Author: J-Mo

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“No you can’t be gay, you just haven’t found the right guy yet.”

My sister is a proud lesbian. As proud as they come. She’s the Teddy Roosevelt of gays, waving a rainbow flag as a bald eagle glides around her…and I love her for it. We talk about it frequently like it’s nothing (because it shouldn’t be a big deal), so when we encounter someone who actually doesn’t love her for it, it’s always a huge shock.

My sister threw a holiday party last week and we met someone new. Once we mentioned in the conversation that she was gay, you would have thought we said she was previously Harrison Ford:

“What? That’s a joke right? You’re not actually gay?”

Once she said she was he responded:

“Oh no. No no no. You’re not gay. No. you can’t be gay, you just haven’t found the right guy yet.”

How do you respond to something like that? Who gets to be the judge of whether or not my sister is gay? She went through another time when a guy really liked her, and when she continuously reiterated she was gay his response was, “It’s just a phase! You’ll grow out of it!” I’m sorry, it’s not a cyst on the side of her arm, it’s who she is.

I know our country is making a lot progress towards legalizing gay marriage throughout the United States, but I am constantly reminded that the country needs far more than that for the LGBT community to be fully accepted. There was just a news report last week of a young boy killing himself after being bullied for being on a cheerleading squad. Where do we even start to not only gain support from the country, but also show the opposition that literally nothing is wrong with being a LGBT.

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A gruesome comment that filled me with rage

It’s amazing how you can get along quite well with someone until you realize they proudly blurt out their views that make you want to instantly kick them where it hurts.

I’m known generally as the nicest person in the world. I hate conflict, and when I’m in a conversation with someone, I feel an incredibly strong obligation to smile and listen. Last week I had an extremely gigantic exception.

I was racing onto campus from work to go to the Michael Brown discussion in the Women’s Center when I encountered one of my classmates from History. We both laughed about how last minute we are when it comes to writing papers, and all was fine and good, until he said:

“Did you see the protestors up there for Ferguson?” I had no idea he meant it in a bad way.

I immediately got excited that there were protestors and asked where they were, and that’s when he snapped and exclaimed:

“What are you excited for?! My brother is a cop, and he has to deal with this stuff all of the time! I’m tired of people calling racism. It’s annoying. It’s not like black people are slaves anymore. They have their freedom, they just need to move on.”

In the midst of his “argument,” I immediately snapped, and yelled “You don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about! You have no f******* idea!”And proceeding to race to the Women’s Center with tears drowning from my face.

Did he assume I’d agree with him because I was white? Did he really believe I’d go along with his absurd comments? It made me lose a lot of hope for my generation until I made it to the Women’s Center and found people as outraged as I was, and had sophisticated arguments as well as insightful thoughts. I didn’t feel so hopeless and alone after that, but it did make me realize more than ever that there is still a fight to be won. We are still in a society that holds particular standards for race, beauty, wealth, and power. We need people to get angry and aware if we want to be and see changes in our country. Until then, I hope that guy in my history class knows why I went from nice to outraged in .00006 seconds right in his face.

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Through the ashes of heartbreak… I rise with triumph.

Not long after I turned 18, I came home from class one day to find that my mom was home early from work.

I walked in the door to find that she had several bags packed in the kitchen. I asked her what was going on and I got this response:

“Honey, I got fired today. I knew there was a risk of this for a while now, but I didn’t want to worry you. I’m just going to stay at Sean’s house for a week to clear my head. I’ll be back in a week with a plan okay?”

Sean was her boyfriend that lived on the water somewhere near the Eastern Shore. He had cheated on her and broken her heart before, so I wasn’t a fan of him at all, but after watching several boyfriends leave or break her heart, and after watching her struggle constantly with online dating, who was I to stop her from being with him?

Growing up, my mom was constantly dating, and she was very open about it. My whole life had been taking care of her, because it was never in her head that she was supposed to live alone. Sure, she was incredibly strong, but she was also incredibly confused and depressed. She grew up wanting a husband and kids, and while she got the kids, she never got her perfect husband, and my sister and I had to constantly live with her disappointment. My mom went to stay with Sean, and never came back. I got a text message from her that she got married, and she made a life for herself. Since I was 18 I was technically an adult, so technically she did nothing wrong, but you don’t realize just how young you still are when you’re 18 years old.

I didn’t no how to cope with such an enormous empty feeling, so I replaced it with what I learned to do: have a lot of sex.

I went from sleeping with one person, my first love, to several people, in a span of months. It was awful. I had some really great guy friends, and when they showed interest in me, I automatically assumed I needed to sleep with them in order to receive love from them. I’d wake up in the morning feeling filthy, wrong, and quite frankly very unfamiliar with myself. Who was this person that suddenly slept with every man that moved? This wasn’t me! I put these guys before everything, including school and work, and it all came back to haunt me soon enough.

One I ruined my GPA, had no job, and lost nearly all of my guyfriends fro obtaining quite a reputation and getting heartbroken from nearly all of them, I hit rock bottom, and felt the emptiness all over again. None of this was solving any of my problems, but actually just severely avoiding them. I had to find out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life.

I’ve spent this past few years really finding myself, and who I want to be. Sex is faaaarrr in the back of my mind (unless I’m watching a scene of Lord of the Rings with Aragorn), and I’ve dedicated my time to a fresh start. I transferred to UMBC, turned to therapy and acupuncture, started playing the banjo, and have been working as a barista for nearly two years.

I didn’t tell you my story to get sympathy, or to show off who I am today. I just wanted to share the difficult lesson I learned. Sex does not promote your self-esteem, and it doesn’t solve problems. Also, it’s really, really, really okay to hit rock bottom sometimes. As Kurt Vonnegut said: “I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center”

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I’m a girl…I can still ask you out, right? Is that weird? Oh. Oops.

This past Friday I finally had a date with the guy I really liked for about six months, who also happens to live in Pennsylvania. I don’t fall for people very often..but when I do, I fall HARD. We’re talking send-a-care-package-in-the-mail-just-because-you-have-a-busy-semester kind of hard. And folks, it went horribly on Friday. I’ve been putting the list of things in my head that made this night turn into a similar scenario to the bombing of Pearl Harbor (maybe I’m a bit dramatic..but here it is):
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