On being queer and not knowing it

Hello from ya girl who’s ready for fall 🍂

I know, I know, we’re barely halfway through August. It is way too early to be thinking about warm oversized sweaters and jaunty scarves and mugs of steaming tea. It’s definitely too early to be fantasizing about crisp air, red/yellow/gold/orange leaves crunching underfoot, and being able to leave the windows open without suffocating on city summer scents.

Yet here I am, doing all of the above.

I blame capitalism, because the Halloween decor is already out and that’s got me in the mood for fall! Also, the fact that fall is my absolute favorite season — the vibes are always on-point — and I just want to be there already.

This week someone tweeted something so perfect for me I might as well have ghostwritten it:

Today’s newsletter is going to be slightly out of the ordinary; I’m just sharing a lil essay I wrote. I hope you enjoy, or it makes you feel something, or know you’re not alone 💗

An essay: on late coming-out 🧠

Sometimes I wish I’d know I was queer in high school. I wish I’d had the liberty to crush on my girl friends instead of random male soccer players who barely knew I existed. I had moments of giggling and kicking my feet while huddled with my friends — but I wish those moments had been about a cute girl I was obsessed with and not the boys I refused to talk to.

At the same time, I’m glad I didn’t know. My high school was — is — a boarding school for missionary kids sequestered in the German Black Forest mountainside. We were a world unto ourselves, and in that world the law of the land was the Bible. In that world, seniors were expelled for having heterosexual yet premarital sex. In that world, “save room for Jesus” and “six inches apart” were holy. In that world, any expression of sexuality could get you in trouble.

I lived in a dorm in a tiny village where the adults who ran the ship — my dorm mom & dorm dad — used to tell me I lacked integrity when I forgot to take out the trash, or that I used “Hitler-like actions” when I yelled at someone to get off a comptuer, or that I was the reason another girl was going to wind up in Hell.

I was a good Christian girl, but it still didn’t save me from their abuse.

There are things that I regret about the girl I was in high school. I regret the shame I felt when I first went to the school counselor about my depression. I regret the number of times I let my feelings get hurt and in the way of my friendships, going days without speaking to the girls closest to me over something so small it barely left an impression. I regret the way that I never allowed myself to truly be free and express myself.

But I do not — I cannot — regret not knowing I was queer.

When I write my YA novels about girls in high school who know or learn they’re queer, it’s my way of exploring something I never could have experienced. I live vicariously through characters like Nat, who realizes she’s bisexual as a senior and comes to fully embrace herself and love the girl who helped her discover her sexuality; I live through characters like Jade, who’s known she was bi for years already and doesn’t let anyone give her shit for it — or, really, anything else; I live through characters like Claudia, who’s messy and angry and in love with her female best friend. They all get to have journeys that I didn’t; they get to have journeys it wouldn’t have been safe for me to have.

And I don’t just mean it wouldn’t have been safe because of the people who surrounded me. I think if I had any inkling as a teen that I was queer, my own worst enemy would have been myself.

As a teen, I hated myself. I thought I had few if any redeeming qualities, and I clung tightly to my faith, because I’d been introduced to the concept of the fiery torturous pits of hell in elementary school, and I was terrified of it. Maybe that’s an uncharitable view of my past self, that I only believed because the alternative was damnation, but the truth is my fear of hell has plagued me since I was maybe 7, and it’s been a very, very big part of my life.

My churches taught me, too, that homosexuality was a sin. Worse than a sin, even. They taught me it was an affront to God for a man to love a man, for a woman to love a woman. Transness and gender fluidity weren’t even on my radar. And the punishment for the sin of homosexuality was certain doom in hell.

It was in high school, too, that I had my first suicidal thoughts. They came after a talking-to from my dorm mom, and I remember looking out the window into the distance and thinking that it would be better for everyone if I were to lose myself in the wilderness and die. I didn’t think my life was worth living.

When I think on who I was in high school, when I consider where I was and the messages that raised me, I know with startling clarity that I would not have been safe if I had any inclination I was queer. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d doubted my heterosexuality; but I’m glad I never had to find out.

I fear this essay has rambled a bit, so I’m going to try to rein it back in here. I want to regret fewer things, and one thing I’m releasing myself from regretting is my ignorance about my own self for much of my life. Maybe there were signs back then, and I suppressed them; maybe there weren’t, and I never could have known either way. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is it wasn’t safe for me to know, and I’m glad I was protected from that.

Alla prossima 👋

There is so much pain in the world, so much human-inflicted suffering. Was it only this week that the Biden administration sent billions of dollars to Israel to arm them so they can continue their genocide of the Palestinian people? Was it only this week that we learned mpox is spreading across the world, partly because Western nations refused to share the vaccine?

We are a dog chasing its own tail, trying to bite it off, not realizing — or not caring — that doing so will only maim us in the end.

My heart breaks every day and sometimes I simply don’t know how to carry on. Today is one of those days. What keeps you going?

— Karis xoxo