Pride. PTSD. Pulse.
It’s all in June.
June is PTSD Awareness Month, Pride Month, and the anniversary of the horrible mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando Florida.
I live with cPTSD. I am bisexual and a proud ally to the entire LGBTQIA+ community, and the shooting at Pulse shook me to my core. June is a strange month for me.
I wasn’t at Pulse. I was in New York when the shooting happened. It still hit way too close to home.
I grew up in Manhattan. I lived at a school for ballet dancers. Ballet felt like torture to me because I happened to be good at it but I hated it. I was forced to dance by my mother who was so horribly abusive that living at a school that made me dance on broken bones was the lesser of two evils in my life.
The first time I had a “boyfriend”, his name was Jake (not his real name). We were quite young and paired as pas de deux partners. If he was going to lift me over his head while he spun pirouettes, we might as well hold hands in the hallway too. Both of us went on to date other men, but he became, and remains to this day, my best friend.
He was my rock through ballet school. He noticed the way that I would look at the girls and not just the boys and was the first person I admitted to that I was attracted to both males and females.
