thoughts on the queer suicides and honesty in talking about our queer stories

 so tonight i'm distracting myself from cancer and ICU's with facebook and hulu and i come across tim gunn (from project runway) and his It Gets Better video. and i'm touched because - he comes out with the fact that at 17 he tried to kill himself. and i think. this honesty and vulnerability is kinda rare in folks who've made it. i feel like often i hear lip service to yea it was hard but whoo it gets better without the real addressing of the fact that before it gets better it is so really and actually life threateningly hard. and i think about myself. i tried to kill myself when i was a teen. lotsa pills taken in a haze of i'm too weird and like the wrong people and no one will ever get it. and you know i was not even especially bullied. with social messages there is enough - or was enough - or still is enough - cultural bullying that you know as a queer youth - you KNOW you are other. and that other is wrong. and you can give lip service to being bad ass and punk and cool and not giving a shit but the messages still get through. and you know the christian right and bullies have negligible impact compared to what we tell ourselves in our own heads. and i guess that's the part to me that gets better. the bigots often (but not always) stay bigots. the bullies, they take what power they can now and often have lives that will - post childhood - have absolutely nothing to do with you. but it's the self hate. the internalizing the messages that you're less than and don't deserve more because you're other. that, for me, was the biggest change. that's the inner struggle. the war. to love yourself. and i don't mean in the rainbows and skipping down the street way (though skipping is fun). i mean in the knowing that you're worthy way. that you're worth being treated well. expecting loyalty, love and goodness from the people you choose to have in your life. it means that you can love who you want - even if it goes against expectations - in any direction - and being able to expect that your people will be happy for you. what changes is that you can stop worrying that your friends or family or chosen family will abandon you and just trust that you're a good person, a worthy person and that you have people and a life you can rely on. sometimes i hear stories like tim gunn's and i wonder, what will my story be in 5, 10, 15, 20 years that makes the hardships of right now seem like just a blip. i know i can look back now, even with all of the cancer and ICU's and unemployment and know that the life i live now, that teenage me that took all those pills, could never have imagined this. could never have imagined the love and impossible romance, the music, the writing, the performances, it was unfathomable. and sure my life went a different direction than i expected. i planned to leave high school, go to U of M, live in ann arbor and get skinny living off of cigarettes, yogurt and diet coke, make a way for myself as a poet and then move to amsterdam to live in a small dank one room near the red light district and maybe eventually move back to new york and it would all be impossibly romantic. instead i went to michigan state, gained weight instead of lost it, started writing, got married, moved to san francisco, got divorced, started a relationship that's now 11+ years in, hung out with punk rockers, became a known local writer and then started some accordion bands all the while working at places like MTV and one of the worlds biggest film festivals (and a queer one at that). and sure right now it's hard. and sure depression and stress keep on hitting me like a mack truck. but i'm really hella glad that that whole pill thing back in high school didn't work out. because i got to learn that if you can just hold on... change is really the only constant.