And… scene.

This summer, my holiday just suddenly ended because my former bff M the Meds major couldn’t live without her boyfriend of three weeks for, well, three weeks. She lasted two weeks, and barely, after which I’d lost weight because I felt guilty eating more than she does (and she’s a full 20 centimeters smaller than me), and we couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Or at least it felt like that to me. My friend M the Meds major is a selfish person,  which is a terrible thing to say about a friend. She means well, but in the end, things gotta be done the way she wants ‘em to be done. I, on the other hand, am a stubborn person, and when you step on my toes just a little bit too much, I become a pain in the ass. And I wanted to see Eastern Europe, so there you have the reason I was back in Holland after two weeks, and I was angry.

Four or five days later I was having breakfast in the Neumarkt Starbuck’s in Cologne with my boss. (Just a couple weeks ago I realized my first job is a gay writing job that I didn’t actually actively apply for. How am I ever going to top this?) I was sleepy, because although my parents live close to the German border, I had to travel for anything between an hour and a half and two hours to get from door to Starbuck’s. That depended a little on the subway transfer, but for three days during the Gay Games Cologne I did it every morning and every evening. I am nineteen, and I didn’t have a press pass because I was supposed to be in Eastern Europe, but I tried to manage as best as I could. I was nervous at first, then I was exuberant, and then I was just tired. I watched sports I couldn’t care less about (like beach volley) and cheered for the Dutch people. I talked to people I didn’t know were important. I stumbled through translating English to German even though all my German gets mangled up with Swedish these days. I told some German guy we didn’t have any transgender magazines and while I said it, I felt incredibly stupid. I watched a black father and a white father feed their toddler daughter, all smile and curls and terrible twos. I developed a temporary fondness for cheerleading, and got soaked in the rain to watch it.

I don’t ever blog about my job because it feels strange, and also, because there’s not much to talk about. I do it from behind my computer and I often cram it in between vocabulary revisions, episodes of The Vampire Diaries, reader texts, or dishes. When I still used to live with my parents I never started writing before my parents went to bed because they didn’t know anything about it for I think pretty much the first year. But on the second day my father drove me to Cologne and he went back with our magazine, to give to his lesbian colleagues.

Anyway, when I was in that Starbuck’s having breakfast and being sleepy and silent, there were sportsmen around, and I could feel the buzz.

When I’d just admitted to myself I did actually like girls, first I had all this anxiety building up in me that only got released a bit when I came out to my online friend D the English major, then to my online friend J the English major (who is at my uni now), and then to E the People and Bussines Management major in December of 2007. Then I started worrying a bit about politics, major events, and the like, and the first thing that happened was 15 year old Lawrence King got shot by his classmate on February 12^th, 2008. I came out to my parents that night, which ended in drama from my mother’s side, who ran up the stairs, shouted a couple nasty things, and slammed my parent’s bedroom behind her. My father responded with silence, although I do remember him telling my mother to let me just speak. I didn’t have a laptop back then, and it took me two days before I allowed myself to be downstairs beside breakfast and dinner. That’s when I read about the shooting online, and I felt powerless.

The second thing that happened was Proposition 8 in California. I was up all night the morning of the elections, watching live television until the wee hours, and I was up at six the following day when Obama spoke live on my radio. (Which, by the way, sits abandoned on a closet in my old bedroom in the South.) I knew Prop 8 was going on, but the Dutch press pretty much ignored it, so again I had to wait ‘till the evening, and subsequently the next day when I had some time off between classes to head to a computer, to find out if they’d finished counting. Prop 8, as we all know, passed. Again, I felt powerless.

Meanwhile, my mother was still avoiding ‘the topic’. At one point she said, ‘do we really have to talk about it all the time?’ although I hated bringing it up and never actually did. She referred to me as a dyke while we were playing a board game at Christmas 2008, and again two times after. She once said I must like purple because I am bisexual, I would never have any kids although I wanted to be a mom when the other kids wanted to drive fire trucks, and when we were painting my room in the summer of 2009, she asked how you could possibly know the difference between just a girl friend and a girl you like. Which for me is, ‘well people I’m just friends with can be really pretty as well, but people I like set my stomach on fire with their eyes‘. (Instead of saying that, I asked her how she knew with guys she met.) I am still hopelessly teaching her not to say ‘homofiel’ (homophile) but ‘homosexueel’ (homosexual) and not to correct herself when saying ‘pedofiel’ (pedophile) and replace it with ‘pedosexueel’ (pedosexual). ‘Pedosexual’ is a term coined by Dutch press (the bastards) and this political party who is banned from running in elections but who wants to ‘take away the stigma’. Well they can choke in their stigma, I don’t want them referred to with a civil description. I know I’m being childish, but I have my reasons.

At school, although I wasn’t targeted specifically because nobody ever knows I’m queer, there were definitely taunts directed at no one in particular, and when I spoke out to my English teacher about it, she refused to take it a level up. I was afraid to talk to the guy one level up if only because my self esteem was dwindling. I fell into depression, I cut my knee with my gilette in the shower, I stared at my wrists for an entire weekend and listened to brilliant Andrea Gibson on repeat. I wrote ‘this will never be over until I am over’ in my diary and texted my friend J the English major the lines ‘tonight I wanna slit my wrists, hold my blood to God’s lips and say taste this’. She replied, ‘Don’t. You. Dare.’ and told me everything would be fine as soon as both of us would be at uni in Amsterdam, because at that time she lived across the country. She saved me. I never told anyone this. Then I wrote a lengthy e-mail to my History teacher about why my grades were almost sub-zero (lowest point reached with a 2.1 out of 10) and I managed not to cry when he invited me to talk about it after class one day. He raged at the insecure little boys in my class who dared to say about my new gay headmaster that he should’ve never been allowed to hold a position that serves as an example at a school.

They made fun of my teacher, but I adored him for it. He shot me a look, and I smiled back, and that’s something I will always remember. There’d never been a teacher who actively looked out for me, from the Arts teacher at thirteen who laughingly asked me ‘you do like things quiet, don’t you?’ while I was fighting back tears because no one wanted to cooperate with me on the groups project, to the PE teacher who asked me, ‘you don’t do sports, do you?’ although I swam twice a week, to the Social Sciences teacher who told me that he hadn’t believed I was intelligent before I managed to get into senior year of vwo. Teachers didn’t like me because I didn’t work or because I was apparently stupid, and when they did know I didn’t really have to work, they simply tolerated me. It was so strange at uni to hear my language prof say she really thought I worked for it and was a good student.

Sobutanyway, I spent entire afternoons in the library writing. I read British newspapers between old men and rich uptown women because I didn’t want to go home. I stopped studying. I graduated with decent grades because I am stubborn. Then I got asked to write for the website, to which the most evident trace by now has been removed. I want this site to go down anonymously, and me on the website has been becoming increasingly non-anonymously, if there exists such a thing.

I was in Cologne on August 5^th (I honestly don’t know these dates by heart, but there’s always Wikipedia), surrounded by gay people, when we had all just heard Prop 8 had been overturned by district court Judge Walker. And I felt that buzz for a brief moment, sleepy-headed, while discovering frappucinnos. I realized: I am no longer powerless.

Since I found my way around the internet, I have been active in it far more than most of my friends. I was on message boards, I wrote fiction, I was addicted to an mmorpg for a while. I started blogging when I was thirteen years old, and when the gay issues became clear to me in 2007, I started blogging about those. Feverishly, almost. And I now have a voice.

Forget about all the nasty things my mother said. She was never raised to be any better, no one expected it of her. At some point she started trying, and we get along fine now. I haven’t crossed the hurdle of ‘first girl I’m dating’ yet, but we got through ‘first boy I’m dating’ pretty alright. Forget about high school, and moron teachers, and library safe havens. Forget about me crying on the toilet of an Italian restaurant in my boyfriend jeans and tanktop, my grandpa cardigan (ordered from the H&M men’s department, yay online shops!) flung towards my friends M the former Swedish major and M the Norwegian major, because my friend S the Swedish major had said something tactless about people from bad backgrounds. That’s a whole ‘nother topic, my unhappy bus driving father, the tiny apartment I grew up in until we bought our house, my mother who walked around the house crying for a couple months and said she wasn’t good for anything when I was nine and I used to crawl in bed with her the nights  my father was out working.

At the place I am now in my life, I’m afraid I will forget about that. The good they’ve done for me, my numerous cousins who never got ahead in life and are now doomed to live it over with their own children, that I used to love my grandfather before he turned into a manipulating monster. I’m afraid I will become the kind of person who takes her work home, travels far, and in the end forgets to return to that rural South of that tiny drowning country by the North Sea. But if I work hard enough, I won’t.

I want to go far. That is something the three of us, my parents and me, have always worked for. No matter what, I will get a university degree, I will repay my by then humongous, ginormous, awfully large dept to the government, I will never forget those afternoons as a kid learning English, because I will remember that it will be the foundation of my success. It’s only now that I have a basis in Swedish that I notice how hard it is to learn the finer things that I have never thought twice about in my second language. Why is it ‘to know by heart’ instead of Dutch ‘to know from out of your head’? Why is it ‘on the bus’ instead of Dutch ‘in the bus?’. Why is ‘the police’ plural, when do you say ‘badly’ instead of ‘bad’, what is the difference between ‘good’ and ‘well’, when do you drop the ‘the’ before ‘government’?

I did have a press pass, once. It was the ILGA-Europe conference in The Hague last autumn. I was probably the youngest person there and it was amazing. I have ten more credits to go before I complete my first year of my bachelor’s in Scandinavian Studies. I have figured out this year that I’m more intrested in Media Studies than in General Linguistics, which is fine, because you gotta figure that out one time in life. I just moved from Hoofddorp at the other end of the airport, where I lived for almost two years, to near the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. It’s a giant flat with a lot of short stay international students, which is brilliant. And although I want to remember the bad times, I want to remember the good times just as vividly. I want to see what more life has in store for me. What other victories I will be able to celebrate, be it small ones like a minor or big ones like Prop 8.

I am spreading my wings. Just you watch.

—

Quick note: I will only disappear from *this blog*, not from the internet. Some of you know who I am, in which case you will know where to find me. The last couple posts have been pre-scheduled and I never actually checked back on WordPress. I have outlived this platform, this fake name, and these long-winded rants. There are too much things you can learn about me on here, however, I have realised there are also a million things you don’t know about me. Did you know my parents and me have always celebrated New Year’s in front of the tv in our pajamas, complaining we don’t know what regular people do on those occassions? I once slept through it with my cousin J? That my favourite dish comes from Groningen, the province I was born in, and contains bacon, and that I became a vegetarian in October last year? Which, frankly, is a bit of a problem?

You didn’t. Because you don’t know me. And I like to keep the other million things to myself.