Hiding from Myself

I have always been hiding myself. It sort of comes with the territory of being gay. You hide from your family, you hide from your friends, and you hide from society. You learn to store things away because someone else’s reaction may be harsher than the consequences of bottling it up. It becomes easier to lie to yourself than to express yourself. This is part of the danger that society imposes on those that are deemed lesser. This is not an experience shared just within the Queer community and I’m sure many of us have this same experience, but I can’t comment on those perspectives, I can only comment on my own.

People always ask me when I knew I was gay. Maybe, I’m a special case, but I always knew I was gay, the only issue was coming to accept it. Again, I might be a special case with this, but I accepted it when I was in 6^th grade. That was the first time I stopped really lying to myself. Before then, I was absolutely terrified of who I was. At that time, the representation in media was either very stereotypical/negative or shielded from me because they hit on some very adult themes that I probably couldn’t handle at that point. I had nobody to look up to, nobody to show me that life in the Queer community can be happy, comforting, and safe. I did not want to accept myself, but I knew that life would be even more difficult to survive if I didn’t. I came out to myself and that was my first step to being tired of hiding.

The next step came during high school, the first time someone learned that I was gay. I wouldn’t call it my first time “coming out” because I didn’t really decide to do it. I was asked if I was gay and I didn’t want to lie to them. That’s how I operated for a long time; if someone wanted to ask me, I would answer as truthfully as possible. This was my way to stop lying, but not be open. I didn’t get a lot of questions during that period of my life, so it wasn’t very satisfactory for me. I had actively come out to a person during this time, but I was not ready to actually come out to others. I was moving forward, but very slowly.

My (hopefully) final, and most important transitional step came with college. When I went to college, I decided to be fully open with myself and others. I was completely out to all my friends on campus and I started living my life in the way that I truly wanted. In addition, I started coming out to my family. That is still an intimidating process, but I will continually work towards it. With this new transition, I can finally do some true introspection and find out who I am.

Now a lot of the people reading this are probably wondering what this has to do with art. This blog is a part of Arts at Michigan, so I should make some reference to art. I will do more than that. Unfortunately, I believe that my artistic development is stunted from my experiences. A lot of art concerns looking into oneself and I wasn’t really able to do that for most of my life. I wasn’t able to express myself like others could and I think has negatively affected me. I don’t believe my creative endeavors are as mature as my peers and I don’t know if they ever will be. At the very least, I can express myself now and that is a miracle.