I believed, for so long, that the only voice I had was the one I used in my writing. In high school, a teacher described me as a sponge, soaking up information to think over and use later, when I could write out my thoughts, lay them all out in neat, uninterrupted sentences. Partly this was fear – fear of speaking in front of others, of having all eyes on me, of being vulnerable. I was quiet and downright shy. As I’ve grown up, I have found it to be challenging to find my voice. I never felt loud enough, articulate enough, gay enough, right enough, to share my thoughts publically or out loud. There’s been a lot of talk about imposter syndrome – feeling like you don’t deserve what you have been given or have rightfully earned – and I think this is the name for what I have felt for a while. I just never felt like I belonged. And then I started talking about it: my experiences as a gay woman. In a way I never thought I would ever be able to, I have found my voice and rediscovered the power of words, both written and spoken.
I was raised to believe that standing out, being different, thinking outside the box was the best way to live life. The only problem was, I didn’t know how to stand out, how to be different, without using the physical volume of my voice. At the school where I teach, one of the administrators has worked with some teachers to combat the ignorant, bigoted, racist, sexist, homophobic and all-around negative way that students treat one another by creating a lesson called “The Uncomfortable Conversation.” He shares statistics, some legal terminology and, if there is an incident of hate, where some of the legal responsibility falls on the school administrators and when it falls to law enforcement. Then a teacher shares some of his or her life story. These stories deal with immigration, adoption and being LGBTQ. Because I’m the only teacher from the LGBTQ community who is out at my school, I fill that category. The stories may or may not reflect the lives of the students, but the hope is that students ask questions, learn something, understand how to handle tricky situations.
Being quiet makes me feel comfortable, but it also makes me feel invisible. In college, I went through some iterations of myself, cutting my hair short, wearing button down shirts. Not only was I trying to find myself, but I was trying to find a way to fit into a community, trying to find a way to show people where I land. How could I reflect on the outside, the kind of people I wanted to date, namely, women? It seemed easy to cut my hair short, wear polos, pick up rugby. But those things also didn’t feel like me. I still don’t really know how to come to terms with this, the conflict between my appearance and the kind of people I’m interested in. However, now that I’m married, I see it as less of a problem, it’s farther removed. What I think about now is how to tell people who I am married to. How do I make sure I say something first before someone asks me about my non-existent husband? How do I avoid these awkward moments?
Part of being out and being who I am and looking the way that I look challenges me to embrace the awkward moments. Here’s how – the more I share my story, the story of my engagement to my wife, the more powerful I feel, the more in control of every situation. After practicing, performing my story for class after class at school, I know exactly what to say, how to smile and gently correct people who assume I have a husband. I feel powerful because I have control over how I share my story. When I say that I’m gay, that I have a wife, I am also turning upside down a widely believed assumption that someone who looks like me could be gay. Power comes from voice. Does one’s voice need to be out loud? And how loud? How many people does it need to reach to make a difference? Now that I have practiced speaking my story out loud – how can I practice words to say that can be helpful in other harmful, discriminatory situations? What can I say when a young child misgenders my wife or tells her that she is in the wrong bathroom? My voice, however loud or shaky or uncertain, matters.
I was scared at first to come out at work, not necessarily to my colleagues because they are adults and have already learned how to be gracious or at least not disrespectful, they have learned how to keep their questions to themselves. Coming out to my students was what scared me. Would they respect me still? Would they pull a prank or write “DYKE” on my classroom door? Then, what I thought about was when one of my students, quiet, shy, saw a picture on my desk of me and Jen – smiling, a cloudless blue sky – she used this picture to tell me that she, too, was gay. Another student, with autism, came to me after a lesson, saying he was embarrassed to ask a question he had, but had decided to do it anyway; he asked if we’d ever want to have children. When I answered honestly that I had no idea, that there were many things to consider, he shared with me that he thought he’d want to adopt someday. Would I have these conversations with my students if I did not share my story with them? Sharing my story does not only help me, although it has taught me a lot, but I have learned that my voice could matter to my students.
Alexandra Sladky 