When Ghersi recalls the experience of coming out to a close friend for the first time, he falls back on a metaphor that he will invoke several times during my week with him in London, whenever we happen upon a moment in his biography where he finds himself at the precipice of a life altering decision. “That was like jumping off a cliff,” he says. “My survival instincts—everything I’d trained myself to do—were telling me not to do it, but something inside of me drove me forward. You jump off a cliff because you know that when you land, and you crash like a bunch of Legos and you fall apart, you’ll pick up the pieces that are left of you. But you don’t reattach the ones that are not useful to you, that don’t feel like they’re you. Every time you jump, you have this opportunity—this really beautiful, fertile, uncomfortable period—where you’re not whole, but your essence is helping you attach things onto you, things that inspire you, things that you think are full of life. That’s kind of like what happened to me.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 17:21:57 +0000