"Go sit with the guys!", says my mother, at every family gathering when I am always glued to her arm in the ladies corner and my cousins are wrestling on the bed in teams, trying their best to emulate W.W.F. scenes and stunts. All I want to do is watch my sisters dress their dolls at the backdrop of their gossipy giggles. I do not want to wrestle and I do not want to go and play with the girls too ,fearing an objective harsh "No, your father won't approve." from mamma.
This was back when I was around 7 years old , which is 12 years ago , back when I did not know self expression and appeasement was a mortgaged entity until you decide to rebel in an Indian society. There was 'almost' nothing that I hid from my mother. When I say 'almost' I exclude the internal battles, which I never in my wildest dreams knew will take over my life like doomsday.
This was one such incident of numerous everyday events that made me felt excluded from my own world. There was always a hiraeth to escape and be in a place where I will be a human being before deciding my gender,preferences or gestures.
Flash forward : grade 6, guys and girls all of a sudden start shying away from each other ,talk about things that felt good in certain places . I was quite sure I was not getting the point of it. "You are over-thinking", I would tell myself. Bullying is another problem that we as misfits are "blessed" with. I started losing friends because I was sissy and when I say this I mean exactly that I had no friends all through the high school. All you actually get is hatred or sympathy , its never love in general from the cruel heteronormative world.
Here comes a moment in all the troublesome routine school days, when a guy I liked comes and keeps his hand on my shoulder. Nothing felt more reinforcing than that gesture to let me know that for the first time I had butterflies in my stomach and that I could feel things. I clearly remember crying myself to sleep for feeling what those kids felt too but feeling it the opposite way. I felt it was the best but I was scared as hell to admit it.
You start burying that feeling deep inside you, to an unfathomable depth that no one (including you) can easily reach it. Being mocked for being sissy was my start of the day at school. Being called impotent a pet name . In the whole school , I was the only one of a kind and people would come to my class just to see how I behaved and to have something to laugh about. My parents failed to do anything despite of their efforts and eventually my dad started pointing out to my flaws of having a crooked hand and he would use some physical force just because he was helpless in that situation too.
Bring a bad name to my parents was the last thing I wanted to do and even by not doing anything I felt like and to most extent I was a shame to my family , not for being gay (because people in my province do not even really understand the concept of homosexuality) but for being effeminate.
Some years later , when everything had intensified and people were actually aware of something called homosexuality , the bullying took a new swing. Some of them made my fake profiles on social media to mock me putting my gender as female and my preference for male in those social media sites. So in a way, people knew that I was not straight even before I did. After this point in my life I really started questioning my sexuality and everything sorted out when I dated a girl and failed to pleasurably make out. I boycotted everything that involved meeting new people or being with the older ones because I would be introduced to new people as a diseased , rotten , impotent hideous 'creature' whose existence did not really matter.
Suicide seemed the only way out BUT I love my mother dearly . Coming in terms with my sexuality, as a result was the most difficult time partly because I informed my mother about the feelings and our journey to understand homosexuality started together. I came out in order to cure myself back when I thought I could change it.
Am I proud of who I am ?
Absolutely yes.
Will I still want to change it if I could?
Unfortunately, Yes because my family still lives in India and I still can bring a bad name to them in the society if I ever try to live out and proud. Having a relationship and a family is out of sight for me. All I can do is hope for a better tomorrow and try being happy at the moment because if I stay happy my mother stays happy and that is the only thing I want in my life.
Now this is pretty ironic because my happiness is contingent on my family's happiness and so is their on mine! But we still cannot be happy given the society that we live in . I am 19 and it might be too early to question but ..Does is ever get better ?
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