When I was a little boy, I knew I was different from the other boys I grew up with. I grew up feeling like I fully identified with my masculine and feminine sides, and I was lucky enough to have parents who allowed me to do that. I was caring, considerate, and very in touch with my own and other people’s emotions, something that didn’t seem very typical for boys in the 80’s growing up in rural Canada. I played with dolls, dressed up with my sister, ran a mini pretend restaurant with my sister, figure skated, all things that at the time were seen as things little boys don’t do. Before school, it was just normal to me. But when I went out into the world and started kindergarten, I was struck with the fact that most boys didn’t do the things I was doing, and didn’t act the way I acted. As the years passed, I started keeping a lot of things to myself to fit in more and be more accepted, primarily by the males around me, so much so that as I aged I dropped a lot of the things I loved doing, especially when I was young.
As I hit my teenage years, I felt like I moved away from a lot of things that made me myself and that brought me joy, so I could be seen like all the other boys. While it didn’t always work, it often allowed me to blend in, and because of that and so many other reasons, as a teenager I turned to drugs to numb the feeling that the world would never accept me for who I was. I knew from an early age I was gay; I always leaned into being more feminine and emotional. I loved piano, figure skating, and dancing, not sports, action movies, and other things it seemed a lot of young men back then liked. I feel like I kept hiding who I really was until it all came to a point in my late twenties.
While I came out in my late teenage years, making peace with my sexuality wouldn’t gradually start happening until I was in my mid-twenties, and I wouldn’t really get to a place of accepting myself until I was in my early thirties. But by the time I was in my late twenties, because of drugs, depression, and bad choices, my entire life had fallen apart. I had nowhere to live, not a dollar to my name, and I had to start my life all over again.
In starting over, I had the time to look deeply within myself and ask who I really was, who I wanted to be, and decide that I was no longer willing to dim my light, pretend in any way at any time, and going forward, wouldn’t worry about what others thought about me or how I was living my life.
I connected with things that brought me joy; I did things that pushed me further outside my comfort zone, and I put myself into positions where people could judge me, so I could really hit home that I was living for me, not anyone else, like dancing on TikTok. I love dancing, and I often didn’t in my teenage years and early twenties. Outside a gay club, for most of my adult life, I felt like I would be judged or called names or made fun of, so I often stopped myself. When I got into my thirties and TikTok came along, I wanted to shake off things that were bothering me and move further away from even thinking about other people’s opinions, so I posted videos of me dancing on TikTok, and I still post those videos today. It’s honestly so freeing, and that, along with so many other things, has led me to not caring at all what other people think about me, my choices, my sexuality, or my life.
Once you free yourself from worrying about what other people think about you, once you free yourself from even listening to what other people think about you or your life, it really does open up so many doors. It allows you to fully embrace who you are and what you want, without ever questioning if you should or shouldn’t do it and what people think, because you don’t care. Other people’s opinions of me are just that, theirs, not mine to carry or concern myself with, period.
That’s what I want for everyone else. We get one life to live, and you have to learn who you are, love who you are, and be true to who you are, authentically, because, as I’ve been reminded from a recent study I read, one of the number one things most people regret before they die is this: they regret not being authentically themselves, and not being true to themselves without listening to outside input about what they do, their career, and who they are as a person. So I think about that each day, as I strive to be authentically me, each moment, each day, as I chase happiness, joy, and my version of who I believe I am to my core.