Welcome to Excerpts From My Super-Secret Diary, a new A+ feature for Silver & Gold members in which we publish for you some of our incomplete and/or highly personal thoughts we’ve written down, usually with actual pens. Today, Maddie has selected excerpts from her journals chronicling her earliest queer days.
This week, I turn 25 and it’s the 10-year anniversary of the first time I came out as anything: when I told two of my friends on my 15th birthday that I was pretty sure I was “totally bisexual.”
My early teen years had their share of heavy angst. But that period was also one of the first times I found myself feeling really happy. Sometimes, in-between pining over girls that I couldn’t articulate my feelings for, and spending afternoons at the hospital with my mom, I got to just be an adolescent who did stupid shit with her friends and really loved Rent and the West Wing.
I compiled these journal excerpts because I find them hilarious and heartbreakingly earnest, but also because I have a lot of love for the person who wrote these things down. Reading through these old journals has viscerally transported me back to my high school bedroom where I wrote these words and then hid them under my mattress. I want to hug this version of me, and tell her that 10 years later, maybe she won’t have been John-Cusack-in-Say-Anything-ed (yet), but she’ll have a much better handle on this whole “being queer” situation, and that she’ll have had some incredible experiences of love and connection beyond what she would have ever imagined at 14 or 15. I also want to tell her that she gives 25-year-old me hope, because when I think of all the learning and growing that’s happened in the last 10-year period of my life, it makes me eager and open for what the next 10 will bring.
For now, here’s a window into my brain from eighth to tenth grade:
1.
May 8, 2005
I canNOT believe that my best friends are who they are. [Redacted] was shocked to learn that I know and — gasp — like gay people. She thinks that people didn’t used to be gay! What the hell?!? I liked my response to that, though: “They were gay, they just didn’t say so because they were afraid of being burned at the stake!”
But seriously, the worst part is that she would disassociate herself from someone who came out. That just blew me away.
I don’t especially want to be gay, but If I was, no big deal, and who knows?
It makes me want to cry that she would dessert me if I was a lesbian. It tears my heart out and rips it to shreds.
2.
May 12, 2005
Today, Mom and I were walking in Morristown. I was talking about what I’ll be doing in 20 years (when I’m 34). I wonder if I’ll be working in politics or journalism or writing. Maybe I’ll be a teacher. Maybe I’ll be a mom and a wife. Maybe I’ll be dead. Maybe we’ll all be dead. Maybe she’ll be dead.
3.
May 14, 2005
In my West Wing fan fic, Josh and Donna need to be together, as do Toby and Amy, CJ and Danny, and Charlie and Zoe. They really should have kept Aaron Sorkin until the end of Bartlet’s second term, when the show would have ended a success.
4.
May 15, 2005
I know I believe in evolution, and I’m definitely pro-choice and pro-gay rights.
I want equal rights for EVERYONE, including homosexuals.
5.
June 1, 2005
Empress of the World is the best book. I really relate to Nic. She’s confused about her sexuality, like I am.
6.
June 10, 2005
I had my first slow dance. With [redacted]. We were dancing to a fast song, and sort of talking, and then a slow song started. He said he was going outside, but I asked him to dance. He put his hands on my hips and I put mine on his shoulders and we swayed and moved around a bit. It was sort of awkward, but not really.
7.
July 17, 2005
According to V, who was here [at sleepaway camp] last year, “the food was OK, some of the guys were nice, some of the guys were dykes, none of the guys were hot.”
8.
October 2005
[This is from a page I typed on a typewriter, written as though I were speaking from the perspective of a new high school friend, who I was, incidentally, in love with]
“Maddie once said that she’s straight, but open. I have another name for that: denial.”
9.
November 17, 2005
[above this entry I’ve written, “DON’T READ, I can’t believe I wrote this down.” Sorry, past Maddie – I’m going to expose your secrets to all of A+ now.]
I don’t know exactly what you’d call these. Friend-crushes, maybe. But anyway. There are these people in the world who fascinate me. I think it’s because they’re who I want to be. I’m so shy around these people, and I become klutzy.
I can see myself reading this years ahead and burning it.
10.
February 17, 2006
I’m so fucking confused. I don’t know if what I feel is love or crush, or just friend-love that I’m not used to. Whatever it is, it’s not helping me figure out my sexuality.
I really don’t want to be a lesbian at school. It would complicate everything. I want to be visible in our class, but I don’t want it to be because I’m a lesbian; I want it because I can do good things for the school. (Doing good things can come out of being LGBT, but still.)
11.
March 29, 2006
I’m becoming more and more convinced I’m gay. I could be wrong.
12.
April 1, 2006
SHIT! WHY MUST LOVE BE SO COMPLICATED?
13.
April 17, 2006
So yeah, I told Q I’m attracted to her. I told her first and more blatantly than X [the other girl I am attracted to], but since then, I’ve felt really really drawn to X. When I saw X this morning, my heart flipped over. Fuck I’m confused.
14.
June 17, 2006
Q got up my shirt at Relay for Life which was REALLY nice.
15.
October 11, 2006
I want to be in love and have someone love me back. I want someone to stand outside my window with a radio over their head playing “In Your Eyes.”
16.
October 23, 2006
long list of things that happened at the homecoming dance
-Drunken lesbians with [redacted]!
continue long list of things that happened at the homecoming dance
17.
October 25, 2006
[four lines of text entirely blacked out and rendered completely indescernible by my scribbling over it in pen]
18.
January 1, 2007
In 2007, I want to not get depressed and be slightly less awkward and write more and play guitar more and manage to survive oboe and get a first kiss.
