There is a sociological phenomenon known as “Queer Adolescence.” No matter how old you are when you come out, you are returned to the technicolor, saturated feely days of your teens, your heart and body electric, your self-expression crawling and dripping like vines.
My coming out to myself was anything but a whim or desire to ~*shake things up.~* It was a decades-long self-gaslighting that had backed me into a corner so stealthily, there was no choice left in this realm but to surrender.
I will come out. I must come out. Just… not yet. Maybe in a less-loaded month so as to not ruin any holidays.
Brilliant. It was decided: I would come out in March 2020.
Of course, I didn’t, not in any demonstrable way. I would not tell my then-husband for months. I would not tell my mother for another year. I would not tell The Internet At Large™ until my 36th birthday.
But I did quite fully come out to myself, really for the first time—grappling with the possibly beautiful enormity of my truth, versus the blood-freezing terror of what it might mean for the fragile foundation of my life.
What if this thing I thought was beautiful for so many other people could actually be beautiful for me, too?
Unexpectedly, I was completely alone for the first few months of quarantine. Unfettered for the first time since my late 20s, the tendrils of my long-awaited queer adolescence began to unfurl. The soundtrack to my days resurrected girl power albums I hadn’t listened to since high school. I dyed my hair hot pink, something I’d dreamed about since enviously watching my friends use Manic Panic in the ‘90s. I screened horror movies around the clock—my favorite pastime—and started queering my clothing more and more.
You might know that I began a podcast with my best friend, Lillian Bustle, at the very beginning of 2020. All the Fucks was born in 2019, designed as an exploration in vulnerability. What it became was a daily liferaft of quarantine queerness. Lillian and I recorded every day, as we were coming out parallel to each other. We quietly planted seeds in those early episodes, getting more comfortable with being seen, even by our modest fan base. I was reprocessing all my old stories through a new lens, a queer lens, which brought all kinds of aha moments in its wake.
Even quietly, even privately, I was in a superbloom of accepting my own queerness. When I stopped gaslighting myself and leaned in, everything started to make sense.
Oh, that’s why I liked that TV character.
Oh, that’s why I love this song.
Oh, THAT’S what my obsession with that babysitter was…
By the fall, I started a DIY project of redesigning my office—an altogether milquetoast space that was functional, but plain. I painted the walls Pepto Bismol pink, dusted the windows with pink-striped ice cream parlour curtains, and added a statement wall of deep green banana leaves. It was glorious, a fever dream of The Birdcage and Golden Girls and Cape May Victorians.
It also looked a whole lot like this—my Pepto Bismol pink and jungle green bedroom that I designed when I was 8 years old. There’s even a giant mural of a rainforest waterfall behind my mom and her camera.
There was nothing conscious about resurrecting this frankly legendary interior design moment. It was just feral queer ether running through me, an ephemeral substance never challenged when I was so young, when I was free to have weird feelings about Girl Scout Camp and my babysitter and TLC. It took my mother seeing pictures in order to say—you made it look like your childhood bedroom?
I sure did. My body knew exactly where it was interrupted—and how to get back to that little switch of track to try again.
I relish every moment of this superbloom, because there are many times (see: many essays before) where it is painful, awful, choked with loss.
Even now, 4 years later, the magic is still revealing itself to me. I look around my room—such a far cry from the ones before—and I see the seeds of old and precious dreams. There’s the canopy bed, the thrifted gilded mirrors, the fairy lights… and I realize that I am still becoming, still growing into the dreams of my queerest, most feral self.
She looks an awful lot like 8-year-old me.
xx Jen