Winifred Wilson's Exciting Adventures in Space

I was recently asked by a colleague about my sexuality and realised that the connotations that go along with the word Gay really affect my ability to associate with the word and simply say I am it. I originally intended this post to discuss that, but somewhere along the line it turned into a story about my youth. I filed it without much thought as a failure, but have been unable to write the post I originally intended and felt that perhaps I should post this anyway. So here we go, judge away!

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It’s the age of the internet and over sharing and every queer kid has their story about their coming out in video or blog or tweet or (insert other medium here) form. I feel a little narcissistic throwing my lot in with them all, but I find writing my thoughts out quite therapeutic and calming. So here are some of the current rumblings of my mind, laid out for you in glorious Constantina (or Palatino if you are missing that or Times New Roman if you are from the stone ages)!

The hardest thing I ever had to accept about myself has been my sexuality. In fact, I am not even sure I am completely at ease with it now.

My early developmental years were spent in a catholic primary school which still had a nun as a principal in mid western WA. I didn’t really have a sexual identity in those days, as most young kids don’t, but I experienced things in those early years that influenced me for quite some time. My days at this school very heavily reinforced the person that I was supposed to become and the world that I would be in. A world where normal meant being a university educated salary man with a wife and 2 kids, a mortgage, and maybe a dog or two. Needless to say, my life is nothing like this now and is unlikely to be even close to this in the future.

Future me aside, I struggled on through school, not really making friends and generally feeling like I didn’t belong in the world. I think part of this lack of belonging was the special kind of intense guilt that only catholic’s truly know how to bestow upon a child. Every week, we dragged ourselves across the road into the big cathedral for mass. At mass they reminded us how terrible we were and how we needed to absolve ourselves through the confessional, a constant spiral of doubt and guilt that really affects a child’s feeling of selfworth. As a primary school student, this just made me feel like I was never good enough. As I grew up and my body and hormones changed, it made me doubt everything going on around me.

Heading into high school, I went through that delightful stage we’d all like to forget called puberty. When you live in the outer reaches of Western Australia, and already struggle to get along with the other kids, the last thing you need is your body waking up and telling you to start thinking about sex. For most boys, this meant that the girls started to become much more interesting. For me, it meant I began to be attracted to other boys. How could this be?! Everything I had learnt so far had told me how a man and a woman fall in love, get married and have kids. Was this some cruel joke of God for all those times I lied in confession (Hey, you try remembering all the sins you committed as a kid all week!) to the priest?! Why did my body and my hormones need to be different? Why couldn’t I be like everyone else around me?

I found myself in an intensely emotional period of my life. I withdrew more and more from the people around me, scared that they would uncover my dirty little secret and judge me. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react to what was going on within me, all I knew was that I was terrified. When you’re 14/15 and your world view is shattered by a realisation of self, you start to fray around the edges. I began to hate being at school, hate being around the other students and hated who I was. There was nothing in my life that I wanted to be anywhere near, no part of it that I could tolerate. I frayed pretty badly and even tried to take my own life in year 10 at a particularly low moment.

I spent the next few weeks hiding the cuts on my wrists (I know, dramatic right?!) from those around me, including my mother. I felt pretty stupid that I had allowed myself to get to the point that I had taken a box cutter to my wrist. It was at this point that I realised I had a chance to start again somewhere else. My parents had divorced several years prior and my father now lived just outside Perth. One morning, I rang my dad and asked him if I could come live with him for a while, an idea that he jumped at! This was great news and I was so excited that I had packed everything I owned before my mother got home from work that afternoon, ready to leave.

Moving cities never really helped though. I tried hard to fit into my new school, but I was again in the catholic school system and I felt like I had to hide my sexuality from the other kids to gain any level of acceptance. I still had very few friends and still felt like I was not good enough and would never amount to anything. Rebecca Drysdale is certainly right when she says “There’s no one who is meaner than a bunch of asshole teens” in her song It Gets Better. So I had moved towns, 700kms in fact, and I still felt miserable and alone. Looking back, it is incredible that something as incidental as sexual attraction could have caused me so much grief and misgivings, even prompting me to attempt suicide.

After school I had a series of menial jobs, eventually landing a position with a German company in Sydney, meaning another big move and another chance at starting afresh. This time I was 3,000kms away from anything I had previously been and could really create my own identity without the pressures of school or other kids. For the most part I started off pretty poorly. I didn’t make friends easily and those that I did meet were less than desirable. I tried to talk with people I met, but I felt like once they knew my sexual leanings, I just became “the gay guy” to them. Suddenly it felt like it didn’t matter what I was or what I did, I just “the gay guy.” I began to retreat into myself again, gained a lot of weight and rarely left the house except for work and grocery shopping.

So when did it get better? When did I begin to accept who I was and move beyond it? It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time, but the answer is simply: when I met my real friends. Over the course of 18 months to 2 years, I met people that had long since stopped being hung up on minor details and started maturing into good people. I hung out with them, met their friends, drank with them, ate with them, laughed and cried with them. It no longer mattered whether I was into boys or girls, it just mattered that I was genuine. With belonging came acceptance. Acceptance by my new friends and also acceptance within me of the person that I was then, and am now. A person that continues to grow and mature, who holds a steady job, who loves life and is even starting to love himself. I still haven’t been to uni, hell I didn’t even finish high school, but I am happier by the day and look forward to the times ahead.

I look back on the darker days and know that those days made me who I am today, they made me the person I have grown into. Now, I am only too happy to be a shoulder and listen to help other people out experiencing the same terrible ups and downs. It sucks now, and no child, or anyone really, should every have to go through it, but small steps are taken every day towards creating a more open and accepting society. One day, stories like this won’t need to be told anymore because queer children won’t feel like they don’t belong. I dream of that day, but in the mean time just remember there are people out there for you.