PF Chang’s (Patreon)

When I was a young freshman in high school, my mother read my diary. It had fallen off my nightstand the evening before after I had vented a stressful amount of feelings onto its pages, spewed my confusing swirl of emotions and fears onto the thin black lines. I had stayed up late writing, nearly eleven-thirty. When I pushed the journal onto the nightstand and heard it fall, I was too tired to fix it.

But I also went to bed with a swirl of anxiety coiling in my gut.

In the morning, I had little time to think while getting ready for school. I grabbed my clothes and got dressed, rushed for breakfast, got my backpack together in the dim Portland morning. How was I to know my mother was going to enter my room that day, seeking to clean things up for me, and come across the notebook? To pick it up and read the last entry? To read the confusion and decide she had to do something about it?

She shared it with my father while I was at school, oblivious. She planned with my father while I ate lunches with my friends and the girl who made my chest tighten. She got reservations as PF Chang’s to set me straight.

I was over the moon excited when mom said we were going out for dinner that night. PF Chang’s was one of my favorite places to go, and I couldn’t wait to get some food. We drove through the drizzly day of Oregon’s perpetual overcast skies, walked into the restaurant, and took our seats.

Jokingly, my mother insisted I sit between her and dad. I know now it was to keep me from running.

She told me she saw what I wrote. She told me she never invades my privacy like this but she was glad she read it. 

And she told me I wasn’t gay.

The memory sizzles out then, filled only with anger and frustration as over and over again, both my mother and father insisted they knew me better than me. That they knew I wasn’t gay. That God wouldn’t make me gay. That being gay was wrong. How did they know, I asked? They told me they just knew. They knew I wasn’t gay.

Growing up fundamentalist means I’m not entirely sure I can blame my parents for their homophobic response to my normal growth as a teenager. They were taught religion in the heart of the anti-gay propaganda spread by the church. They believed gay people were pedophiles, twisted and sick. They believed if I were gay, I would be that, too.

When I came out as asexual during my fourth year of college, I was met with resistance. My friends were asked if they thought I’d just “grow out of it” and if the whole thing was “weird.” And as I continue to deconstruct the horrible things taught to me in the heart of a church that preached hate, I’ve begun to think back to that day, and to the feelings I have towards one other girl. Instead of running, instead of being afraid, I am working on letting myself feel these emotions, to understand them, and to accept them fully.

My therapist asked me yesterday, if my adult self met with a younger version of me that day, instead of my parents, what would I say to her? 

There is wrong with you. You’re not broken. You have a right to understand yourself and to be yourself. Even if that means other people don’t like it. Even if that means you won’t be what other people want you to be. You have a right to explore.