If you had told 18-year-old me, born and raised in rural South Carolina, that six years later she would be living in her own apartment, as an unapologetic lesbian, she would’ve laughed. Laughed in utter disbelief–and joy.
At 18 years old, I sat in a church pew letting my thoughts drown out the pastor’s sermon on the sins of liberal education and homosexuality. There was a constant refrain in my head: I just have to make it through today. Just one more sermon, and I won’t have to step foot in a church for months. I only had a few days until I moved states away to begin university, and I was beyond ready. At that point I felt like I was holding on by a thread, ready to unravel at any moment, because the year leading up to this point had been an emotional nightmare.
When I discovered that I was a lesbian a year earlier, at age 17, it was like a missing puzzle piece clicked into place. I remember laying on my bed, legs propped up on my bookshelf, coming to this realization. I felt this sense of calm clarity wash over me, unlike anything I had experienced before. My entire world, all of my feelings, finally made sense.
However, I also knew that accepting this would make my future drastically more difficult to navigate. When you live in the evangelical South, in a conservative family, everything is on the line. Would my friends shun me? Would my family disown me? Will I be able to get married one day? Was there a future for me? I barely knew any queer people, let alone thriving queer adults. To embrace who I was – who I am – would make me a target and leave me further isolated. And that fact terrified me.
So when I found myself in that church pew, listening to my last sermon before moving away, I searched for that clarity that I had experienced over a year earlier. As I listened to the pastor preach about how the liberal arts “turned people gay” and how homosexuality would be the downfall of America, I clung to any hope I could muster that the future would be better than whatever emotional hellscape I had been living in for years.
Now it’s six years later, and I’m living a life my younger self never imagined. If I could go back, I’d envelop her in the tightest hug that I know she desperately needed and tell her everything works out. That she makes it out.
Not only does she make it out, but she thrives. The emotional wounds still exist, but they’re nothing compared to the love and joy and freedom that she discovers at university. She makes more friends – queer friends. She gets her first girlfriend. She meets unapologetically southern queer women who become some of her closest mentors and who give her reassurance that you can have a thriving queer life in the South.
I’d tell her that she becomes unabashedly herself. That she doesn’t succumb to the anxiety and uncertainty about her future that threatened to overcome her all those years ago.
That all of her perseverance and hard work pay off. She’ll scrape and claw her way out of darkness despite the constant barrage of uncertainty and fear. She’ll create this life piece by piece, through gritted teeth and many, many tears. Every time she chooses authenticity, to show up as her true self, leads her to this life.
If 18-year-old me, sitting in that church pew, knew what I know now, maybe she wouldn’t have been so afraid. Maybe she would’ve felt safer knowing what future lay ahead of her.
She was so brave for what little she knew. Brave enough to move hundreds of miles away from the only home she’d ever known for a future she wasn’t even sure was possible.
Her resilience is the reason I’m still standing, breathing – living. Every time I wake up and choose myself, to live authentically, is for her.
