the Men from the Guys

the Universe has a funny way of working, of this i am convinced. last night, after work, Stephen and i went to our weekly Weight Watchers meeting. after about 20 minutes into the meeting, the door opens and in walk 2 older women and a girl in her twenties. One of the women was the mother of my high school friend who had recently met with an accident, the other was his aunt and the girl was his cousin. Mrs C (that's what i'd called her back in HS) looked much older and pretty worse for the wear. i leaned over to Stephen and told him who she was and he whispered back, "this is fate, you need to talk to her". so for the rest of the meeting, i deliberated and weighed my options, and decided he was right (what a shock). so, we waited outside and i re-introduced myself. i'll spare you the long story (just this once) and get to my point:

while talking to her i felt myself completely revert back to the kid i was in HS; shy, nervous and stammering. i had no idea how to talk to her as one adult to another. when it came time to introduce Stephen to her, i felt like i was coming out to my mom all over again. now, i have no idea whether or not i she was aware that i was gay, but i'm fairly certain that her son may have mentioned it back when i came out to him. still, i felt such trepidation and nervousness, that i turned into a stammering fool. the problem is, i kept seeing myself through her eyes and all i could see was that kid i used to be; i felt like such a child in her presence, since that was the only role i'd ever played. after some polite chit-chat, we parted ways and she promised to pass on my good wishes to her son (who's made a full recovery, incidentally). i got in the car, flustered and red-faced.

this experience, coupled with Monday's post from Byron, has really gotten me thinking of how i see myself. Somehow, i'm 30 years old and (mostly) self-sufficient, yet i still don't think of myself as a man. what defines what a man is? it can't just be about age; is it maturity? is it responsibility to oneself and others? i'm not 100% sure what yardstick one uses to measure being a man by, but i feel like i'm falling a bit short.

for a very long time i thought of myself as a "kid"; never a "boy" or boi". maybe it's because i knew quite alot of "adults" and usually went for older men to whom i was a kid. i went from being a kid to being a "guy" in my early twenties, when i grew a goatee and began to lose my hair, and i've hovered at "guy" since then.

so here i am a CawfeeGuy at 30. i'm not sure when i'll become a man or if, to the outside world, i already am. all i know is that i'll never be a "kid" again, and that sometimes...though admittedly very rarely...i get intimidated by "adults"; people who were adults back when i was a boy or a kid. when that happens all i can do is try not to imagine what i think they see (a kid playing dress-up, pretending to be an adult), but project what i want them to see:

a boy who was a kid who became a guy, but is still trying to become a man.