Tis the Season

Or, how to take accountability for what a million people probably have never read or will never read and when you already have taken accountability with the people who matter 

In my teens, I wrote a blog. A lot of us did. Nowadays, some might call it a glorification blog, but really, I think it was the place I went to find safety from being judged. My friends on there truly cared about me, and I truly cared about them. We were not encouraging each other in the activities necessarily; we were interested in the fuckedness of the lives each of us was in. We reached out and supported each other, especially when it got bad.  

I think these kinds of spaces are concerning for many, and in my memories of what I wrote, and the language I created so we could better hide our sicknesses, I know they have their downsides. Even now, when I think about getting a “breath of fresh air,” I think about going out for a smoke. I am not sure how much responsibility you can put on a teenager, but this secret language is something harmful that I created. 

Over the years, I have reached out to the specific people I have harmed by my actions and behaviors, taken responsibility, and apologized and done my best to make amends. It’s not that I have been through an anonymous program or anything like that. It’s that I unlearned what I was taught by a therapist as a teenager to do.  

In my teens, because I was already a writer, my therapist taught me to create characters and assign them different behaviors and personalities and write about them in a setting in which they could have a dialogue. Later in life, I realized she wanted to prove a diagnosis that is actually a myth by creating the appearance of it. This diagnosis has historically been assigned to queer/transgender people as a way of pathologizing them ever since transsexuality was removed from the DMSV as a mental illness. At the time, I was expressing queer desire and exhibiting abnormal behavior for the social constructs of the gender to which I had been socialized.  

But this is not about that. This is not about that timid boy who no longer had a team to play basketball with, so he picked up smokes because it looked cool. 

This is about that boy who brought alcohol over to parties. This is about that boy who walked in on guys having sex with girls in their mom’s bedroom and just walked out without making sure it was consensual.  

This is about that boy who called a girl fat online in his blog because she said cutters were just looking for attention or crying out for help. Kids can be really mean, even he could be really mean when ashamed.  

That boy was me before I even had the words for it, when I thought of myself as a girl because of how I had been socialized. And I am sorry for it. I am sorry for the Xangas and thinking that I could handle it. Mostly, I am sorry to you, if you ever read them. At the same time, I hold my teenage self in a place of understanding that there is only so much judgement you can pass on a child.