Natalie Weiss

This is my first Pride month. I mean, kind of.

It’s my first Pride month in which I am fully out, and I don’t care who knows that I am a lesbian, and I’m writing about Pride and posting about Pride on social media. It’s my first Pride month in which I am actually proud.

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August 2020: I’m sitting alone in the conference room in the gym where I work. It’s a Monday evening. I have my laptop open, and I navigate to my college’s student dashboard. I haven’t been a college student for nearly four years, but here I am, enrolled in a creative nonfiction course. I want to learn about writing. I guess I want to learn about myself.

I was a straight-A student throughout high school and college the first time around. I cared so much about perfection and achieving what I thought to be success that, looking back, I know I missed out on a lot. I cared so much about a perfect line of A’s on a piece of paper that I lacked curiosity. I lacked bravery. I lacked originality.

In the conference room, I plug in my headphones and fire up Zoom for the first time. I enter the virtual classroom, and faces start popping up as my classmates log on. I don’t want to be afraid to talk. I don’t want to be afraid to ask questions. I don’t want to be afraid to be honest.

Class goes well. It’s once a week and two and a half hours long, but be it maturity or my predisposition for endurance (where my long distance runners at?), it feels like it goes by quickly. Near the end of class, our professor walks us through an exercise she calls “scene magic.” In essence, it is a step-by-step guide of how to write a scene. I write about running the 2018 Chicago Marathon. There are many elements writers build into scenes, whether readers recognize them or not. Well-executed scenes tend to balance description, interiority (what’s going in the narrator’s head, both within the scene and as a reflection), figurative language, and dialogue. Our class practices including these elements. We finish the exercise, and to both conclude class and introduce ourselves as writers to both herself and our classmates, our professor has us each choose a section of our writing to read to the class.

I read through my scene, and I immediately know which part is strongest. But it’s also the most honest. It’s the most vulnerable part of the piece. I don’t want to read it to this group of complete strangers. But, also, this is a (virtual) room of complete strangers. Who the heck cares?

I endure this internal battle all the way up until it is my turn to read. And I go for it.

I keep running. It is pure joy. I know that in a few hours, I will still be exhilarated, but in so much pain. And I know in a few days, I will question why I did this, as every muscle screams with every movement. But in a few weeks, a few months, a few years, I will know why. I will know that I didn’t give up then, so I can get through now. In the moments when it feels like all hope is lost – when I am told I am no longer welcome at home because of who I love, when family is just a word and not a reality – I won’t give up. Because now, I hear the roars of the crowd, and I see the Chicago skyline before me, and I feel my heart pounding. And I run.

In reading that section, there’s a tiny voice rising up in me that says, I’m proud.

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About a month later, I sit in the Barnes and Noble café and use that scene magic exercise to write an essay. I’d been trying to find the words for this essay for over a year, but every time I’d sit down to write, what came out was either half-hearted or just didn’t have the right approach. Turning this essay – this moment I’m trying to capture – into a scene is the trick. It’s the magic I’ve been waiting for. I sit there, sipping a latte, and I write:

Hi. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. I guess, if I’m honest, most days I don’t think about how I don’t talk to you. I hope that isn’t hard to hear.

I keep writing, dancing around what I’ve come to say in the same way I would in real life if you were sitting across from me in that café or the Starbucks down the street. Sipping coffee. Talking about what we’ve been up to. Leaving things out because I don’t know what you’ll think. But, eventually, I find courage, and I’ve stalled this moment for twenty-seven years, and I can’t stall it any longer.

Ok.

I’ve left some things out that have happened to me these past few months, these past few years. So let’s just start here, with the truth.

I’d take another sip of the latte. I’d look you in the eyes and inhale, exhale.

“Well,” I’d say, “I’m not sure if you’ve known this.” This is that point that I get to every time, at least six times by now, where I always pause to remember: the next words I can’t take back. It’s not that I’ll want to take them back, but a shift might occur. There might be a distinct before and after this event.

The moment of silence would pass.

“I’m gay.”

And then I’d tell you the story.

I reread the essay several times, scrutinizing it, making sure each word is placed where I want it. I sit on it a couple of days, just double-checking with myself that this is how I want it to go. And then, I copy and paste it onto my blog, and I click “post.” And the voice is louder, it’s finding strength. I’m proud.

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It took me five years to write my first novel. The first three of those, I ignored the story I needed to tell. I jumped on the dystopian bandwagon and tried to write about a girl enrolled at a shady college who falls for this cute guy. I wrote about a high school guy pining after his best friend’s sister. I wrote the things I had already read. Girl saves the dystopian world. Guy gets the girl. Straight. White. Predictable. I never really finished any of those stories though.

The first time I wrote about a girl falling for a girl was in late 2017. I guarded my writing – specifically what I was writing about – fiercely. I wasn’t out to anyone but my best friend at the time. But that story was the turning point. I met Allie and Maggie, my main character and her love interest, respectively.

The novel has undergone intense, story-altering revisions since those early drafts of a girl falling for another girl. But I would still call that the start. It was the birth of that still, small voice. I’m proud.

Now, the story born of those years of uncertainty and pain and timidness is in the hands of people that have the power to boost that voice exponentially. To give it a microphone. To give it access to the rooftop. To let it free. I am proud of that. I am proud of getting to this moment. I am proud.

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To me, Pride doesn’t have to mean dancing in the streets and kissing your partner in public and going to parades. I love it when it means that, but it doesn’t have to mean that. It does, however, have to mean letting that voice inside of you grow louder. It does have to mean embracing your identity. It does have to mean loving yourself. It’s taken me a long time to get here, but I’m here. And I am proud.