The Email
It was fifth grade, and an email from my crush would be the trigger to my coming out.
Five words, just a simple question: Do they know about you?
We'd been talking about her sexuality. How she was bi and her parents didn't accept her. She was asking if my parents knew about my sexuality.
They didn't. But what they did do was read my email.
"What is this about?" my mom asked.
"Nothing," I mumbled. It was very clear that this was a lie.
She took me to my room, shut me in there, and said "I'm not letting you out until you tell me what's going on."
When I still refused to tell her, she sat on me.
Now that makes it sound horrible. I still remember the look on my therapist's face when I told him this story. But let me promise: it was fine. At the time, it felt like the end of the world. Telling my mom my sexuality felt like detonating a nuclear bomb. I'd never heard any positive coming out stories. I'd only heard about the shame. The abuse. And so that's what I thought would happen to me. I honestly didn't even care about my mom sitting on me. I was more worried about what would happen after.
Now both me and my mom are deeply stubborn. But there's only so much stubbornness you can have when you're a child and your parent is sitting on you.
My mom won the battle.
I told her I was bi (I have since identified as pansexual, genderfluid, but this was the beginning of my journey).
And my mom said "Oh honey, I love you no matter what."
And she hugged me, and I probably cried a little bit, and maybe she cried too, I don't know.
And then she said "See, that wasn't so hard. If you'd just done that in the first place, we could have avoided all this."
And we laughed and went about the rest of our day.
Me in love
I'm a blind idiot that can’t be dragged down no matter how many things go wrong or how many times it becomes obvious that they. don’t. like. me. back. because I’m on cloud 9 and on the rare occasions I get there, it’s nearly impossible for someone to get me down to Earth and back to reality.