(TL;DR: I go to a hackathon, experience burst of creativity, admit I am bi, feel inner shame receding, maybe have a life…)
Why am I writing this? I’m not sure. The world has changed; my experiences may not be relevant for young people dealing with the same things these days. Maybe somewhere someone will read this and be comforted. Maybe they will read it and feel relief that they are not me. Maybe I just need to get it off my chest.
I went to my first hackathon in March, and this unleashed a great burst of excitement and creativity. Afterwards, in an email conversation, among other topics, I joked about being “5% bi”… and for some reason the idea of bisexuality took hold of me with a force it had never had before.
Since then, I have been to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, a Maker faire, and the Toronto Pride parade, and been inspired by each. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about my past.
How did I end up in this place? What was it like for me to grow up?
Around age 4, I remember looking out the window watching the big kids go off to kindergarten, and wondering what it would be like. After my fifth birthday, I found that the reality of kindergarten was not as great as my hopes. Bullying started then and would not stop for many years.
One day in grade one, they came and took me from class. They walked me to another classroom full of bigger kids. I was to continue in grade two. I don’t know why they did this, but it set up the rest of my school career so that I was always smaller, weaker, and less developed than those around me. For a kid already bullied, this was a disaster.
Things went along as well as they could until grade seven. Then I entered hell.
Grade seven and eight were held in a different school apart from the neighbourhood public schools. All grade seven and eight students in town were bused to a single school, and it was like Lord of the Flies. The bullying ramped up, and I spent my spare time hiding, either in the woods or in the library.
The other bad part was physical education. I was thrown into team sports I did not understand, and could not play. But they did not teach the games; they just assumed that we already knew how to play them. The other kids didn’t want me to be there, and I didn’t want to be there. I would have been quite happy doing gymnastics and other solo exercises; instead, the forced team sports taught me shame about my physicality and my body, and reinforced my sense of inferiority.
Despite this chaos, puberty happened and I became aware of girls. By the spring of grade eight, I was fantasizing regularly about them. One girl actually asked me out. No-one had ever done this before; I thought it was some new and cruel form of mockery. I turned her down. Later, at grade eight graduation, my parents met her and said, “what were you thinking?” And much much later, I ran into her on Facebook, and apologized.
Along came high school: grade nine in a new school. The wretchedness of physical education continued: being trampled while playing rugger, being picked last for games I couldn’t do, wrecking my knee in the gym.
Socially, I wasn’t bullied as much, but that was the only improvement. During grade nine, I was pressed into admitting interest in someone I had only looked at briefly from a distance; this person turned out to be a boy. I suspect I was thought to be gay after this, and any chances I might have had at a date vanished. In English class, I was writing stories about the nobility of suicide.
During high dchool, I had hopeless crushes on several girls, including that girl, you know the one: the unattainable girl every school has. She was smart, sexy, athletic, a straight-A student and a cheerleader. But the crushes put me in a kind of tunnel vision, and I don’t know whether anyone else was interested in me.
There was a kind of learned helplessness in me, where I assumed I never had a chance and never tried. Not just dates, but also things like looking for work, or going on trips the school offered, or other extracurricular activities. I read of ecological design from California, but it never occurred to me that going there would somehow be possible. I just drew and wrote stories.
I had no dates through high school, and I went to prom alone.
Only when I went to university and college, did things start to open up. Still had crushes on various girls; also had a crush on one guy. And one fine day I was even unexpectedly kissed! But that was also the time of my greatest regret: I was actually visiting someone I really liked, and at a crucial moment I almost asked her out on a date. For a brief moment I agonized on a knife-edge between confidence and unworthiness… and unworthiness won. I didn’t ask her out, and there was never another chance.
Life went on, I got a job and moved around. Eventually I went back to school and actually did meet someone who became a girlfriend. But it didn’t last. I have met several women who were girlfriends for a time, and I am grateful to each of them, but nothing lasted.
So the form of my social life was set long before any sort of sexual desire. I was inferior and weaker. I couldn’t quickly figure out who people were. At work, I was less likely to try for advancement, and I feared dealing with people. I was very glad to have jobs where I worked in the back room.
Time marched on.
In my forties, I discovered that many people could remember and instantly see the identity of someone in their face. I have always had to deduce who people are by putting together contextual clues like voice, gait, clothing, hairstyle. A little research led me to “prosopagnosia”, or face blindness. I had always stood a little back, taking a little time to figure out who people were when I met them. And during school, it always took me about three months to start to know who people were in a class… and then a month later the class would end. Perhaps this distance affected how people perceived me in school.
At age 49, I went back to school again. The stress of school, plus external family events, led to an actual mental breakdown during second year. I went to the hospital, and for the first time was prescribed anti-depressants. It was like a grey tint over my inner world lifted. My usual dark thoughts became much less frequent, and I stopped having nightmares. I could lift my head and take a better look at things.
In this context, then, the awakening.
I went to the hackathon, and then there was the creative surge, and the idea of bisexuality grabbed me. But it wasn’t only about admitting to myself that I like some men as well as most women. A more subtle thing was happening. I was coming to terms with different ways of being male. I never fit the male stereotype; I was utterly uninterested in team sports, hated the taste of alcohol, liked all sorts of geeky stuff, had an non-male voice, spent my time drawing. In high school, there were no successful role models I could draw on for inspiration.
Today, however, the idea of gender diversity is out in the world. There are other ways to present oneself than the traditional male or female stereotypes, and we see people following these other ways. I meet people who are transitioning from one gender to another. I meet people who have characteristics of both stereotypes. It occurred to me that I could pick and choose what elements to present. I could admit my love of brightly-coloured clothing. I could wear a rainbow bracelet.
Inside me, a great iceberg of shame began to break up. Maybe for the first time, I could just be my artistic self without having to hide myself to appear normal. Maybe I can pick up those drawing projects again. Maybe I could gain the confidence to look for work again, and not feel like I was always begging for scraps.
Maybe I can have a life.
I wish you much joy and prosperity with your new knowledge!
