
people who have a handle on life;
people who live in the real world;
people who make marvellous contributions 
to that world.

People who are ambitious
People who love life 
and live it to the full 
and want to live it to the full.

People with hearts,
real hearts;
people who refuse to condemn;
people who tell me I’m a pratt;
people who tell me to get real:
to sort myself out
to stop judging
to live as I should live
to stop hurting people …
in short … those around me
with my outdated, blinkered ways
and narrow-mindedness.

Part IV

Oh, what bliss to be free of that!
Oh what bliss to walk the promenade 
Along the seafront
My shoulders back 
and my head high!!
No longer with guilt or shame
for who I am and what I am.

Oh what bliss to walk the pier
Yes!

A real pier …

Not just the one I hold in my mind 
and write about …

To feel the wind on my face
To see my friends …

To see my coat around my shins 
keeping me warm in my thoughts,
as my scarf trails horizontal in the gale …

To feel the fresh clean water on my face 
from the rain and sea spray 
when the tide is in
this wonderful, exhilarating cleansing salt!

Part V 

Oh what ecstasy to receive
the unconditional love and support 
of my family 
of my friends
yes, my real friends
those who say, “So what?!?”

The lovely text messages
of encouragement and support
from real friends …
who love me … … for who I am 
and … … what I am

What joy to see the colours now 
no longer jaded or faded by guilt, 
false guilt
and some tyrannical god
who only wants to beat the living daylights out of me 
because I am told,
I have dared to defy Him

Of those who wrote those words
four millennia past
were, indeed, such very unhappy people

Part VI

Oh what joy to discover Him
for who He really is

The Creator

To see beauty in everything that is good.
This beauty reaches out to everyone.

Oh what incredible joy
to once again
entertain real ambition and set goals.

Oh what relief to have thrown overboard 
those idiotic notions:

I must not be ambitious.
I must not do this,
I must not do that,
I must not laugh,
I must always see the sin …
I must always see that everyone else 
has messed up lives;
that most are on that wide road!
And, I’m told, if I follow as the flock follows the shepherd
that this puts me on that very, very narrow path
and that it is such a privilege
for many are those who walk the wide road
few are those who find the narrow path

Part VII

What rubbish! 
What stupidity! 
What blackmail!
How vicious is this religiosity!

Part VIII 

Yes – ambition
Real ambition! All of them:
To publish my book and many more;
To be a good lawyer;
To own an apartment on the promenade; 
To go on cruises;
To go to Hamburg again;
To visit Ireland;
To return to Belfast;
To return to the Isle of Man;
To go to Mannheim, 
Neustadt an der Wein Straße, 
Speyerdorf and Koblenz.

And Yes! 
To once again 
walk the Unter Den Linden 
and see the Brandenburg Gate!

To cruise to New York
and see the Statue of Liberty
from the sea!

To drive again
To feel the joy again
To be at the wheel
To drive along the highway
Iglesias, Edwards,
Savage Garden, Classic FM,
Keating, Michael, Dion, Mae
and all the others!

Part IX

What Joy!
What Freedom!

Part X

What freedom I have 

to enjoy the gym

to swim the lengths 

to run the sands

to walk the beach 

to be who I am

and to be what I am.

 Afterword

I

Written originally on 16 May 2004 in Liverpool, published by Spiderwize in "Idle Thoughts" in September 2009, I publish it afresh, here.

It remains the benchmark. That point in the road where, as in the film Now Voyager (1941) Doctor Jaquith (Claude Rains) advises Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) that he is merely pointing to a signpost when we come to that point in a road where we find a fork, and are unsure which way to step.

Have courage. Follow your convictions. Follow your heart. Debunk dogma and rhetoric. You'll be fine! Really!!

II

For me, piers are critical to my sense of balance, of equilibrium.

I live on an island, and our piers take us for walks out to sea, focal points for fun, happiness, friendship and family; places to be at peace with oneself and with one's Maker, however, we perceive our origin. 

Several piers on the North West Coast of England became places where I sorted everything out in those amazing walks in all weathers - now so beautifully captured in this image of another pier, I know not where.

III

Study the image. See, too, the story and the enigmatic beauty captured in the pose, in the gaze landward with one's back to the sea, in the sure knowledge that there is certainty in this life, a purpose to fulfil and gifts in abundance to take those first positive steps in the sand. 

Just as on the road to Emmaus, so, will there be moments when we think we're alone; and then, "did our hearts burn within us?" as we look back and see our steps, sometimes merging into one, sometimes a light, a not of the sun, much brighter, caught almost in the eye’s corner but unseen if we try to look at it directly...an image... shimmering … sometimes a feather alighting... always an inner calm and serenity... a peace that catches the eye of the bystander or fellow walker... aloneness but not loneliness.

IV

A Caveat. What is religion? What is faith?

The two do not go automatically hand in hand. What I believe and disbelieve is my personal business. I would not have written this so boldly in 2004, even though I was extricating myself from the awfulness - an evil, even - of strict Christian fundamentalism. Thank goodness my family were there as I re-entered the real world.

I look around me, at creation, and have no doubt at all. Then I look at religions, and all I see are attempts by people to impose their will. Christianity is a mainstay, but that is for me. It may not be for you. Even this is under increasing scrutiny.

I long ago worked out that the moment regular, insistent attendance at church takes hold, it becomes a vice-like grip, and with it, the attendant inevitable fall-out as this century is in a head-on crash with words written in a different age, with different belief systems, with unawareness of our origin that by no stretch of the imagination could even have been comprehended, and so, best to assume a load of deities and potentates out there governing all, for good and bad alike. No. Not out there. Up there. Up in the sky that they liked to call heaven or the firmament about the earth, or down in the bowels of the earth wherein they reckoned dwelt death, Hades and Hell. Codswallop.

That is not for me.

Too many people have suffered unspeakably, and still do right now, at this moment, at some place in this world, because of absurd beliefs, minds so closed, so under-developed, so destitute of love, or of those constituent elements emanating from love as a natural outpouring, mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation. Instead, insistent that life now and in their realm beyond is for endless sexual gratification.

I do hold to this.

This Universe is so beautiful, so perfect as to have happened by chance. The blot on the landscape is humankind. A species, clever, extreme, tolerant, intolerant, of great intellect, of such debased and evil thinking that it stands apart from the Animal Kingdom, a violent and disgusting rupture upon creation. In ancient mythology, one could almost imagine the penman writing the gods’ bastard.

14 December 2021
All Rights Reserved

© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022

Written upon arrival in Liverpool on 16 May 2004

I have to go, places for people to face and miles before I can sleep … (loose transliteration)

Photo by Samuele Errico Piccarini on Unsplash

Freedom!

What freedom I have 

to enjoy the gym

to swim the lengths 

to run the sands

to walk the beach 

to be who I am

and to be what I am.