Brave Face

I’d never ride a rocket into out space, so standing at the edge of the ocean was probably the closest I’d get to touching something boundless and greater than myself. For me, the ocean had a way of putting the rest of the world into context for a couple seconds.

The only fear a guy felt when he asked out a girl was fear that she might reject him. He didn’t worry that she might gather a few of her friends, surprise him afterward in a dark parking lot on his way home from work, tie him up, torture and beat him, and then leave him to die. He never had to worry that, even if she said yes, they’d have to pretend to only be friends when they were in public, because if they didn’t someone might spit on them or call them names or attack them.

I wasn't going to kill myself, but I wasn't going to stop dumb luck from taking me out either.

Sometimes coming out isn't about us. It's not fair that we have to carry the emotional burden of sharing our secret and making sure the person we're coming out to is okay, but we make concessions for the people we care about. Besides, I may have run the scenarios for this conversation but my mom had been running scenarios about my entire life since the day she had learned she was pregnant with me.

But I do believe that every single thing we’ve done leads to everything we do, and that it’s kind of pointless to regret the past when it’s the cause of our present.

Because I’m afraid of being . . . fun. People get beat up for being fun. They get murdered for being fun. They get laughed at and ridiculed. And ‘fun’ isn’t the word most people use to describe them.

Of course, using cutting to deal with depression is like snorting coke to cure cancer. The cocaine will make you feel great for a while, but now you're addicted to coke and you have cancer.

It was the feeling of finally finding a puzzle piece that fit into place. Of bursting through the surface of the water and taking the breath that had been burning in my lungs. Of remembering the word that'd been on the tip of my tongue for decades. This was the feeling I'd been missing all those years.

I was just a confused kid who’d learned the vocabulary of being gay from a world that hated fags.

No matter what I accomplished, no matter how hard I worked, I felt like a failure. Nothing I did seemed good enough. I felt ugly, I felt stupid, I felt talentless. And those were the good days. On the bad days I prayed for the pain to stop. On the worst days I’d drive fast and reckless, hoping to spin out and crash and die.

Depression speaks. It screams. It’s not like actually hearing voices. I know the voice in my head isn’t real and I know that it’s lying, but knowing those things doesn’t make it go away. I still hear it, and it dredges up my worst fears and yells them at me until it drowns out everything else.

I didn't have to listen to a specific type of music or dress in a particular clothes or act a certain way, because being queer wasn't the nucleus of who I was, it was simply a modifier. I could be a conservative lawyer and queer; I could be an Olympic athlete or a famous comedian or the CEO of the richest company in the world. I could be me, and I'd find a place to belong.

Instead of being able to go out and buy a book about a closeted gay kid who's scared of becoming a stereotype while coming to terms with being gay that could have helped me understand what I was going through, I' needed to write my own.

What Dante and I had through e-mail was perfect because it existed in a quantum state. Every possibility was still on the table. The moment we met, the possibilities would collapse and lock into place, and that scared me so badly that my stomach churned and I felt like I was going to puke.

I put on the Cranberries' Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can't We?—a perfect album from the first song to the last— pressed play, shut off the lights, lay down, and closed my eyes, expecting never to open them again.

I graduated high school without burning the place down, which I felt was a major accomplishment no one properly congratulated me for.

how tyrannized I felt by a random heterosexual couple casually holding hands in public.