On Becoming Proud of Myself – An Essay

Content Warning: Bullying, Abuse, Suicide

I haven’t always been proud of who I am.

When I was in high school, I knew that I was gay, though the word that was thrown around was fag. I knew and I so desperately wanted to hide who I was, hide the shining light that poured out of me behind a wall of straightness. I wanted to fit in because I was afraid of what would happen if I stood out any more than I did already.

When I was sixteen I had a group of friends in high school, people I had known for a long time. We were a pretty tight group. We were already the misfits, the ones who didn’t fit in. There wasn’t a high school social circle for us, so we made our own.

Max, Sue, Padri and Alana (not their real names) always thirsted for something more, just beyond their reach. Personally, I hoped to just get through a day without being beaten up, tripped, made fun of for the way I walked, called cripple, or being pushed into lockers. It was like the kids in high school could smell the rainbow that emanated from me even more so when I tried to cover it up.

I tried to be invisible, but I was always seen. Bullies in my classes put wasps in my hair, I had slapped my cafeteria lunch tray so that the food landed all over me, duct taped my locker so that I had to fight to get in to my books. It didn’t matter what I did, I was always seen. No matter how much I wished to be invisible, people could always see me, even though I wished they would see right through me.

Yet though all of this I still had my friends, Max, Sue, Padri and Alana. We went through so much together and would talk on the phone late into the night, tying up our phone lines and preventing our other family members from logging on to the internet (those were the days, am I right?). They were my comfort, my safety blanket against a world that didn’t even try to understand me, much like I didn’t want to understand myself. If I did that, I would have to face up to a very painful truth.

I remember going to an Olive Garden restaurant once with my friends. Before we went, my father said, “Now you kids be careful, that’s where all the fags work.” He held up his hand with a limp wrist. “You want to be careful that you don’t touch what they do, you might catch something!” He did his limp hand thing again and traipsed around the kitchen performing his version of pantomiming a woman and all my friends laughed.

When we arrived at the Olive Garden, we found that our waiter was undeniably gay. I looked at him throughout the entire evening and wanted to be him, to have that confidence, that joie de vivre, to be completely myself.

My friends laughed every time he came to the table. It felt like they were laughing at me. As the evening progressed, my friends couldn’t stop laughing. The waiter was certainly outwardly gay, and he was so comfortable with who he was. He would laugh along with my friends as if he knew what they were laughing about. What he didn’t know was that he was the joke. When it came time for us to pay the bill, Max held out a limp wrist for the bill and the water gave him a cool look. The coolness deepened when everyone else started laughing. I could see the hurt in his eyes and the light that had been shining from him for the whole evening started to dim.

As he took our money and gave us our change, I tried to communicate with my eyes how sorry I was for my friends. I tried to tell him that I understood, that I too was like him, and knew what it was like to be the butt of people’s laughter. I tried to tell him without words that I understood, and I felt his pain every day.

“Did you see him?” Max said as we left the restaurant. “God, what a fag!”

“Right?” Sue said.

“Jamie couldn’t stop looking at him!” Padri said. “He wants our fag waiter to be his boyfriend!”

“I do not,” I said, even though I did. I found myself entranced by the waiter’s dark eyes and curly brown hair. Even as I was trying to communicate my pain and how sorry I was, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the waiter was. I hoped that I had hidden those looks, that my friends hadn’t seen, but they had. I remember I was taken aback by Alana’s giving me the dirtiest look; it felt as if she had slapped me.

My friends were my security blanket against the world which didn’t understand me. I remember the day that changed.

I was at my girlfriend’s place at the time. Staci (not her real name) answered the phone, talked for a bit, but then went silent. Her skin turned pale. She handed me the phone and said, “I’m sorry.” I took the phone from her. Even now, all these years later, I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t taken the call, if I had hung up the phone instead.

Life is a series of choices, and I made one that night by accepting that phone call.

“Hello?”

“What the hell is this shit?” It was Max. He started yelling at me, screaming at me. He raged on about rumours I had started, gossip I had spread, and lies I had told. Max told me that there was no use denying it, they all knew the truth. All of them knew. Sue, Padri and Alana didn’t want to speak to me and as far as they were all concerned, I was dead to them. It didn’t matter what I said, he just continued to scream at me until he was done and then the line went dead.

“I didn’t,” I told Staci. “I didn’t do any of that.”

“I know,” she said.

The world around me looked different. As I traveled home on the bus that night, the lights seemed less bright, the sounds of traffic somehow dampened. My heartbeat was so loud, it was almost as loud as my breathing. I hid inside of myself, wondering if everyone around me on the bus knew that the ground could no longer hold me.

I let myself into my house, my hand putting the key into the lock didn’t even feel like my own. I heard my father call out to me and my stepmother ask me how my night was. I must have mumbled something and then went to my bedroom. I sat there in the dark, unsure of how to exist in the world without my security blanket, my friends who had been my world.

When I dressed the next morning, it felt right to wear black. I wore all black that day because it felt like a part of myself had died the night before. I went to school knowing that this was all a misunderstanding, that it was all a mistake. I would talk to Max and my friends and get them to see sense. I walked into the building and when people saw me, they started to point and laugh. I smiled, not knowing what else to do.

I got to my locker, and I could feel the eyes of everyone around staring at me, digging holes into my skin. I ignored the looks and opened my locker. When I did, I heard what sounded like butterflies filling the air around me. It took me a moment to realize that my locker had been filled with hundreds of pages of gay pornography. The whole school could see me standing there, surrounded by a mountain of paper covered in all kinds of men in very revealing situations. I stood there in this cloud of penises and the world shifted even more.

I wanted it to swallow me and yearned for the ground to rise up and wipe me out. I could hear the laughter that started like the small babbling of a brook and then grew into the loud roar of a waterfall. They didn’t put the word fag on my locker, but they had done one better. They made sure that it wasn’t something that I could wipe away. There was no ray gun made that could wipe the memories of everyone in that atrium that morning.

I threw the porn away (but managed to hide some). I looked for Max and Sue, Padri and Alana. When I found them, they were all around Sue’s locker. She was the first to look at me and it was like I had never seen her before.

“Did you get our gift?” She snarled.

“We hope you like them,” Max said flippantly.

“We had fun picking them all out.” Padri spat.

“Maybe now you’ll stop looking at my tits with all those cocks to look at.”

I could barely get the words out. “What are you even talking about?” My lips felt numb. “None of you are making sense.”

“We know who you are,” Max said. “We know what you are.” He walked away, waving at me with a limp wrist.

The world continued to move around me. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t keep it still. My heart felt like it was going to choke me, it was beating so hard. “Why would you do this?” I asked them.

“Why not?” Max said. “We’ll never be popular with you hanging around us. We might catch something…” he said with a sneer.

I watched them as they all walked away from me, each one of taking a piece of me with them. I wondered if they too could feel the pull of the strings that connected us, or if they felt nothing at all. I wondered if I even knew who they were.

The rest of the day passed in a haze. I’m not sure how I made it through my classes. I kept wondering how long they had been planning this, who had come up with the idea? I could hear people whispering about me and about the things that I was supposed to have said, the rumours that I didn’t start being attributed to me. By the end of the day, all I could hear was the whispering of others, the laughter of strangers I did not know but who now knew, me and the voice in my head telling me that I had to hide, I had to run.

I walked home alone. I was not accustomed to this, having walked home from school with Sue for years now. Her absence hit me particularly hard. I walked as quickly as I could until I got home and went to my bedroom. I took off my bag and pulled out about ten pages of the gay porn that I had been able to save. I hid them under my mattress, my face red with shame. I would not look at those now.

I remember going upstairs for dinner, sitting with my younger brother on my lap, talking with my stepmother. It all felt so final, as if this were the last time I would look upon them. I had not planned on killing myself when I left school that day, but in that moment, it seemed the only thing I could do, the only reasonable outcome from what had happened that day.

Telling my parents that I was going to my room to do homework, I wished them goodnight and told them I loved them. I ascended the stairs and already knew how I would do it. My grandparents had given me a knife for my birthday a few years ago. It was in my desk drawer, and I always kept it sharpened.

When the house became quiet around me I put away my books, I had not been able to read anything anyway.  I took out my knife and looked at it, slid the blade out and wondered how to do this. I took off my clothes as I did not want my stepmother to have to clean the bloodstains, and I sat at the edge of my bed.

I kept wondering if this was the right thing to do, but saw no other alternative. The voice in my head had gone quiet as if it were waiting in anticipation for the first slice of the knife. When it came, when my hand slid the blade across my skin, it was like my breath had been taken from me. I kept cutting, deeper and deeper each time, my left wrist becoming a roadmap of blood.

Folding up my blade, I lay down in bed and tried to let sleep take me. I wanted darkness to claim me, I waited for it. When it did, my wrist throbbing and wet, I welcomed it. I wanted it to welcome me home.

You can imagine my surprise when I awoke to my alarm the next morning.

I sat up in bed confused. I looked down at my wrist and my arm was marked with blood, but it had clotted in the night. Later, I would research the proper way to cut your wrists. I don’t know if I had done it properly, but I would succeed when I tried again. I showered, the water running red, and dressed for school.

I walked to school alone, the cuts on my left wrist and arm itching under the bandages. People called me faggot when I entered the school, it mostly the jocks and the guys who wanted to appear tough and strong. I know now, many years later, that they were weak, but I felt like the weak one; I couldn’t even kill myself properly.

One of my first classes that day was with Sue and Max. They saw the bandages on my arm and they both looked at me, a look of curiosity in their eyes. They cornered me after class even though I tried to walk quickly away from them. “What did you do? Did you try to off yourself?” Max said.

I stopped and tore back the bandages, gratified for a moment by the shocked look on their faces. I said nothing. I tried to let the pain on my face speak for me.

“Too bad you weren’t successful,” Max said.

I tried to blend in, tried willing myself to become invisible, but it didn’t matter. People still saw me, and most of them walked around or away from me or tripped me. I felt as if I had a virus or there was something contagious about me. Later that day, I was called to the guidance counsellor’s office.

Ms. Hildegard (not her real name) was a grim person. How anyone like her became a guidance counsellor is beyond me. When I went into her office she stood and told me to close the door. I did so and she bade me to sit. “Your friends came to see me,” she began.

“I don’t have any friends.” This seemed too close to the truth, and it hurt.

“Be that as it may, your friends came to see me. They told me about that,” she motioned at my bandage. “About what you did to yourself.” Here she paused. “About what you are.” The emphasis on the last word was heavy. She would not come out and say the word gay or homosexual, but her meaning was clear.

I took a shocked breath in. My first instinct was to lie. “I broke a dish when I was doing the dishes,” I told her. “I don’t know what they’ve told you.” I can only imagine the glee they felt at sticking the knife in a little deeper.

“Even so,” she said again, “Did you not think that all of this would have been easier if you were not as you are? If you tried to fit in better amongst your peers?”

I looked at her and didn’t bother wiping away the tear that had somehow escaped my right eye. “That’s what I’ve been trying to do.”

She let out a sigh, as if bored by everything already. “I’m required to assign a psychologist to speak to you.”

“Is that necessary?” I asked quietly.

“It is when someone attempts to…harm themselves. I should tell your parents.”

“Please!” I could not keep the urgency out of my voice. “Please don’t. I’ll see the shrink, but please don’t tell my parents. They’ll be so angry.” I could imagine my father’s face, warped with rage at the thought of having his son talk to a shrink about everything that went on in our home. “Please.”

She nodded. “You will have to see him once a week for ten weeks. I will not tell your parents. You are old enough to decide for yourself. It’s your choice whether or not you tell them. Your teachers will be told of this. You may go.” There was no kindness, no guidance, and I left her office feeling even more shameful than I did before.

The sessions with the psychologist did help me. He was kind and nice. I remember he had a beard and glasses and spoke in a kind voice. He told me that I shouldn’t fear who I was, because before anyone had told me differently, I was perfect. I’ll always remember that and how I felt that I was finally seen for who I was instead of what I was.

I would not come out of the closet until two years later, when I had gone away to university, twelve hours away from anyone who knew me. At university, I was finally free to be myself and to try embracing everything about who I was instead of living with internalized shame. I came out as bisexual first, thinking there was still too much shame to being totally gay. The seed of that shame may have been foisted upon me, but I helped it to grow.

It took a long time to let go of that shame. It had grown so large that I couldn’t just turn my back on it. I tried to, going back and forth between men and women until I finally admitted that secret truth to myself. I’m not sure when I made the decision to start being completely true to myself and I suppose it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I claimed my sexuality after decades of hiding and being shamed for who I was and who I happened to love.

More importantly, I had stopped shaming myself. It was never really my shame; it belonged to other people. It may have taken a long time, but I am finally proud of who I am and what I’ve accomplished, and you know what? My sexuality has little or nothing to do with that.

With every news story about a school that refuses to raise the Pride flag, every article about drag queen story times being banned from libraries, LGBTQIA children in danger, the don’t say gay bill, I’ve realized that now is the time for me to say gay. I have to own my story and I hope that by posting this that it reaches someone and lets them know that it gets better. It’s hard slog and you’re not going to change everyone’s mind, but those people don’t matter. You matter.

It took me too long to realize that. Now I’m proud and shine bright and I fucking sparkle and I wouldn’t have it any other way.