There aren’t many Tweets that stop me in my tracks these days, not given the current climate of utter insanity that rules the online world, but this one shook me to my core (and it’s affected others similarly), both for its startling accuracy and its beautiful, difficult, unwavering truth:
“Queer people don’t grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimize humiliation and prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us and which parts we’ve created to protect us.” – Alexander Leon
After forty-four years on earth, I’ve only just begun to process the wreckage that this truth has uncovered. I mourn for the boy and the young man who felt so confused and hurt for such a long time. I mourn for how long I couldn’t see it, for how many sleepless nights and teary-eyed days I spent feeling that something was wrong with me, that things didn’t quite line up, that nothing made sense. Even when I came out and lived openly and honestly as a gay man, I still felt somehow displaced and out of sorts. Every time I felt I might somehow belong ended with a feeling that something still wasn’t quite right. This quote unlocks the survival technique of why so many of us continue to play our parts, while touching on the damage done in living any part of your life falsely.
The world was, and remains, a vicious place for those of us who are different.
Until such time that there is a dramatic and genuine shift in that, this sort of work will continue.
How sad that it should be so.
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