Things I need my teenage self to know (II)

Part 2

I think I’m 17 or 18 here.

Hi teenage me. It’s you, 25-30 years from where you now are, and I have some things that I’ve learned that I need to tell you about so that we can continue working together safely. You live in the 1990’s, but you also live inside of me, a 43-year-old man, and we are in a different time and space than that. So much has happened. Yet I can still feel so many of your fears and protections and desires to mask. I’m hoping that if I can share a few things with you, you might feel more comfortable with some of the things that are happening in our life.

(I wrote the preamble this letter here.)

1. I need you to know that you are loveable.

I know you have no concept of this. Having no framework for love and attraction, and no modeling at all of the idea of gay relationships, the idea that someone you are attracted to might have the capacity to be attracted to you back is not something that has really ever entered your mind.

You know you like guys; your secret fantasies are all of guys—but they are fledgling, very immature, body-based fantasies. You’ve never seen romance between two men. You’ve never seen a love story like the love you will feel. All you see are straight relationships being lionized, celebrated, touted, and shoved down your throat.

You’re so caught up in other people’s love lives (and you’re good at it—you’re a future therapist, you know! You are already practicing those powerful skills of listening non judgmentally and giving space for people’s souls to unburden themselves) that you are distracted entirely from the possibility that you could be deserving of a love story.

2. This is related, but I need you to know that you are beautiful.

What I mean by that is that you, as you are right now—no matter how much you weigh, or what your hair looks like, or what your interests are (like the fact that you love playing the violin or writing poetry), or what your mannerisms look like to others— are actually beautiful.

I know how horrified you are anytime you see yourself on camera and I’m so sorry you have to feel that way about yourself. I promise you that from the lens of time, as I look back at you, I find your mannerisms and effeminate features so incredibly endearing. You are exactly who you are supposed to be. In fact, you are closer to the person we were supposed to have been than we end up becoming because of years of training ourselves to be different, and now I regard that as such a loss.

I really miss how linked up you were to our authentic expression of self. I wish I had kept you safer, and I’m so sorry for the years I spent “acting straight” and being very embarrassed by the parts of you that were actually the fiercest, the most slay, the most c**t. I want you to know, Joshy, that you are loveable—both in the general sense that people can love you and do love you (even though it’s hard to believe, and they give you messaging that you aren’t okay or something is wrong with you a lot of the time), but also in the romantic and sexual sense too. There are lots of men in the world—and in your future—that could and would fall in love with you. With *you*! As you are right now!

I think it’s important that you know this because believing that you aren’t beautiful or loveable as you are is part of what makes you feel so strongly the desire to control how others think of you, to manage what is said about you, to somehow only allow ideas of how you would like to be perceived to exist in the world. And always being on the lookout for “wrong” ideas about one’s self is an exhausting way to live.

It’s also impossible to actually control.

You have no idea how truly adorable, wonderful, fierce, and powerful you are in the exact body you currently inhabit, with the exact mannerisms you currently exhibit.

I literally can’t wait until you stumble on RuPaul’s drag race (you’ll resist this show for a long time because of the ways you were taught to hate yourself, believe me, but once you start watching it, it will change your life!). I’m excited for you to start to realize just how valid and amazing you have always been. Oh how I wish I could have channel all of the femininity and fierceness you so naturally embodied more easily into our current life.

We’re working towards building the courage to try drag. Hopefully we find our way to it eventually. But if we were still you? Oh man—we would be so close to all of those amazing parts of who we are. It’s delicous to think about—and to know you are still in me, still a part of me.

I love you for that!

3. Speaking of that, dear sweet, amazing teenage me—I need you to know that your ideas of how you’d like to be perceived by others are so limited! Limited in a way you couldn’t possibly understand because of where you live and who you are surrounded by.

First, please know it’s okay that those ideas are limited. You are where you are. It’s the early 90’s, and you won’t graduate from high school until 1998—so all of your teen years are right there, smack dab in the middle of this decade that only presaged all the progress to come—but it hadn’t gotten going yet. So please know that your limitations are in no way your fault.

You have been given such a tiny box of possibility to judge yourself against, and your mind isn’t really aware of how others truly perceive you anyway (you have something called a different “neuro-type” than other folks—it’s why you’re so creative and so naturally and weirdly good at some things; it’s also why other things like doing homework consistently and trying to work at Subway Sandwiches as a “sandwich artist” are so impossibly difficult. They are supposed to be hard for you based on your neuro-type!

I know this will be super weird to hear, but you aren’t lazy. I realize this is a message that you have heard since early childhood when your dumb, rude teacher called you “the laziest student she’d ever met,” and a message you heard many times since then—but the truth is, you have ADHD—but not the run-around-really-fast kind. A different kind, whose energy is almost the opposite, with sluggish cognitive tempo and a very internalized form of distraction that is harder to pinpoint. This is an important part of who you are; it is also a disability insofar as it makes it hard to fit into society in the ways society expects.

Like lots of autistic people, you also have what’s called a spiky intelligence profile (think of spikes going up and down on a line). This means that some things you do are things you are naturally extremely good at with very little effort, and other things are almost impossibly hard, and won’t develop for a really, really long time. Lots of social things fit that latter description for you, and I need you to know that that’s okay. I promise you figure some things out socially later in life that allow you to have truly beautiful relationships, and some truly rich friendships.

I know it’s hard to hear, and really hard to understand, but as an adult, we have come to understand that the small box we were trying to shove ourselves into is such a TINY part of this big, wide world.

Did you know there are all kinds of sexual orientations and gender expressions out there, and that that’s becoming more and more okay in this world? Did you know that who you are—exactly you, exactly right now—is totally okay?

Did you know that there are men that look like this:

and women who look like this:

and a whole group of people (of which you are a part) who don’t fully identify as men or women but something in between (or not on that spectrum at all)? It’s called non-binary. It can look like this (or like anything really!):

or

or so many other permutations and combinations of gender expression and sexual orientation and that it is all, every part of it, beautiful and okay. Did you know that you get to be a part of that? That you are a part of this vibrant, powerful rainbow?

Here is a picture of us a few years ago (easiest photo to find on the laptop!):

And that’s our husband, Carlos (yes, don’t be alarmed; people are eventually able to get married to other people of their same gender, and we end up marrying a really wonderful, amazing man).

We get to conform to gender norms if we want to. Or we can choose not to.

All of it’s okay! And there are gifts in all of it!

Well, teenage me, that’s what I have for you for now, but I might come back and have more to say tomorrow (or I might not.)

Thanks for hanging in there with me. If I’m not mistaken, I think I can feel you easing into things a bit more—feeling a little bit more comfortable with my posting online, and feeling better in general a bit— and if so I’m so, so glad. It’s okay not to be terrified all the time. It’s okay to know that our place in the world is secure, and who we are is beautiful and valid, and that the way we express love is valuable and wonderful.

I love you. I’m grateful, deeply, for every single risk you took for us. I’m grateful for the ways you tried to protect us and help us survive the brutal years of bullying and religious oppression (I may talk about this a bit with you more another time—just know that some of the things you are learning end up being harmful, and I’m so, so sorry about that). I’m so grateful for the way you turned lemons to lemonade in so many ways. You were resourceful at every turn, and found your way towards such beautiful things.

The life I am living now—which is a BEUATIFUL life with an amazing husband and awesome kids and a great house and a job we love and a little doggy named Princess (I accidentally called her Peaches today just like your beloved doggo—in fact, her name is Princess Peach, and we didn’t even choose it!)—is because of you. Because of how smart you are, how genuine and real you are, and how—despite the need to mask so much—true to yourself you are.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I love you and adore you. I adore you with my own love, and even though she is gone, I can feel mommy adoring you through me as well.

Keep rocking that violin! It’s a hobby we enjoy as much now as we did then. And keep knocking out those poems—we end up winning awards and being published places and it’s oh so very fun! So keep learning vocab words and reading the dictionary and all that fun word stuff.

And, finally, please don’t give up.

One last, more serious note. Joshy, don’t jump off that balcony in the hotel in Eugene. Just stay put. It’s okay. It will be okay. I promise. Just go lie down in that big comfy bed and go to sleep, even though you feel so, so very alone. It will be okay, and you really truly deserve the many joyful things that are coming. In those moments you think of taking your life, remember the message that that one teacher in 10th grade tells us (who, now it seems VERY clear, was a lesbian, but just didn’t have the ability to say so without losing her job): there is nothing that can happen, ever, that in the moment is worth taking your own life—and things always do get better no matter how low things feel.

She is right.

Take care of yourself, sweet boy.

Love,

Your older self, Joshua Mayorga-Weed