I Get Good grades! I go to church! I’m a Cheerleader!
Illustration by Sydney Toby
If I’m telling you the truth, I have never been an honest writer.
I realized this earlier today, when I made the bold decision to test my capacity for second-hand embarrassment by leafing through old journals I found buried in my childhood room. It’s a pastime that never fails to provide entertainment, but today, I found myself unnerved by the dishonesty I noticed woven into the majority of the lines I wrote. Dishonesty that I was so easily able to ignore back when I was writing. Denial – like most unhealthy defence mechanisms – is a learned habit, and I grew up practicing it like an act of bad religion. My journals housed more than the mundane details of existence; they were a performance, a curation. I filled pages of writing with thoughts I wish I had and emotions I wish I felt, and I did this so routinely that the guilt of being an unreliable narrator quickly subsided and just turned into muscle memory. And while I’m sure journaling is a healthy habit for most normal people, if you’re anything like me it’s more of a sick game of mental gymnastics and self manipulation. Honesty is terrifying, and my words are my only creations that have ever been bold enough to bite back. I found solace in the illusion of controlling who I was, clawing at the throats of my sentences as if carving bruised skin from a peach. Fraudulence became like a drug to me, it was addictive. As my authenticity gradually waned, my self-satisfaction waxed. I didn’t write this way because I lacked self-awareness, or wrote through a naively narcissistic lens: I was caged by an unjustified desire to paint myself as something palatable, even in pages of writing that only I would ever read.
One topic that I never touched on in my writing was desire. I never wrote about yearning, about the unfettered longing to know someone inside out, or the urge to be known inside out. Today, I owe it to my younger self to write about love. Not through a tone tainted with frustration, guilt, or shame, but a piece simply acknowledging the fruition of self-acceptance. There was a time in my early teenage years when I only ever saw myself reflected in imperfections. When I was thirteen, I realized I liked girls. It wasn’t your typical gay awakening – there was no celebrity crush or childhood friend I began to look at differently – it was a realization I had during an eighth-grade World Religions field trip, sitting cross-legged in a Mosque during a silent time of self-reflection. A simple, unprovoked discovery; an epiphany of sorts, if you will. Since I made this life-altering discovery in a Mosque, this meant to thirteen-year-old me (who was raised not religious whatsoever) that suddenly, not only was I gay, but I must be a Muslim as well! Quite the culture shock. I’m sure you’ll obviously be surprised to know that only one of those labels has held true to date. While I wish I could tell you I embraced this epiphany with pride, the opposite could not be more true. My sexuality was a topic I managed to ignore for the three years that followed. It’s something I never once brought up in my writing. Reading through chapters of my life and seeing how so much of my self-discovery went undocumented throughout my adolescence is painful. The plot holes in my journals are a reminder of the shame my sexuality carried, and how love was a word I always erased.
Instead of writing about myself, I found it easier to write about the person I wished I were. Like if I pretended hard enough to be someone new, it would eventually feel less like pretending and more just like living. One of my all-time favourite quotes is from the greatest movie ever made, the 2000 coming-of-age film Almost Famous, and it is “adolescence is a marketing tool”. Adolescence is a brand, and like the quote suggests, it became less to me about growing up and more about buying in. It’s something I see reflected in the pages of my writing. I never portrayed myself as the same person for more than two consecutive months, it was an inconsistency that kept me sane (and drove everyone around me crazy). Reinvention was a writing tool, a practice of my artistic liberty. I abused the shit out of metamorphosis. Writing myself as a new character over and over and over was not a road to self realization, but a meticulously curated mindfuck of people pleasery. Change is a necessary ingredient of our humanity. It’s an instrument for self-discovery – we try on pieces of people we meet like an afternoon out thrifting, holding onto characteristics that seem to fit right until we become a mosaic of the qualities we love most from the people we love most. But change, to me, was a way to laboriously dance around self-loathing by not allowing myself to ever actually become myself.
The plot holes in my writing are a source of regret, but they are also a reminder of how much I’ve grown as a person since my earlier years of teenage angst and frustration. Being able to write comfortably about my sexuality has helped ground my sense of self, and it’s also allowed me space to recognize that I am more than the people I fall for. Since moving to Kingston, I have learned to appreciate that we are not fossilized at any certain age: I will continue to evolve in every capacity, striving to build an essence that I can comfortably inhabit. As long as change blooms from authentic roots, it’s not an agency for self-destruction. And while it’s difficult to see through the fog of adolescence, embrace the inevitability that one day you will hate yourself less than you did at thirteen. Because right now, I am turning into everything I despised at thirteen – and I’m happier than I’ve ever been.