Coming Out pt 3: Learning to accept myself

I'm gonna start of mentionning something that happened recently. My dad is one of the higher-ups at a med school. A student at this school committed suicide. My dad had never personally met this kid, put hearing about this brought up some painful memories of my mom, who committed suicide when I was 6. When he found out about it, he spent the rest of the afternoon crying. My dad is usually the kind of person who tries to supress those kinds of emotions. He decided to take it upon himself to talk to the kid's parents and help them through this. For those of you reading this who are religious, please pray for this kid's parents and for my dad. They need them.

Interesting coincidence that this happenned now, cause this next part of my story is about my own experience with suicidal thoughts, among other unhealthy thoughts.

I was a very angry kid through most of highschool. Part of it was my problem accepting that I was gay, and part of it was having to deal with the comments of other students. As I said before, sometimes it seems like every other comment made during school was anti-gay. I would just sit there and listen to them. Occasionally, I'd make one or two myself, just in case someone would find it suspicious that I never made any gay jokes. I was completely miserable at this time. I hated the other kids in school for the shit they said. Sometimes, it would be unbearable. I wanted to hurt them. Whenever they would get on a roll and say one gay joke after another, I'd imagine myself snapping and attacking all of them. I never did though. I think I have Tae Kwon Do to thank for that. It was a great way to vent my anger and learn to control it. Accidents happen a lot in Tae Kwon Do. People do sometimes get hurt. I'm thankful for these accidents, because they helped remind me that a) I hate hurting people and b) I can really hurt people if I tried.
It's funny. Hurting someone during the match feels like a sign of weakness. You're supposed to understand your strength and be able to control it. When you fail and hurt someone, you feel extremely guilty. It sucks because sometimes it's hard to maintain control, especially when facing a tough opponent. Towards the end of a fight you get tired and can't think straight. You forget to control yourself, and let go. Then, someone gets hurt. It takes a high level of maturity to accept that accidents happen and forgive yourself. You can't beat yourself up about it. You have to learn from it and move on. If you dwell on it too much, when the next fight comes around, you'll be too afraid of your own strength, hold back, and end up losing the fight.

It's similar to what I dealt with in highschool. Though I never actually snapped, I increasingly lost control over my thoughts. The fantasies I had of hurting kids at school became more violent, brutal and graphic. If it had kept up, I probably would have become one of those school shooters. One day, I just snapped out of it. I realized that I completely lost control. When that happened, I internalized all the anger I had towards the other kids. I began hating myself for being for being such a bad person for wanting to hurt them so badly. It bothered me more and more everyday.

I had finally accepted that I was gay at this point, but I felt that there was no hope for me to have a happy, openly gay life. I slipped further and further into despair. I started having thoughts of killing myself. I thought about it all the time. You know what's weird, all of these depressed thoughts of hating yourself, feeling hopeless for the future, wanting to kill yourself, the become strangely comforting. You have these feelings so often that you start to get addicted to them. They have physical effects too. You feel drowsy and your entire body slows down. It's like a warm blanket wraps around you. It's so comfy that you don't even realize that it's strangling you. I started to plan how I would go about killing myself. I decided that I wanted something quick and relatively painless. I also wanted a way that would leave little mess for my family to clean up. The first tenet of Tae Kwon Do is "Courtesy." I remembered how my mom killed herself. She hung herself in the garage. That seemed like a good way to go: it was quick, and there was no blood or anything.


Remembering my mom was what made me snap out of everything. I remembered how my mom's death destroyed everyone in my family. I realized that I didn't want to put my family through that again. I found my drive to keep going, at least for a little while. I started thinking about what it was like when my mom died. I thought that my life would never be the same and that I'd never be happy again. What made it worse was that most of my close friends had moved away at that time. I felt incredibly alone. The more I thought about it, the more I noticed the similarities between that time in my life and the things I was afraid of dealing with if I came out. I was afraid that I'd lose my family, my friends would all move away from me, my life would never be the same and that I would never be happy. Once I realized these similarities, I thought, If I was able to get through all of this once, maybe I can get through it again.

They say that God has a plan for everyone. Everything happens for a reason. Well, if God exists, maybe that horrible time in my life happenned to prepare me for all of this. If I wasn't forced to go through all of that, maybe I wouldn't know that I had the strength to get through this. Maybe I wouldn't understand how much suicide destroys people, and that I'd never want to put anyone through that. I started having hope for my situation.

I'm looking at what I'm writing, and it sounds like this all happenned pretty much all at once. It really didn't. It took a long time to get through this depression. Even when I made all of these connections, I still had to tell myself over and over again that everything was going to be okay.

Coming Out pt 2: Starting Highschool

As I said before, I had a pretty strong Catholic upbringing. I've always believed in God, but I never had a really strong tie to the Catholic church itself. Not that I can remember, anyway. I remember when I was really little that my family would go to church every sunday. We'd go to Christmas and Easter mass, celebrate Advent and Lent, the whole 9 yards. Then, my mom died when I was 6. She committed suicide. After that, my family quit going to church for a long time. I think what happened is that my mom's death caused my dad to lose his faith for a while. This time was particularly hard for me because around this time, most of my close friends had just so happened to move away. I didn't have many people I could talk to. Anyway, my dad met my step-mom, who's a strong catholic, and when they married, we started attending mass regularly again. By we, I mean my dad, step-mom, new little step-sister and me. My older brother was out of the house by this point, so he didn't go, and my older sister refused. I tried to refuse too, but I still had to go.

Anyway, I also started attending Catholic grade school. there wasn't a huge difference between public grade school and Catholic grade school. If it wasn't for the uniforms and the occasional mass, you wouldn't know it was a catholic school at all. Being gay didn't bother me too much there since I was still in denial at that point.

Highschool was a bit different. For one thing, they took religion much more seriously, except they were really bad at it. I don't know what was worse: them severely misrepresenting non-Catholic people and beliefs, or them misrepresenting Catholic beiefs. I won't go into too much detail on this post. The being gay thing was more of a problem here too. I had begun to accept the truth that I was gay, but I was far from being okay with it. The anti-gay stuff was pretty terrible. it wasn't just jokes about stereotypes, sometimes kids would bluntly state how much they hate fags, completely straight-faced. Sometimes it seemed like every other comment was something anti-gay.

You know, the occasional gay joke has never really bothered me. I'm of the mindset that it's okay to make fun of people, as long as it's in moderation and everyone's included/teased. I mean, what would comedy be without making fun of people? What would be left? Puns?
The thing is, when it seems like every other joke is directed at you, it starts to hurt a little. You're not being included, you're being targeted. Sure, you know that a lot of them don't mean what they say, but when you're in the closet, it's impossible to tell who's who. It's really painful not knowing who your real friends are, and who will leave you without second thoughts if they found out you were gay. I don't know if I can even describe the feelings of loneliness. It's like you wake up every morning and think to yourself, "everyone I care about might abandon me if they found out about me." I know that sounds dramatic, but it's the best way I can describe it. What's worse is that I didn't know a single other gay student at my school. I had no one I could talk to about it. I knew I couldn't be the only one, but I might as well have been since I didn't know anyone else. At some schools, you can go talk to a teacher about this stuff. Not at my school. Even the teachers seemed to join in the anti-gay stuff once in a while.