The Poetry of Becoming Whole

On Contradiction, Identity, and the Courage to Contain Multitudes

Before I came out, I thought survival required being two people.

One version of me dated men. She was visible, legible, congratulated. She fulfilled the expectations placed on a young woman coming of age at the turn of the millennium. She was supposed to be looking for a husband, for a father to her future children, for the life everyone assured me would eventually feel like my own.

The other version loved a woman.

She existed mostly in private, hidden even from myself. The men weren’t so much love interests as decoys. Distractions that bought me time while I tried to understand why the life I was performing never quite fit. I didn’t experience these two selves as a contradiction necessarily. Not at the time. Fragmentation was not a failure of identity. It was a strategy for survival.

Many queer people know this strategy intimately.

In my conversation with poet Julian Randall, I found myself returning again and again to the question of wholeness. We talked about masculinity, vulnerability, race, queerness, poetry, justice — the ways we tend to divide ourselves to become legible to the world. Listening to him describe tenderness not as weakness but as a form of courage, I realized we were circling the same idea from different directions.

We’re often told that coming out is about finally becoming ourselves, as though there were always one authentic self waiting beneath the disguise. But that has never quite captured my experience. There was no singular identity to discover. It was instead the slow, painstaking work of allowing incompatible truths to exist in the same body. In time, I eventually stopped demanding that only one part of me be visible.

Perhaps this is one of queerness’s greatest gifts: challenging categories by exposing the fiction that we were ever meant to fit neatly inside them.

Lately, I’ve watched two friends arrive at this same threshold. Both married men when they were young. Both built lives they believed were their own. Both, in their thirties, encountered an unmistakable, overwhelming desire for another woman. Their stories are otherwise completely different, yet they share something profound. They weren’t suddenly transformed into different people. They became impossible to divide any longer.

Patriarchy, it seems, depends on division and fragmentation.

It divides reason from emotion, strength from tenderness, men from women, public from private, power from creation, desire from belonging, and on and on. It tells boys that vulnerability is weakness and girls that power belongs elsewhere. It teaches us to amputate whatever part of ourselves threatens the order it depends on.

Even motherhood is narrated through this logic. Women grow human beings from two microscopic cells, constructing hearts and lungs and nervous systems organ by miraculous organ inside their own bodies. It is difficult to imagine a more astonishing act of creation. And yet, cultures organized around patriarchy have long insisted that children bear the names of their fathers, as though lineage flows primarily through the one who did not build the body itself. The architecture of power has always depended on redirecting our attention away from where creation actually occurs.

Another gift of queerness is that it interrupts that illusion.

It asks whether the boundaries we’ve inherited are descriptions of reality or just bad habits of thought. That question has followed me into places that seem to have nothing to do with sexuality. But maybe they do.

Like the scientific fact that pain and pleasure activate many of the same regions of the brain. Neuroscientists can distinguish them by the patterns they produce, but their architecture overlaps in surprising ways. Pain and pleasure, it turns out, are close relatives. I often think about that and how it seems to prove that humanity has long misunderstood contradiction itself.

Pain and pleasure. Grief and joy. Fear and desire. Life and death. We treat these as opposing forces, yet anyone who has loved deeply knows how often they arrive into our lives holding hands. The birth of a child is painful. Healing hurts. Longing is exquisite because it is unfinished. Even pleasure contains the shadow of its ending.

Wholeness has never meant eliminating contradiction, but rather, expanding it until it no longer feels like a threat.

I’ve known alcoholics who died devastating deaths after breaking the hearts of everyone who loved them. I could have been one of them. I’ve watched random cruelty and illness fracture lives that deserved gentleness instead. Some nights the universe feels breathtakingly indifferent.

One October evening I drove beneath a massive yellow moon hanging low on the horizon. Ten minutes later it had become small and white, nearly swallowed by clouds. Nothing about the moon had changed. The Earth had simply continued its patient turning, carrying me with it while I mistook movement for stillness.

That image has stayed with me.

We are bodies moving through an immeasurably larger choreography. The Earth spins. The planets orbit. Galaxies drift. Every object casts a shadow because light exists. Time itself emerges because bodies move in relation to other bodies.

Reality seems to speak in pairs.

Light and darkness. Birth and death. Expansion and collapse. Pain and pleasure.

But there is so much space between the poles and the act of living, for me, is pushing them wider and wider. Queer people have been opening that same kind of spaciousness for generations.

We have learned, often because we had no other choice, that identity can hold paradox. That love can rewrite family. That bodies refuse the stories imposed upon them. That contradiction is evidence that reality is more generous than the language we’ve inherited to describe it.

Poetry has always understood paradox this way. That’s one reason Julian Randall’s work feels so necessary to me. His poems refuse to flatten identity into something linear or singular. They give it instead a round shape. Whole. They allow tenderness and rage, joy and grief, vulnerability and resilience to occupy the same space without demanding that one resolve the other. They practice the kind of wholeness I’m trying to describe. They make you feel it in yourself.

Sometimes I wonder whether there is, after all, a vast and meticulous kind of care beneath everything. One that continually urges life toward integration.

When I place my fingertips against my wrist, I feel a pulse. A quiet insistence. Something inside me seeking. Longing?

Perhaps that seeking/longing is what has always been holy. The movement itself. The body forever reaching toward a version of itself spacious enough to hold every contradiction it contains.