If you know me in real life, and a few of you do, you'll know that I don't tell people my age, and I don't celebrate my birthday unless forced to do so. People don't like this, at all, I have found, and won't leave it alone. They view me as someone who is still young enough that they shouldn't care if people know their age. If I was 50, for example, I don't think anyone would have the gaul to ask me such questions, but I'm 33, and probably look a bit younger still thanks to good genes and an off-and-on nightly skin care routine. So they press, and press, and I usually acquiesce and give it away. I'm an unusually private person, and am a smart enough private person to realize that if you give people a little of yourself they assume that to be the whole thing, so this is usually where my limit goes. You can't give away everything about yourself, and so if people really feel the need to "know me," and know how I tick, I give them the "gay card" and the "age card" and hope that lets sleeping dogs lie.
The reason I'm a private person is that was how I was taught to be by experience when I was young, and that personal experience has taught me to be wary of those who want to enter my orbit, as they might not last long or might be there for the wrong reasons. In the theme of being brave in 2018, right now, I am going to confess something I don't think I've ever told anyone-I came out of the closet considerably earlier than I typically tell people I did, I just don't count the first time. This is because when I was 20, and coming out to my dear friend (who still texts me every year on the anniversary of me coming out, bless her), I was ready. I was scared, but it was time-I needed to come out of the closet, and wanted to have the bravest moments of my life. But I technically told someone I was gay for the first time when I was ten years old, long before I could realize what those words would mean and what truly mortal danger I had just placed myself.
It was on a playground, and two girls wanted to know whom I had a crush on, as such things had come to dominate the recess conversation. The truth was I had just developed the first crush on someone in my grade, a redheaded boy who was new to our school that year, and had become my first friend that wasn't preordained by your parents' choice in playdates. He was a fast runner & a little shy, and something of a loner. I would learn as I got older that shy redheads were kind of my type, but at that point I just thought he was super cute, and for some reason (despite me being quite different from him as he was a jock & I was a nerd), he seemed to like me. At the time, I had also just learned of the term "gay" from a schoolyard taunt. Actually, to be specific, I had learned the word "lesbian" from a game where you had to jump off of the merry-go-round when something applied to you (ie "if you're not wearing red, jump off, you're born in February, jump on"). When someone said "stay on if you're a lesbian" and everyone jumped off, I was smart enough to jump off and ask questions later, which I did, to my dad, who in his kind-hearted but deeply Minnesotan way, explained what that term meant. I was wise enough to realize at that time that I shouldn't tell my dad this, but how lesbians felt about girls was how I felt about guys.
So not realizing what an impact it could have on my life, I told those two girls after they gave their fleeting crush-of-the-month to me that I was "gay," and hence couldn't have a crush on any of the girls in our class. I was smart enough not to say the specific boy's name (or perhaps they were too agog to not ask further questions), and then I spent the next eight years of my life in high school petrified of what I had done. For, you see, it was particularly frightening already for a closeted, different kid in a small town to exist within the confines of rumor and innuendo. It was quite another thing for him to be openly gay. There were no gay kids in my high school for me to look up to, and the only person who was clearly LGBT was a transgender student who was five years older than me, and was openly mocked & berated in the halls, frequently as teachers did nothing. In fact, I remember distinctly teachers openly discussing her in front of students, in manners that they never would their other pupils, frequently in unkind or pejorative ways. These were teachers who applauded my performance and thought of me as one of their shining students, and I was afraid that it would all go away as soon as those girls confirmed that I was "different."
I to this day don't know if those two girls said anything to my classmates. In hindsight, I may have accidentally picked two girls who would have legitimately kept my secret. They were more popular than me, but they were obviously the sort of people that as adults were going to swing pretty liberal on the gay rights issue, and maybe they realized the ramifications of what I'd done long before I did. Or perhaps they told everyone they could, I don't know. I never asked. I never brought it up again, likely hoping that they would forget, and I actively avoided them as I got older, to the point of being rude when they asked for my friend request on Facebook. Either way, the "different-ness" was still evident to anyone who cared to look. I endured bullying pretty consistently, and had no real respite in the form of a close friend or a confidant that I could trust. I had no sympathetic female friend until very late in high school, at which point I had developed massive trust issues to those around me. Even those teachers that applauded me looked at me with some distance as I got older, some with sympathy and others with a stern moral condescension, as if to let me know that I shouldn't cross that line into "different-ness" until I was out of their classroom. I still have nightmares about a band teacher who made a point of ridiculing me in front of the classroom and during our lessons together, and I've been out of that school for nearly 15 years. And all of this was without me having to confirm it, having to confirm what I had told those girls on the playground when I was ten. I can't fathom what my life would have been had I emerged from the shadows. Perhaps it would have been better-perhaps not worrying about a problem would have made me less guarded as an adult, someone who didn't want to share when someone mistreated them or who knew how to let down their guard. Or perhaps my name would have become synonymous with Matthew Shepard's. I endured my first death threat when I was fifteen in a Biology class, and it wasn't my last. It's possible the only thing holding those bullies back was a match.
Either way, I was taught to be on my guard, and the best course-of-action was to let things I didn't like about myself remain on the inside. I thought this would go away as I got older and particularly as I came out of the closet, but I am still a very guarded person, someone who is ludicrously, comically guarded about seemingly mundane aspects of my life as they might be rife for bullies. I think college might have broken me of these shackles a bit had my friend group stayed intact a bit longer, but it didn't. My best friend from college, probably the only true, traditional "best friend" that I'll ever have, stopped talking to me one day and never really spoke to me again, or gave me a proper explanation as to why we stopped talking. I have my suspicions as to why it happened, but honestly it's all just conjecture I've considered a thousands times in the years since. I try not to talk about that anymore, but it still makes me sad-I still miss the person I was with him, carefree and special in a way I never got to feel in high school when I was only friends with most people at an arm's length, and a way that if I'm being really honest, I don't know that I have ever felt since. This is partially because after the person you trust the most in the world smashes your trust in them in a million pieces, it's impossible to put that back together with the same level of confidence. And it's partially because that was the first time I ever let my guard down with someone and they seemed to love the geeky, shy, silly, sweet, and yes, occasionally sad, person underneath more than the matter-of-fact, polished, tailored, distant person I put out to the world, where everything I said was carefully modulated and considered, not just what I felt at the time.
Which brings us back to why I don't tell my age or celebrate my birthday, as there are two reasons. The first is because I don't like to be vulnerable, clearly. And putting myself at the center of attention makes me very uncomfortable still to this day. I like hanging out with other people, even if natural introversion means that I hit my limits after a while, but I don't like people to be focused on me, or have me at the center of attention. Birthdays do that (so do promotion happy hours, hence why I tend to avoid such things at all costs), and I don't like it. It means that I might be evaluated on how many people show up or how fun I am or that I'll be nervous how much fun other people are having (plus, my friends are not a "group" so it's also the awkwardness of having a bunch of people who don't really know each other get together). I like to pretend that I don't care what people think of me, and to some extent that's true, but a more accurate statement would be that I prefer people not to think of me, for the good or the bad. A lifetime of knowing that being in the spotlight is when you're most vulnerable has made me realize that I don't want people to know I exist, I don't want people to see me in a way I'm not in control. It's part of the reason that I might not publish this article (though I suspect I will)-I don't want people's opinions of me to shift. It's why I don't give this blog to more than a few close friends-it makes me feel too vulnerable.
And that leads to the second reason that I don't like talking about my age-that judgment from being "different." When I was in high school and people would ask if I was gay, I would lie, and it took a lot of time for me to answer that question honestly when asked point blank (and yes, that happens more than you'd think). But it took longer for me to eventually get to a second part of that answer, where I was saying "I'm gay" and wishing that it wasn't true. This article's already running long, so I'm not going to get into that particular chapter today, but I will say that for a big period of my life, at this point still the majority of life, I wanted nothing more than to be straight. In high school I would beg God in my prayers every night to make me straight, so that I could fit into the world. I don't know the moment it first happened where I liked that I was gay, but it did eventually get there. I eventually realized that all of the things that I loved about myself were in some part driven from being different, from being gay, and what a joyous thing that that got to be a part of my life. Pride eventually took on a whole new meaning when it wasn't just said with defiance against oppression, but with genuine appreciation for that part of my life.
But when I say my age, inevitably it relates back to the thing I hate most about myself now-that I'm single. And unlike being gay, this doesn't stem from a place of societally-imposed hatred, but instead self-disappointment that in a world where every single one of my friends (who are my age or later) have made a romantic relationship work, I just haven't, and it's not because I didn't want it. And at 27 that didn't bother me the same way it does at 33. It's not so much that I am "old" (I'm not, though I'm also decidedly "not young" anymore), but that I'm "old for..." I'm "old for...someone who wants to get married" or "old for...someone who wants to have kids" (maybe not in your part of the country, but in Minnesota, this is ancient, even by gay standards). And unlike every one of my friends, I don't have the confidence of knowing that I can make a long-term (defined here as over a year) relationship work, because I haven't...I've never had that happen. I work really hard not to feel different about this, and I have worked really, really hard to not be single, and most of the time I don't think about it...except when you make me talk about my age. Because then it reminds me of the ticking clock in my head, the one that says "why are you so behind, why are you so different?" and it brings me straight back to being in high school, marginalized and hurt.
So that is why I am weird about my age. That's why I don't celebrate my birthday. Maybe someday it will mean something different to me, I'll get over this gut-instinct thought of it meaning "being different" or that I will have someone who will make me not care about my age in my life, but for now, let me be dramatic about it. Let me say I'm old without protestations from you. And let me not talk about it. Because we all have our own walk in life, and this is the one I'm trying to get down. Respect that, and applaud that I have made it this far down the path.
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