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By: ZACK HUDSON
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A little voice in Christopher Nutter’s head started whispering an unhappy message during the author’s 20s, when he was a journalist and bartender in New York.
“It’s all over once you get old,” the voice said.
As it turns out, “old” was somewhere in his 30s, and the voice only got louder as the years rolled on.
“I had a massively traumatizing experience about no longer being young, and I didn’t even have a concept of what Chris would be without being young,” says the author of “The Way Out,” a self-help tale told in first person from the Nutter’s own struggle through addiction, depression, selfishness, anxiety and narcissism.
Nutter brings “The Way Out,” to Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse on July 12.
At age 30 and consumed with the idea that his time as a viable, lovable person was short, Nutter slung himself through a period of holding onto his youth by chasing sex, an addiction it took him years to overcome.
“It hit me like a Mack truck, and I was scared shitless,” he recalls.
As the emptiness of the encounters weighed on him, Nutter began to question what he was really looking for.
“The big warning sign was that before the addiction, I had always concentrated on the things that I enjoyed and that were outside of stress,” he remembers. “Fulfilling an addiction is extremely stressful and exhausting.”
Nutter writes about the lessons he learned through reflections on various points in his life.
“My early 30s period was my toughest times since my early adolescence, and that came as a big surprise to me,” he said. “My primary currency in this world that kept me safe, my youth and desirability, was going to be gone. I didn’t know how I would even feel if I couldn’t look in the mirror and go ‘wow.’”
The clarity Nutter gained from self-examination is what he prescribes for other gay men and lesbians.
Anxiety about attractiveness and age agitated Nutter. “The Way Out” is a guided tour through escaping the emotional issues that plague readers, no matter what they are. The title alludes to gay men, but Nutter says “The Way Out’ is open to everyone.
“Ninety percent of the text deals with very universal issues of love, fear, conflict, sex, friendships, relationships, religion, and everything else that every human being grapples with on a daily basis,” he explains about the book, which was first published in 2006.
Clarity gives lesbians and gay men power to make decisions that can enrich their lives. Above judging choices or behaviors, Nutter says seeking clarity and awareness improves standards of living.
“Be aware of at least one thing, that if the time comes that what you’ve been doing is no longer working, if the thrill is gone and now it’s destructive, there’s always more,” he advises.
In “The Way Out,” Nutter lays out a candid, warts-and-all personal history of his life, which started out in the suburbs of Birmingham, Ala., and so far, finds him in New York. He worked as a journalist and bartender through the seemingly glamorous and fun late 1990s. In the low-lit, party culture of the time, happiness was a fleeting illusion Nutter became adept at creating for himself.
“My whole adult life I was plagued by an overwhelming sense of terror and guilt before I would even open up my eyes,” he admits. “There was extreme frustration and extreme powerlessness, because I was always trying to change other people and other things and fighting monsters out there.”
After hitting bottom and spinning his wheels for years, Nutter’s clarity was realized sometime in his early 30s.
“What changed is I realized the monsters weren’t out there,” he says. “And when that happened, I was flooded with a sense of power.”
Finding his own way out of unhappiness completely shifted Nutter’s life. He encourages readers to do whatever it is they think they need to do to be happy. And if something goes wrong, be aware enough to realize it and beat it.
“It’s not a doctrine,” he says. “It’s about what is right for you.”
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