Doug is a faggot …

January 18th, 2012 · · Sexuality 9 comments


Story told by: Doug / Edited by: Emily Harris

I’m from a small, conservative town in Eastern Washington. I was lucky enough to be born into a loving, supportive and tight-knit family. Growing up, I was always sure that my family would love me no matter what, and I was taught to be proud of who I am. Unfortunately, not everyone around me was as supportive or accepting, and I was forced to learn early on that if I didn’t stand up for myself, I was further empowering those trying to tear me down.
 
I remember being teased about my appearance and natural tendencies beginning in kindergarten. It’s so sad that kids that young even think of hurting someone else with their words, or can so easily recognize stereotypes – no doubt taught to them by their own families. I didn’t actually realize I was attracted to boys until adolescence, but somehow it seemed all the mean kids at school knew years before that. They would call me all kinds of names, but the one that always hurt the most was “faggot”. When I started hearing it, I didn’t know what it meant. I just knew by the way they said it, by the looks on their faces, that they wanted it to hurt my feelings.
 
As early as elementary school, I can remember gravitating towards girl friends instead of boys. I loved all things girly, but I didn’t really care for the things the boys at school would do for “fun”. As the years passed, I’m sure that the fact that all of my friends were female just added fuel to the “you’re gay!” fire that triggered the taunting and teasing I endured.
 
When I hit adolescence and hormones began to kick in, I realized that I was actually attracted to boys. The realization frightened me because of the stigma that being gay carried with it at the time and in my world. It felt like an inner struggle sometimes: me trying to be true to myself like my family had always taught me, and me trying to feel accepted in school like all teenagers do. At 15, I had my first official boyfriend. That relationship helped me feel more comfortable with myself and with my sexual identity.

 


 
As I started to feel more comfortable with myself, and was able to accept and appreciate all that makes me who I am, I also started to respond to the verbal bullying differently. Instead of letting the mean-spirited names and negative comments get under my skin, I would acknowledge them as truth. If someone called me gay, I would look right at them and say, “Yeah, I am.” The bully didn’t really know how to respond to me once I stopped letting them tear me down. It didn’t humiliate me anymore, because I wasn’t ashamed of being gay. It took away any power that the bullies thought they had over me, the victim.
 
I spent my first 20 years in my home town, trying to find a balance between being me and not being teased for being me. The words didn’t hurt me like they once did, but they were an annoyance, and always having to put on a brave face wherever I went was starting to wear on me. I started college and had a few jobs here and there. Then I got hired onto the MAC counter. I had found my place! I absolutely loved every moment of it. When the opportunity to transfer to a counter Downtown came, I jumped at the chance.
 
Today, I live in Capitol Hill and work in Downtown Seattle. I feel so at home here, and I wish that someone could have told the younger gay boy in me that there was a place like this – a place where everyone is encouraged to and appreciated for being whoever they are, and to love whoever they love. Maybe it would have given me a little more push to fight back against the bullies, and maybe it would have helped me through some of the days when I did lose a little confidence in myself because of those bullies.
 
I was fortunate to have a loving and supportive family, as well as a teacher and a coach who kept the bullying in high school school from going too far. Many kids are not that lucky.  I feel like I was blessed with the support system I have, and with the inner strength that got me through the tougher times, because I can now be an example to the gay youth that come after me. I feel that I have a responsibility to them to fight back, and to show them that there is life after the vacuum that the middle- and high school worlds can become at times. If they can seek out people who they trust, who they can count on to help them through the bullying, they will be remarkably stronger on the other side, and they will be able to appreciate and love themselves exactly how they were meant to be. Hopefully, the younger generation will continue my mission to help those after them, and so on, until the bullies are the minority and feel ashamed of their own prejudices.
 
It’s a lesson that rings true for everyone, gay or otherwise: remember to stay true to yourself, and have confidence in who you are, no matter what. Appreciate and cultivate your natural talents and passions, because those things will help shape you and find your path in life, and no one can take that away from you.

 


Emily is ugly …

December 19th, 2011 · · Dysfunctional Relationships 26 comments

I can remember the last time I threw up, and it wasn’t on purpose. For most people, that’s not a memory that would evoke pride – or even a memory that would stick. For me, and millions of men and women just like me, realizing that there are ways to get through life’s ups and downs without starving yourself or purging any bit of food you’ve eaten is huge. It’s more than huge; it’s a life-saver.

My childhood was riddled with cutting comments and snide remarks from people about my appearance. I was not pretty, or thin – and it was easy for friends, classmates, and even at times my own family, to point out these flaws in the form of insults. I can’t remember a time before I thought “fat” = “ugly and worthless”. Sometimes the comments bothered me, sometimes they didn’t – until I realized that being ugly and fat made me different than my friends. Through middle school and high school, while my friends were going to dances and parties, I generally wasn’t invited. I was social at school, and I had lots of friends, but I wasn’t happy. I didn’t think people cared about me, or valued me for more than what I could give them or do for them, and eventually internalizing all of those thoughts led me to hate myself.

My life has long been somewhat of a contradiction: I have always known that I’m smart, and have always valued myself quite highly in the career world. People who know me through work see me as someone very different than I’ve been socially. The self-esteem I have when I’m in career-mode was virtually non-existent in my personal relationships, including the one with myself. As it turned out, the girls I developed the closest bonds with growing up were not just thinner and prettier than me. They were (are) those above-average beautiful girls, and never seemed to have to work at feeling good about themselves. It seemed so easy for them, and so impossible for me – and, in my mind, that meant there was something intrinsically wrong with me.

My inability to love and appreciate myself in my personal relationships meant that I often settled for much less than anyone deserves from a friend or partner. These unhealthy relationships continued to poke at my self-worth with comments, broken promises, lies and deceit. Friends would turn their backs on me, boys I liked would use me to get closer to my more attractive friends, “boyfriends” would blatantly cheat on me. Today, I know that all of these things happen to everyone; then, I equated all the bad things people chose to do to me as more proof that I was worthless – because I was fat and ugly, and not worthy of being cared about or respected.

Not all of my relationships were unhealthy, thankfully. I had a fairly typical relationship with the first boy I fell in love with – we were together on and off for a few years, and then moved in together when I was 19. He was 24, and ready for much different things than I was – at 19, I was living on my own for the first time, and learning what it meant to balance adult freedom with adult responsibilities. He wanted to get married and start a family; I wasn’t ready. We split up, and he rebounded quickly – with a girl who looked and lived nothing like me. She was slim and blonde, and the opposite of the independent, career-driven 21-year-old I had become. Instantly, like a knife through the heart, I thought that the fact that he’d rebounded with someone so much more physically attractive than me meant that he’d never really loved me, and that I had never really been good enough for him. The one man I’d ever really been in love with to that point in my life, didn’t think I was worth much, so why should I?

Without realizing what was happening, I began to put myself into situations that reflected the fact that I no longer had much self-worth. Or, maybe I did realize it and I just didn’t think I mattered enough to care. I was drinking and going to clubs, meeting random guys and just having fun. I was also quickly developing a serious eating disorder, turning in on myself – my body – as a means to control the world that I felt had spun so far out of that control.

I was bulimic. I would binge and purge whenever I felt like I needed to control something, anything. It was a distraction, a way to expend my energy and focus on my appearance instead of on whatever might be bothering me – the break up, frustrations at work, arguments with friends, family issues. No one knew that I was sick; people saw me losing weight and they praised me for it. Throwing up made me feel good. I realize that statement disgusts most healthy-minded people, but it was the feeling I would get through purging that was addicting. It was a relief, it was a “clean slate”, it was a ridiculously amazing high.

Then I met my next relationship. He was tall, full of personality, always on the go and knew the city like the back of his hand. He introduced me to a million new and exciting things, from music to drugs … and the prospect of earning money off my body, off my looks. Somehow he knew I was the perfect target – he played on all of my insecurities. He started making comments about my body, and telling me what to eat and when to go to the gym (always). We started arguing about the craziest things; somehow it always ended up with me being yelled at or berated, and sometimes left on the side of the road to find my own way home in the middle of the night.

When we fought, I was often overtaken by this incredibly urge to purge. Even if I hadn’t eaten in hours, or all day, I would become antsy and irritable until I could lock myself in a bathroom and throw up. Since I was also becoming addicted to exercise and eating fairly clean, when I threw up, I was throwing up fairly healthy food in healthy-size portions – or nothing at all. Most bulimics binge and purge, and don’t often lose weight because of that combination. I didn’t really binge; I just purged.

Once purging my food (i.e., my feelings and thoughts) became a solid part of my life, purging through exercise was an easy progression to make. I was walking to work, then walking to the gym, then working out for hours, then walking home. Every. Single. Day. A day that I couldn’t get to the gym for my scheduled workout was a day I could barely function otherwise. I lost about 40 pounds over a 3-month period, going from double-digits down to a size 2. I’m 5’9” and have wide hips – anything below a solid 8 is not healthy for me. But back then, I was so far gone that I still saw myself as the fat girl. And since fat was synonymous with ugly and worthless, I still wasn’t “good enough”. Enough for what, I couldn’t tell you, but I just didn’t feel good enough period. I would stare at myself for hours in the mirror, picking out my flaws and hating myself every second of it. I would stare at myself for hours in the mirror, picking out my flaws and hating myself every second of it.
I know now that I clung so hard to that unhealthy boyfriend because he made it easy for me to get sick. He supported my compulsive exercising, he praised me when I didn’t eat for a full day, he sent me to the gym when he was angry at me for whatever made up reason. He would randomly call me names and tell me how unattractive I was.

One night, I decided to go out to a bar with some acquaintances. I wasn’t going out to find another guy, but I was so starved for positive male attention that I was easy, unknowing prey for a man who, today, I don’t remember much about. What I do remember is meeting him and accepting a drink. I also remember him driving me to his condo, making me another drink there … and then I remember waking up in a strange bed, next to a strange man, naked. I remember walking into the bathroom and seeing my face in the mirror, and I realized that I hadn’t been conscious for whatever happened between that last drink and the moment I woke up in the morning. I had no memory of it at all. I saw my clothing strewn around the condo … Calmly, I put my clothes back on and left. By the time I got home, that experience was buried so deep in my subconscious that it’s taken 6 years to surface. I didn’t freak out about it then, and I didn’t tell anyone – anyone at all. I felt like it was my own fault -I was stupid to take a drink from that man, and I was stupid to go home with a stranger. And I didn’t want to have to admit to anyone that I’d put myself in such a cliché position. I had no respect for myself, and didn’t expect any man to either. I don’t know if I would call it date-rape, because he wasn’t a “date”. But I do know that I ended up in that particular situation because of how much I hated myself and my body.

Flash-forward to today, and I wish I could say that I love my body and I think I’m beautiful. Some days, that’s exactly how I feel. Most days, though, the social anxiety I’ve developed over the years due to my body image issues makes it much more difficult to face the world. I have been in recovery from bulimia and exercise addiction for just under 2 years, and it is still a daily struggle to stay the course. Through my recovery, I put on weight and completely stopped working out for a time, and my new body makes it that much harder for me to make it through some days without worrying incessantly about whether people are looking at my flaws, and judging me for them. It’s still incredibly difficult for me to believe someone who pays me a compliment, or trust someone I care about not to use my weaknesses against me someday.

I’m not cured, I am not fixed, I am not recovered. I am recovering, and I believe I always will be. I am of the belief that eating disorders – anorexia, bulimia, exercise addiction, EDNOS – are not things that one recovers from, like you might from alcoholism or drug addiction. I can’t abstain from food like one could drugs or alcohol, unless of course I’m opting to try anorexia this time around. I don’t typically tell someone, “I haven’t forced myself to throw up my food for 2 years,” and expect them to congratulate me. And when I tell someone that I suffered from an eating disorder, they usually give me a blank stare, or they joke about how they wish they could be bulimic to lose weight too.

Everyone has a story and this is a piece of mine. I know that my natural tendency to go to food, and to my body, started at a young age. I know that I learned early on that skinny = pretty = worthy of love and valued by others. I don’t know if I would’ve done anything differently had my family not had such a fascination with food when I was little, or had people not made me believe that “fat” = “ugly and unworthy”. I do know that words hurt, and the affect of those words can last a lifetime. You never know what your comments may mean to someone, or how long their impact may linger. And, you never know if that friend who is pushing you away with their crazy behavior or unhealthy relationship choices is really crying out for your help. I am so incredibly lucky to have people in my life that remind me that they don’t love me for the outside, they love me for the inside. One day, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to love me for the inside too. That’s the part I’m still working on.


Esther is fake …

December 19th, 2011 · · School 20 comments


story written by: Esther/ edited by: Emily Harris

 

The high school years are an important part of our development and transition to adulthood. You’re trying to figure out who you are, and who you want to become. It’s a time of making new friends, experimenting with new things, learning to drive (first taste of freedom!), and, of course, having a boyfriend. I am a twin, and being a twin definitely had some advantages in high school! Double the friends, double the clothes, double everything really. In school, my sister and I were known as The Korean Twins, and we loved knowing that everyone knew us as a pair.

Our first year of high school, things were great. It seemed like everyone liked us – our friends were fun, our classes weren’t too boring, and attention from boys was never lacking. One day, a girl whose boyfriend had developed a huge crush on my twin began getting jealous. Extremely jealous. From that day on, things would never be the same for The Korean Twins. The jealous girl began spreading rumors around school about my sister and I. She said all kinds of things: we were fakes, two-faced, slutty, easy, STD-infected … She even started a rumor that I’d been gang-banged and was on drugs. It was as if, because her boyfriend liked my sister, suddenly my sister and I were both terrible, awful boyfriend-stealers – which couldn’t be further from the truth, about either of us!

Being high school, of course these rumors spread like wildfire, and of course there were people who got caught up in the drama of it all. All of my girlfriends happened to get caught up, and they all turned their backs against my sister and I. As the rumors continued to spread, and continued to grow, people were treating us differently. Guys specifically. They began talking to us and treating us likes whores, like pieces of trash.

I cried for weeks. It was all too psychologically difficult for me to handle – I was frustrated and felt tortured by the rumors, and by how awful my perfect high school life was becoming. I knew the truth about my sister and I, and I knew we’d never done anything wrong, to any of these mean girls or immature guys. It all hurt so much, I didn’t know what to do. I began to contemplate suicide. I started cutting myself. It was the only way I knew how to lessen some of the pain, and the fear I was developing – fear of going to class, fear of trying to make new friends, fear of generally trusting people.

The fear of going to class, and of going to school really at all, lead me to start skipping school altogether. I watched as the perfect attendance and GPA I’d created fell apart. I’d always been a confident, A+ student, but now I was failing all my classes. I couldn’t concentrate when I was in class, so it seemed silly to even attempt to attend. I began rebelling against my parents, sneaking out and smoking. Thinking back, all I can remember is that I just stopped caring, about everything. I’d lost myself. I didn’t know who I was anymore.

I’d lost all my friends. When you’re a teenager, your friends – your social circle – is everything to you. It’s such a huge part of your identity. Without it, who are you? I had lost all trust in female friends, so I stopped dealing with females. Soon enough, I had only guy friends, which didn’t help my new reputation at all.

I tried telling my parents what was happening, and I begged to be home-schooled. Instead, they began grounding my sister and I for cutting class, getting bad grades and sneaking out. I felt like a caged rat – I had no place to go, I was just running around in circles, and I felt like I was going crazy. Something had to give.

One night, my twin and I ran away from home. My parents couldn’t handle it anymore. Our high school principal told my parents to send us to juvenile detention because we were “out of control”. That was like a wake-up call for our parents. They pulled us out of school and enrolled us in an alternative high school. It was still hard for me to trust people, especially girls, because I was terrified of being targeted again.

I’d been held back a grade because of all of my school trouble, so I had a lot of work to do to get back on track. I knew this was my second chance, and I took it. Five years later, I can look back and recognize how hard I worked to get to where I am, who I am, today.

I was a victim of bullying and I know the power of rumors can be like an infectious disease, and it can cause scars that last a lifetime. Some of those scars you can see, and some you can’t. Rumors are powerful yet invisible, and they can quickly turn from innocent “gossip” to insidious poison that destroys lives. The words that one jealous, insecure girl decided to tell some of her high school friends still affect me today. Those words left me with painful childhood memories and a different path through young adulthood than I ever imagined.

I wouldn’t be who I am today without that girl doing exactly what she did. I am stronger now, and I have learned to love myself, and I have finally learned how to trust again. I like to think I appreciate life, and opportunities, more than I might if I hadn’t been through what I went through. I believe in loving others, forgiving quickly, and ridding my life of people who aren’t worth my time and energy.

Words are more powerful than we realize, especially when we’re young. I’m one of the lucky ones – I came out of my bullying experience on the other side, and I was able to learn from it and turn it into motivation to move my life forward. Every victim isn’t as lucky as me, so this is for those victims. This is for the bullied who don’t know how to speak out, or feel like they can’t. Be careful what you say because it can destroy lives.


Jennipher is ugly …

December 19th, 2011 · · Strangers 7 comments

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder…that’s what they say…
So true and everyone understands but most people struggle with their physical beauty everyday…

My family and I have a tradition of spending time together, atleast one day, during the weekends. On a cold autumn saturday, we met up at a restaurant in Bellevue for brunch. After finding amazing parking spots close to the main entrance of the restaurant, we all walked in together and headed towards the hostess. “It’ll be 10 mins or so.” said the hostess with a smile. We found a comfy spot by the door to wait out our 10 minutes. At this point I felt a constant stare from a young Korean American couple and their guy friend. I looked to my right and sure enough the couple and I met eye contact and they looked away. The Korean female whispers something to her boyfriend. He looks over at me once again and positively nods. He then proceeds to whisper the same message to their guy friend standing next to them. The guy friend looks over, stares up and down and blurts out in Korean “I think she’s ugly.” My heart started thumping, blood pressure shot up…I wanted to yell at the guy “Excuse me?! Who the F*ck are you?!” Instead, I just stared straight at him…with daggars coming from my eyes. To his surprise, he realized that I was Korean and that I understood exactly what he said. He immediately looked at the ground as his shoulders shamefully shrugged inward and the couple quickly turned around with utter embarrassment. Few seconds went by and by their saving grace, the hostess called their number for seating. I stared at the guy as he walked passed me with shame and his guilt ridden hands in his pockets…he never once looked up. “What a coward…” I thought to myself.

Let’s be real here. Everyone at some point in their life has thought, said it out loud and or said to a friend “She or He is Ugly…” It’s human to have an opinion but let’s not forget that it is also human to be kind to others.

“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothin’ at all. ”
― Thumper


KT is a whore …

December 19th, 2011 · · School 8 comments


Written by: KT / Edited by: Emily Harris

When people talk about name-calling they usually think of children teasing each other. My first experience was a little different: my first experience was with a grown-up. A grown-up I respected and looked up to. Ironically, this was someone who taught me about the importance of respect. This someone was my teacher. I had stumbled into a conversation between my best friend and the teacher and heard him calling me a whore. I was practically a child at the time, and I had no idea what the word even meant. I had to ask my best friend afterward – talk about an awkward conversation! Apparently, the teacher felt he had to right to call me something so vulgar because of how I dressed. But at that time, I was so young that I was still wearing a sports bra, and really would not have had any idea how to dress like a whore even if I’d wanted to.

Looking back, I find it incredibly disturbing that he found the way I dressed provocative in any way. If he had, as my teacher, he should have talked to me about dressing differently instead of judging me and calling me names behind my back, especially to other kids. His gossiping and name-calling inevitably led other students taking on his perspective. The whole situation really hurt me, and, without me really understanding the impact it was having on me, it began to erode my ability to trust the adults in my life. This distrust of adults slowly turned into a general inability to trust anyone, adult or otherwise.

I became very rebellious and I had a hard time respecting authority. After transferring around between a few different high schools, I just stopped going altogether. Because I didn’t feel comfortable letting my guard down with people, I had a hard time connecting with people until I started using. It was the perfect escape from reality because reality sucked! Slowly, I got sucked into a world ruled by the drugs. I didn’t know who I was anymore, and didn’t care. Everyone was so nice when they were high. No one argued, no one gossiped … When I was high, I felt like everyone loved me – and I loved them right back.

My foray into the drug world began innocently enough, with smoking weed. Once I was regularly smoking, popping pills didn’t seem like such a big deal. If my friends and I were partying and someone had some pills, we all did them together. It felt like a kind of bonding experience that I hadn’t been able to experience before because of my trust issues. After awhile, getting high and partying at night meant I needed something to get me through the workday. That’s when I started using meth.

I had my party drug, my bedtime drug and my work drug – I was never sober! I couldn’t get to sleep without smoking anymore. The incessant drug use was starting to show itself physically. I didn’t look healthy, and didn’t look like me anymore. One day, I passed out in the middle of the day while standing in a friend’s kitchen. When I came to, I knew I had to quit before it was too late. I didn’t want to quit, but I didn’t want to end up killing myself more.

My road to sobriety was not fun at all! I was thrown back into the harsh, evil reality of life. I had forgotten how mean people could be. Since I could no longer numb myself with little pills or my trusty little pipes, I found a new way to deal with sober life: I started mimicking my attackers. I’d told myself that I would never be like them, but there was something in me that genuinely wanted to understand them. Maybe if I put myself in their shoes, I’d finally be able to.

The transformation into a gossip or a bully was slow, but by the time I realized what was happening to me, I had become the kind of person that I hated. I was picking on people just to pick on them, just to keep my distance from connecting with them. I was disgusted with myself. The change in me was not lost on my friends and family, but I wasn’t interested in listening to them when they tried to pull me out of the road I was going down. I was playing a character – the mean girl – and they were interfering with that. They were messing with my experiment, and the experiment was my new drug. I was sober now, but I still needed something to numb me to reality, something to pour my energy into so I didn’t have to focus on myself. I didn’t ever want to feel small and insignificant again, and the best way I knew to prevent those feeling was by keeping everyone at arm’s length. Anyone that got too close got the full-on “bitch” side of me. That’s how I pushed people away.

Today, I’m approaching the things that I want to work on within me in a healthier way. I stopped playing that experimental character, and I was lucky to be able to rebuild some of the relationships that were damaged during that time. After everything I have been through, the one thing I regret most is how I let my trials and tribulations change me … I became the kind of person that I despised! While I can own up to all of my actions, I can’t help but wonder if things throughout my life would have gone differently, better, if my ability to trust and form genuine connections with people hadn’t been taken away from me at such a young age.