*looks at unfinished panel on last page beside her, due tomorrow* Right, then. I'll write another entry.

My mom first found out I'm a lesbian a month before I left for my freshman year of college, when Dymphna showed her my start page (you know, the page you get when you start up your browser? I make my own with all the links I usually visit) which had a link to Christian Lesbians on it. (Personally, I think it could have been worse; it could have been something like MuffDiversGalore.com or AnarchistBabyEatingDykes.com.) My world imploded for a little while, and through a series of events I sort of accidentally went back in the closet.

Demonstrating her impeccable sense of timing and self-restraint a second time, Dymphna showed my mother my online journal a month before I was to return to my third year of school this past summer. She was directed to it by a few of my high school classmates who had recognized me. Apparently my journal was something of a hot gossip topic, since I used a pseudonym for myself but no one else, so there were identifying details aplenty. Yeah, that was stupid; hence, why this time I changed every proper noun I could think of that would lead someone here via Google, and have not linked to any of my other pages, nor let anyone I know in Real Life™ link to here.

Also, hence the footnote at the bottom of the page. I still don't know who first found my page and started passing it around, but rest assured should I ever find out who it was they will know the extent of my pissedness. Currently, I've changed the public template to display a snarky message to said offender, without deleting any of the entries. The content is still there, simply unviewable.

I definitely don't want to completely delete it. I kept that journal from 2002 until this year (I had previous journals). In total there's about two hundred entries, and they average about six thousand words each. That journal took me through just about my entire journey:

- Coming to grips with the fact that I indeed did like girls.
- Dealing with being in the closet and hiding something very basic from the people I loved the most.
- Slowly starting to tell my friends, or deciding which not to tell.
- Coming out (as bisexual) to the Internet in one entry and getting the most amazing outpouring of love and support from a readership composed of a shocking percentage of Christians; I got comments that made me cry with how much they understood and cared about me.
- Figuring out that maybe I was more accurately described as gay than bi. (When you realize that you've "always been more concerned with personality than looks," tend to go for boys that look and act like girls, and if told to pick would choose women with no qualms, you start to wonder if you really like boys per se at all.)
- Wrestling with the religious consequences and interpretations.
- Getting emails and comments from people who read my entries and identified with them, often undergoing the same struggles themselves, and thanking me for putting words to screen.
- The fallout from the first coming-out to my parents.
- The frustration and pain and stress that came with recloseting myself.

Depression. Religion. Sexuality. Politics. The good and the bad. God and art and life.

That journal's got a shitload of meaning, to me and others, and I'll be damned if I erase years with a few clicks just because some jackass I went to school with decided my revelations made good gossip fodder.

Thing is, when my mom read it, she didn't see pain and frustration. She saw spite, rebellion and hate. And I did vent a lot in no uncertain terms. When something frustrates me, I don't mince words about it. If I think something is fucking stupid, I will write "This is FUCKING STUPID." And usually I'll follow up with about a paragraph or so about why, exactly, I think something is fucking stupid. (I did debate in high school. I can hold forth for quite a long time in blunt, concise prose about my opinions. I also have an absurdly large vocabulary.) I hated a lot of things my mom did and said, and they made me angry. I thought a lot of her reactions were at best, inappropriate, and at worst ludicrous. When all that came out in writing, it looks a lot like I really just hate my mom. So I can't necessarily blame her for getting angry about some of the content, even if I think she sort of missed the point.

I also rather abused my sister in the journal, but I'm quite open (in person, as well) about the fact that even if I have to love her as a sister I will probably never like her as a person. She has treated me like something she would scrape off her designer-label pointy-toed high heels for about as long as I can remember, and I see no reason why I should do much more than avoid her as much as possible and civil when it is impossible to be elsewhere. Her actions regarding my journal didn't exactly do much to contradict my opinion of her.

At any rate, the question of what to do with the damn thing still stands. I've considered going back and re-copying select entries to either here or a separate journal (after going through and obliterating the identifying details this time). I've also considered just downloading the whole shebang to my computer and saving it that way, but a lot of the meaning it holds for me is in how others reacted to it, and I would sort of prefer to let it be public in some way. What can I say, I'm an artist and I'm a storyteller, and I like/need to be heard.

Anyone got any opinions on what I do with it?

Labels: blog, family, Teh Gay