My original question – What am I? – is irrelevant. Apparently, I am a symphony. The more pertinent and on-going question is Who am I? it’s a perennial and evolving investigation into what kind of person I am, what change I want to effect and whether my actions hurt other people. I need to remain vigilant, to keep an eye on history at all moments, to read and read and read and never pretend that I fully know the answer to anything at all except what my own responsibility requires. And in turn to demand of others that they know how to answer the question too.

Tessa McWatt, “Shame on Me”

In chapter 1, I…

• Share my hobbies and passions from seventh grade
• Grapple with pressure from other students to come out at the age of fourteen

Back to Seventh Grade

Welcome to the first chapter of my coming out story. I hate calling it like that, because I never intentionally put myself in the closet, but I can’t come up with a better title.

I mean, I tried:

1. Trials and tribulations of a queer teenager
2. Growing up in the shadow of heteronormativity
3. Wait, when did I enter this closet?
4. Kesem does teen angst
5. Stranger in a strange land
6. Diary of a 14-year-old who has nothing going on for him and is about to lose the potential to, but at least does well in school because he thinks good grades will help him achieve his dreams
7. Don’t read this
8. God, this turned grim
9. Fake it till you make it: my journey toward happiness
10. I’m okay. Kinda going through a rough patch, but it’ll pass. At least I hope so, because nothing in my life worked out the way I’d intended it to, and I’m surrounded by teenagers acting like actual teenagers, but I’m glad some people are happy
11. Wasting my time on Earth
12. There’s normal people, and then there’s me
13. People constantly assume I was born cishet and that I seek everything they do: a memoir
14. Seriously, I don’t remember choosing to live inside a closet and deal with the pressure of coming out, so, uh, no thanks

None of these are as crisp and informative as “Coming Out”. Besides, back then I used this term myself, so spurning it now would be anachronistic.

At first, I translated just the segments related to my sexuality, because many of my diary entries include things like friendship problems, my love for Nintendo, etc. But then I realised those things show who I was at the time, and can’t be separated from the issues I was facing.

This series of posts will include some childish shenanigans and immature sections. They’ll probably be annoying to read, but at least they don’t represent me anymore. I read them wondering who this person was.

I’d journalled a lot back then – sometimes on a daily basis – so I chose the best bits. They quickly formed 15 chapters almost on their own. My fourteenth birthday entry from To Be Alive, Part 1 counted as the prologue.

The only things I redacted were either too private, or details surrounding other people.

Before I go into that, I figured some pictures from that period would be worth a few thousand words.

Here is a cardboard t-shirt we did in arts and crafts class that I decorated with my then-obsessions:

The top right corner depicts the Dango family from an anime called Clannad. I developed an unhealthy fixation with those adorable creatures in seventh grade (2007).

I kept nearly every drawing or painting I’d produced in childhood, including a notebook full of Fakemon I had designed with a friend. I’d drawn the Dango family everywhere; too many relics act as proof. Eventually it became a running gag for my friends to draw them being tortured or killed. For example, from a girl in Japanese class:

The Hebrew on the left reads “sex drugs and jacket!” (No idea what the jacket is supposed to mean). And down, next to the squashed Dango: “mission accomplished!”

I wonder if there are any Dango pillows in Japan. It would be pretty kawaii.

In Israel, when students reach seventh grade, they are tasked with a paper about their genealogy. I can’t translate the term for this to English, but it’s a big project that explores who you are, who your family is, and where in the world you are from. I threw away mine, so here’s what my sister’s says about me:

(This description might’ve been copied from my paper. Next to the picture, it says “me and my sister”, not “me and my brother”.)

Finally, here’s my favourite song from that period. It was released on 12 February 2008. For months, I’d ask kids at school who recorded it on their cell phone to play it during recess; my siblings always carried the cell phone the three of us shared until tenth grade.

And now, chapter one, written two days after my fourteenth birthday.

Chapter One