Coming Home

This year marks the tenth anniversary of my high school graduation and my class has planned a celebration to commemorate this event. I won't be going, though not really for the obvious awkwardness of this one weekend in August, but because I have come to the realization that it isn't my place, that right now I have things to do that require my efforts more than chatting it up with people that I really have no interest in seeing. That world ten years ago is gone, thank any higher power you wish to insert, and it almost gets more painful to go back. However, what strikes me above everything else is that this world ten years ago was something I liked to return to and yet now I don't, a similar running theme running through life lately and leaves me question: How can something that was once familiar not be familiar anymore?

This high school reunion has been an issue for the last week and yet it seems that it has only been the catalyst of something much bigger. The fact is that I find myself at odds travelling out west as it was emphasized in my last trip. Every time I travel there, I feel as if it is becoming less of a place that I need to be. I tell people here in Toronto that I am going home, but at the end of the trip, what I feel is that I am finally coming home.

Over the past three years, Toronto has become my home for a variety of reasons. I can be me here, completely out as being gay without having to conform to anyone else's rules of life. I can speak openly and honestly and I am respected for voicing my concerns. It is this honesty that I live my life by a certain code of ethics and that code seems to exist only here. People ask how I can live here and now after three years, it's hard to imagine living anywhere else. I feel as if my world has completely opened up here.

When I returned home not long ago, I was placed in a series of compromising positions among almost everybody I knew. It was almost as if I had never moved away at all and that my life was returned to three years ago. It was the first time in a long time where my values of honesty and truth were thrown out and I felt like I was completely out of place. I had fun seeing a few people, but from the very first moment I got off the plane, I felt awkward as if I were entering the room of that high school reunion.

This was a place that I was familiar to and suddenly it was like I did not know anything about this place. What was worse was that they did not anything about me either and this caused the majority of concern to me. I was a nomad in a strange world that looked exactly like the world I grew up in and it made me feel so much like I didn't belong that I longed to get back to Toronto. Even my walks in the town at night, in the cold of winter didn't help and I counted the days till I got back on that plane.

To be on the fair side, I have changed as a person. I can be stubborn as hell and I can be brutally honest when I need to be. I think I got that from years of living around secrets and being told that keeping quiet was the best course. While that "sitting back and watching the world go by" attitude is nice once in a while, it also means nothing changes either. I was constantly hiding myself and embarrassing the people around me if I did speak up. It sent me back to that "small town" mentality where no one says anything to your face, but instead says things behind your back.

When I was in high school, I could not wait until that beautiful day I graduated and moved away. I hated high school so much that I was sure I could have been a statistic for suicide. I never fit it properly with anyone and lingered off to the side in hopes not to be noticed. I would walk at lunch hours away from the school and would only return for classes or when the bust was headed home. I was constantly pushed to do things by myself for the most part and while this helped me to do things now, it was devastating to me then.

I never thought I wanted to move that far away, but when I only moved 45 minutes away, it was not enough. I was still trapped in a world where I did not have an identity. Part of it was my undiscovered sexuality I am sure, but there another part of me that was still immersed in the world where I was constantly lumped into categories like being my someone's son or someone's little brother. It became as unbearable not to hear people use my name when I was an adult as when my chemistry teacher could not remember my name after four years of high school. When I moved to Regina, I finally claimed myself away from anyone who knew me before and it was exactly what I needed.

However, coming to Toronto has been where I have become my own person. The identity I developed in Regina has morphed into a worldly experienced person and I have found out more about who I can possibly be here. Regina may have been where I found myself, but Toronto has become where I have pushed myself to my limits and I have not even really done that yet. All I know is that it's going to happen here.

Suddenly, I get a letter in the mail telling me about my high school reunion and I am sent back to a world where I was miserable. I want to show these people the "me" they did not see, they could not see and finally I can be the person I really am. I have to write this article on my life for the last ten years and all the proud things I have done since I came out as being gay, but I have a problem: some people don't want me to say anything.

Well after this trip, I decided to change this. With this high school reunion, I now realize that keeping quiet and being secretive about my life and its accomplishments has been the wrong approach. It does not help anyone if I cannot be honest about the person that I am and I realize that I cannot go to this place that I used to call home and keep considering it that. I have to tell truth about me with this article and I can be sure that for five minutes, people will talk. Then after five minutes, no one will care and somehow I can go back to this place once considered home and not need to hide. I will not need to hide every again because there will never be anything to hide again. Home should be a place where one can just be and I think I may have just found it in Toronto, but I will always keep going back in hopes that I can be there too.