Hmmmmm....

After a gruelling post-taco pedal around the countryside this afternoon (with cousin and deflated bike clinging on the back) I found myself sitting in front of a documentary by a man who decided that he no longer wanted to be homosexual and had signed up for a special ex-gay support group in Memphis designed to show gay people the error of their ways.

The crux of the Ex-Gay Group's line of reasoning is that nobody is born gay - events in a person's life somehow trigger this unnatural instinct in them and they need to identify where, in a timeline of their life, this was triggered and deal with that trauma.

In these support groups were a broad range of people who believed that homosexuality was unnatural and was not 'who they were' but an affliction or addiction like alcoholism. These were people who were not happy with an element of themselves that (I believe, generally) is a part of who they are and not a personality trait or characteristic that can be eliminated. This concept suddenly shone a light onto a thought that had seeded in my mind somewhere in Peru but had never grown into idea.

To digress for a second.
Several people have asked me (and something Lucas and I have discussed on occasion) what I have learnt from this trip* so far. The idea of people heading to foreign lands or going to retreats to 'find themselves' is not a rare thing. And I admit that this cliched reason for disappearing for a while has occurred to me on occasion. However, while watching the documentary this evening, the idea dawned on me that there is no 'finding yourself' or any other such path of self discovery. I know who I am and you know who you are. The matter gets confused when we are not happy with who we are (or think others wouldn't be happy with who we are) and need to pursue avenues of self-improvement or try to mold ourselves into the people we think we ought to be. I think the real task is to be honest withourselves about our failings and embrace them. In my mind, self-acceptance is an important branch on our tree that we need to develop before we can say we are happy balanced people.

Apologies to anyone who thinks that was a fairly obvious conclusion. But it just occurred to me and puts some feelings from South America into perspective.

*I still refer to this as a 'trip', but in reality it is a trip just as much as Canberra was a trip. This is not a holiday from my life, but rather is now my life.