Being Gay And Incredibly Happy

25 and I’m perhaps at my happiest. Ever!

You may be asking, What’s the big deal? Well, I think most people don’t expect a gay person to be happy. Or to be leading a life that he or she is sufficiently happy or confident of to talk openly about.

Too many a time the news that we hear about the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community or an LGBT person tend to be something bad or negative. Suicides, discrimination, injustice, bullying, just to name a few. We seldom hear something good or positive.

It is ironic that the word “gay” also means cheerful and carefree, because many gay people are living the direct opposite.

Well, let me start my story here:

I was little when I began learning that being effeminate is no good for a boy.

At first, people hinted at it, my lack of obsession with toy cars and my interest in dressing up Barbie dolls. I was just a child at that point, so I didn’t care much.

But then people started dropping terms like “sissy,” “gay” and other equivalents. At some point, I realised that those words were used to shame my behaviour.

But as a kid, you don’t really understand much, do you? You don’t/can’t process what’s a personal attack, what’s a criticism, and what’s a honest, sincere advice. As a kid, when someone says something that hurts your feelings, you just feel bad. You don’t evaluate whether it’s constructive criticism or not. Similarly, when someone throws you a compliment, you feel good and happy. You don’t double guess it or try to read between the lines to see if it’s sarcasm or not.

Life seemed simpler. Because you were simpler.

Growing up, I think we all had our equal share of good things and bad things that had been said to us. And these things had either made us feel good or bad about ourselves. They are what that built us into the person that we are today.

For me, a lot of the things that had been said to me in the past hurt me deeply. I don’t blame whoever though — I didn’t exactly voice out what words had hurt my feelings.

Here’s another thing about kids — they don’t often vocalise their inner world in meticulous details. That doesn’t mean they will forget about it all though.

In my subconscious, I knew that something was amiss. While I continued doing my thing, playing with Barbie dolls, playing house, playing pretend as a mermaid and etc., I started to feel guilty. I knew that I was behaving in a way that the adults deemed as wrong. As inappropriate. As shameful. As GAY.

You see, when you’re told again and again that what you find to be so natural and so instinctive to be wrong and shameful, you can’t help but to feel bad about yourself. Not just your behaviour, the things you do, but also, the person that you are.

Have you ever failed a test or an exam and felt really bad about it? And when you went back home and told your parents about it, they then made it worse by lecturing you?

There was a time when my life was a never-ending, all day, 24 hours test of whether I fit into gender stereotypes.

Some parents may argue that them informing or educating their child about existing gender stereotypes is actually done in good faith. It’s to help their child to avoid bullying. Like telling their son not to take on the role of a princess or a fairy when playing pretend would in turn help him avoid being bullied or discriminated against.

“But how long do you intend to go on with this protective act?
Forever?”

So you are going to teach your son or daughter that in order to avoid being hated or disliked, he or she should pursue the absolute conformation to social and gender stereotypes?

And for WHAT? To be HAPPY? To be acceptable to other people and in turn feel a sense of joy about it?

That I tell you can be one of the saddest ways to live: To base your happiness on others’ opinion of you, and not your own opinion of yourself.

I can still remember a particular incident from my childhood where I was told by my mom to stop “walking like a girl.” She added that it’s shameful for me to act that way and I would be laughed at by other people if I continued so. I was of course greatly upset by the comment. And greatly embarrassed.

That was also one of those few moments where I learned something about social relations, that I need to act a certain way so that I would be accepted by other people. That I shouldn’t act in ways that might make people reject me…

But with that, I had also started to reject myself, slowly, bit by bit.

I would try to “correct” myself. I learned to be hypercritical of myself, to nick-pick. I would try to identify parts of myself that people might possibly dislike, even before I was ever told that they were disliked.

Through this process, I learned much about introspection indeed. But I had also come to believe that my natural self couldn’t be trusted. It’s going to betray me one day.

So I got to fight it. I had got to… not be myself.

I suspect at some point of my teenage-hood, I had lost track of whether suppressing my true self was all done for my own benefit, or for the benefits of others.

I had stopped living to make myself happy, but to make others happy.

I was never taught to stand up to bullies. Well, I never told my parents or complained to anyone that I was bullied in school. So I came up with my own solution: I stayed silent.

In fact, I was always in fear of someone dropping a hurtful comment. Just so you know, it’s always the most innocent comment dropped that hurt the most — the arrow that was shot before my defensive gear was up.

I would try to put up a brave front, but on inside I was crumbling in fear and shame. And I would then turn my back against my own self. I would put on my own set of tainted lenses, which I had refined bit by bit through the years, and become my own judge.

I had thought that I needed to change the way that I was so as to avoid the hurt. There was nothing I could do about the bullies; all I had to work on was myself. And so I tried to make myself smaller, to stand out less. To be more… invisible.

In the end, I became my own worst critique.

It was like having another voice in my head which I was supposed to fear and abide to. It was my other self whom I had believed to be the “more right” version of myself. The version who would be doing all the right things, making everyone like him. He whom my parents and relatives would be exceedingly proud of.

He was the one I trusted the most. And I knew that he’s constantly trying to improve himself at the same time to be even more shrewd in different social settings, and more sensitive and intelligent in picking up social cues, so as to help me avoid situations that might cause me to embarrass myself.

For years I had lived like that. And even now, I still have him in my head — that part of me. The one whom I thought would know better.

But NO.
The truth is, he doesn’t know better.

He does not know anything about living a honest, open life.

He knows nothing about FREEDOM, or about living a life which is without shame or fear.

He is in fact a coward who can’t live without people’s approval of him. Their smiles, their praises and their acceptance.

He is a people pleaser who thrives on others’ acknowledgement of him because he never had the capacity to love himself regardless.

He never had the courage to be who he really is. Because he was not taught to be brave. He was told to fear constantly and be wary always.

And he was me, and I was him.
I was my worst enemy.

I have come a long way. A long, long way to who I am today.

I was living in the fight-or-flight mode for as long as I can remember. If I wasn’t fighting others, I was fighting myself.

But now, I am no longer afraid of being called out for being gay. You can pass a joke about me and my “gayness,” I don’t care. Or rather, I am glad that you bother talking about me. Because in that moment, I would have meant something to you. And you? You would mean nothing more than the old version of me whom I’ve but grown out of.

The fight is over.
Two decades worth of it.

Life sucks sometimes. And it will be a whole lot worse if you actually believe the wrongs that other people say you have.

I’m happy not because I naturally am a happy-go-lucky person. I’m happy because I now know that I can be happy regardless of what people have got to say, and I make sure that I be it.

Trust me, life will be a lot better for you when you stop listening to what people have to say about you.

Just be true to who you are.