Better Late Than Never
The adoption story wrote over everything. A story that big, that painful can turn into something powerful but at great cost. It can be blinding. That’s why receipts matter. One reason, anyway.
I told a new friend the truth, the same way I used to whisper my secrets to strangers in the elevator when I took that intro to social psychology course half a million years ago. Casually said something to the tune of, “I’m a little late coming out so I’m brand new here, I had a smidge of trauma and some bad choices to take care of first. I’m still figuring it out.”
I don’t need a big la-ti-da to-do about it. It’s nobody’s business the way I love in any way, shape, or form. But there’s no reason to brush it off, either. It’s not nothing. Just world-class repression. And I’ve come so far, might as well have a little cake about it.
After I wrote Rose’s Locket and my parents had to deal with the publicity of what I’d done, my dad quietly compiled folders of pictures of me sorted by year on a flashdrive and dug out all the old adoption paperwork from the closet or wherever they hid it after I’d found it that fateful day sometime in junior high. I was maybe 12. It wasn’t words (my preferred language), but this compilation of photographs and documents filled a gap in my heart that had been missing so long, it had scabbed over and scarred. I’ve been looking through those pictures, recently. Grieving for and putting to rest the blood of the past. Looking for clues on how to navigate my own parenting journey. You know, the usual.
Memory is such a funny thing. When it’s all you have, time blurs it so that it’s hard to distinguish between the real events and the fictions built on top of them, past lives and possible worlds. But finally, with photographic proof, I can triangulate between what’s left of my writing from back then, the pictures, and my memory. That’s for the timeline. Always do your research, right?
But stories shouldn’t always be told chronologically the way a life happens. That’s more of an outside perspective. And it shouldn’t be an outsider telling my story. At least for me, I experience my life across time through my writing. I think we all experience things across time, to some extent, when we revisit memories or plan for our futures, even when we focus on the moment at hand and watch the snowflake of time melt away. And as I’ve been looking at these pictures and falling through that archway of memory, I see the currents of other stories I haven’t told yet. Neglected subplots that had to yield for the powerhouse story of a lifetime that demanded all the attention.
This is one of those stories.
These photos are hard to look at. It’s deeply obvious that I was uncomfortable. I moved from a blanket around my shoulders to jackets and sweatshirts. To hide. You can tell that the yearning for freedom was there, but inarticulate. My skin alone glows bronze against the alabaster of my family, but that’s something I’ve only just recently come to grips with, too. But it’s more than that. The t-shirts and carpenter jeans. The hair, always fixed wrong. These are stories of shame, stories of body dysphoria, stories of a character building herself all wrong, but not having any way to build it right. Stories that need to be told differently. Stories that just need to be told.
The first time I announced my queerness (it was bisexual then) was on the stairs of the north building of the junior high when I broke up with my boyfriend (the first time). I knew what I was, knew how I felt. Definitely didn’t have the audience right on that one. The confessions that followed from there to here have been minimal, though by the time I’d been to my first strip club, it was definitely obvious to the people around me. Something they can tell, but it’s just never fully materialized. Not in any way that doesn’t also emphasize the suspicious tilt towards hypersexuality.
But here we are, version I-don’t-even-know-the-number Shannon who is tired of all the painted faces I’ve been putting on. There’s never been any reason for me to make an announcement one way or the other except that I let shame make so many of my decisions. Can’t I just be me? Can’t I just be loved unconditionally [there’s a loaded word] for who the fuck I am? The answer is yes. And much of that falls on how I show up for myself. My queerness has always been a situation of if you know, you know. And to be honest, I don’t think I’ll say much more about it unless it comes up. But it’s time to leave the energy of hiding behind.
There’s more to the story, but I’m not going to tell it. Not now. I think the pictures do it justice. Happy Pride.
