Stumbling Up

Until I got to college—its own minor miracle—I was a shitty student. I had no interest in homework and a lot of defiance. I’m not entirely sure what was going on for me, but, looking back, it seems the public schools I attended just had no fucking idea what to do with an audacious queer kid.

In second grade, my teacher, Mrs. Parker, tried taking all my books away, ostensibly because I wasn’t using them—a tactic that just pissed me off and left me digging in my heels at 7 years old.

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Pradin, was different. I think she was the first teacher to really see me.

She invited me to her office several times and was always kind, engaged, and engaging. She clearly liked me. She gave me a bunch of tests that were actually fun—tests to assess me, my intelligence, and my aptitude. My visits continued into the beginning of fourth grade.

Unbeknownst to me, she was also meeting with my parents—my mom, at least. They seemed to like each other a lot.

Just one month into fourth grade, I found out I was moving up to fifth grade and skipping ahead. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, but it seemed like a good idea to me.

Sometime in fifth grade, puberty arrived early. I was suddenly bigger than even the older kids in my new cohort. In some ways, that was a very good thing, but it also made me even more of an outsider. Other kids already viewed me as weird and didn’t know what to think of my advancement.

I was a queer kid, bigger than my age peers, still foundering scholastically in a system incapable of handling exceptions. I was ganged up on, heckled, and bullied. I established an outcast identity just in time for the rest of my family to enter a turbulent period of divorce and displacement.

My mother, now single, moved with her five kids to a different school district a few miles away. In sixth grade, I found other outcasts—my tribe. We were the freaks, the druggies. At 11, between 7th and 8th grades, I dropped acid for the first time with my friends. It was incredible and life-changing.

I continued to be an absolutely shitty student all through high school. I had to retake algebra, rhetoric, even gym class. I just hated going to school and refused to conform to the homework mandate.

I was smart, clever, funny, talented. I’m lucky I had music lessons, choir, and drama class.

My struggles were scholastic and social but not sexual, despite my early pubescence. I established an intimate relationship with my own body that seemed free of conflict, shame, or frustration. I felt at home, in some respects, with my growing body, even as I was coming to terms with my orientation.

Just after my 17th birthday, less than a week after moving into the dorms in my freshman year at Northern Illinois University—the school that accepted me on a music scholarship—I called my mom to tell her I was gay, a reality I’d just fully accepted myself.

I only had to move out to come out.

In college, my grades suddenly soared. I liked being on my own, being in charge of choosing my classes, and just being inspired by good teachers. I did really well and moved to a much better school two years later.

And 17 was when I started having sex.

It was also the year my drug use became daily.

I don’t obsess over regrets, even though I’d have preferred that some things had gone differently.

I wish I hadn’t used all those drugs for so long—daily into my thirties. Such waste.

I wish my elementary school could have solved my puzzle, unlocked my passion for writing and fitness much sooner.

I wish exceptional kids like me were as celebrated as conventional kids. In the sixties, there was a desperation to push a social conformity that institutions could feel slipping away from them—if it ever truly existed. Queer kids like me languished. Many of us didn’t survive.

But I survived and thrived through some amazing social changes, which just seem to keep coming.

And a few key things were very right, like a mother who loved and supported me, to a point, a family that laughed a lot, and a house full of books I was free to read, regardless of their “age appropriate” nature, which is how I went from Milne to Roth before the debut of my first pubic hair.

I don’t really regret any of it—including being a shitty student, an outcast, a drug addict, and more than a little slutty. I don’t play “what if” games with the past. That, too, is a waste.

We all press or fall forward, thanks to and in spite of everything. All we can do is adapt, pivot, make our choices, and move on to the next moment—until we don’t.

If I have a point, it’s that children need a lot and our systems often fail them—fail us.

My friends know me as someone who “hates kids,” which isn’t actually true. I just prefer the company of adults pretty much all the time.

But I do care about kids. I remember the ways I was neglected and misdirected as a kid myself, mostly through adult ineptitude.

My beautiful, imperfect life is the totality of everything I arrived with and experienced, and all the people and systems I’ve interacted with on the way to this moment.