It Gets Better September 21, 2010
In 1988, I was 15 years old. My social awkwardness had been compounded over and over again through many many things, but the worst was about to come. I had been at a private school that had groomed me to be a success story, competing in the academic pentathalon (for which I won several medals). More work was poured on harder and harder, and eventually, I cracked. I cracked really hard. And rather than addressing the root cause, I was expelled, that was that.
From there, I was moved into a public high school where I knew very few people. I turned in further, and in the way that bullies do, they picked up on this and over the next year a campaign of brutal harassment begun, wherein the school faculty deliberately turned a blind eye to it. And then, it got out that I was gay*. I wasn’t, but it didn’t matter – as someone who was incredibly socially awkward, I didn’t have a girlfriend, there was no way to deal with it. You can’t fight rumors in highschool, because that just means the rumors spread farther and faster. All you can do is keep your head down, and pray that oh god just one fucking day, just one fucking day would go by where I could just be normal. Like everyone else.
Of course I failed harder in school. I regularly had dreams about finding a gun, killing my tormentors, and ending my own life. And during the days, I was punched in the kidneys repeatedly in the hallways from blind angles. I spent one afternoon after school hiding underneath spider-infested steps near the end of the school year because they’d actually organized a group of people who weren’t from school, and thus would be harder for me to identify, to work me over.
That I even managed to go on day to day, having interests, hanging with a few friends, was a fucking miracle.
And even then, after high school, it left huge, deep scars. Because I knew what it was like to be singled out like that, I was privately terrified of anything that might make me question my heterosexuality, sometimes making myself sick worrying about it. Being around gay people made me even more nervous beyond my own crippling social anxiety because I didn’t want to have to go through that torture again – not ANYTHING to do with my own feelings about sexuality, but the crippling fear that I would have to go through that again.
Why do I bring all of this up?
And here’s the thing: even with my own social anxiety issues, and all the other things that kept me locked up inside of myself and terrified of reaching out, after I left high school, it got better. I moved out on my own for the first time, and it kept betting better. I forced myself into stepping into new social circles and meeting people, and it got even better.
If I had opted out, and not endured until it left up, simply hoping that it would somehow end eventually, and I wouldn’t have to end it myself… all the wonders and the joys and the fun and the sex and the love and the beauty, I would have missed out on it.
Because it got better.
It does get better – it truly does. We live in a world where we can reach out into communities spun from connections around the world – something that I didn’t have. And if nothing else, just let them know that it does get better.
*Hooray for small town mentality. Why was I gay? Because I had long hair. I was into heavy metal, for fuck’s sake.