Being Large. Containing Multitudes.

A word of introduction: this one's personal before it gets professional. If that's not your jam, feel free to jump ship here. Otherwise, carry on.

When I first self-identified, publicly, as a gay man, I was 24 years-old. I was, I thought, finally living my truth out loud. And live out loud I did. I joined the board of a local LGBTQ+ youth advocacy organization, later became its executive director. I marched in parades, became an advocate for marriage equality, rethought my language, my wardrobe, my politics. And I dated like a teenager. Being gay became a pillar of my identity and my way of moving through the world. I found community in a way I’d never known and a chosen family that embraced me without judgment. Over the next ten years, I would speak to thousands of students about my own experiences, working with and on behalf of young queer people to create safe spaces and equal opportunities. I had two deeply meaningful long-term(ish) relationships over that time – relationships I felt the need to fight for every day just to feel recognized and safe. I felt I was both one of a kind and one of many at the same time – finally me, and finally part of a larger we.

And then a surprising thing happened.

In the spring of 2009, as I was exiting a 5-year relationship with my then partner, I fell in love with a woman. Though I’d had relationships with women as a teen and young twenty-something, and though I’d been aware of occasional attraction to women over the years, I’d come so completely to think of myself as gay, as queer, that it hadn’t occurred to me that I might again someday entertain or pursue a relationship that wasn’t with a man. But here I was, very much falling for a woman. So I followed my heart. There was some trepidation, but also certainty that love, not sex or gender, was the thing.

Surprised though I might have been by my own feelings, it was the responses around me that caught me most off-guard. It seems that in constructing my identity as a queer person, I’d encouraged the investment of emotions on the part of others as well. A handful of my queer friends were immediately supportive; they may have had a question or two, but they were as present and loving that day as they had been the day before and the day before that. Others though acted as if I had perpetrated a betrayal – as if I’d somehow lied or misrepresented who I was. Despite our unison cries of “love is love,” this love seemed. . .somehow less, somehow, fraudulent. Those early months and years in this new relationship with the woman that would become my wife, were filled with rejection, pain, and distance from people I had come to call family. I hadn’t, and never have, stopped identifying as a queer person. And yet, the freedom to evolve beyond that single narrative, one I’d eagerly embraced myself, has been a journey.

It occurs to me all these years later, that the single stories we tell about ourselves can be just as damaging or challenging, whether at our own hands or those of others, as when we tell a single story about a whole community, region, or nation of people. Whether our own lives, or the identities of others, dismissing the single story in favor of many stories is crucial to our understanding of self and one another. The word “and,” I think, is one of the most powerful of all. Embrace the and. Practice the and.

We are – I am – perfect AND flawed, lovers AND fighters, sincere AND misleading, kind AND cruel, and on and on and. . .

What you ask does this have to do with. . .well. . .anything you’d care about?

Good question, glad you asked.

If we aspire to be a leader of others, better, a practitioner of leadership serving others, then it’s crucial we first learn to lead ourselves. Lead ourselves away from singularity, from single (simple) mindedness, rigidity about well, much of anything. And lead ourselves into possibility, pause, deep listening, learning, and identifying more with and less as.

If leadership is helping people face difficult challenges and do the work and learning necessary to realize a better future - and I 100% believe that’s what leadership is - then we’d be foolish to think we can practice that work effectively without doing our own work first. For starters, we need to be good at praxis, essentially the never-ending cycle of theory, action, and thought (or better, reflection, followed by a new theory, a different action, and more reflection).

I once thought I knew who I was; and I did. Kind of, or perhaps in part. But like Walt Whitman adds parenthetically in Song of Myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. You too are large. You too contain multitudes.

In my case, some of those multitudes I’m fond of, some less so. And some are still hidden to me, destined to make an appearance just so and at just the wrong (right!) time. Some of those multitudes are my history, my family, my ancestry, and the choices I’ve made – good, bad, and otherwise. They all rent a bit of acreage somewhere inside. I can’t always control when they show up, nor necessarily evict them from their land, but I can control how I respond to them. I can take the time to know whether the want or need they’re going on about matters or not.

The best practitioners of leadership I’ve known are keen to their needs, desires, and ego-driven liabilities. They’re not void of them, they’ve just met them before, recognize them when they walk through the door, and know how to show them to a quiet corner long enough to let the learning (and leading) carry on.

How about your being large? How about your multitudes? How do they show up and mess with or support your ability to practice leadership with integrity, insight, and impact?