Support is as simple as a sentence.
I had to sit down and cry for a few minutes after this one.Reposting, because I didn’t say what I needed to. I was scared. I still feel like a frightened child when it comes to talking about these things. I can see a tweet and feel like a worthless, broken, disappointment. I know it’s not true, but the voice from my childhood is still there.
This tweet hit me hard, from both sides of it:
Amberly hit me right in my compassion. I have volunteered for years with LGBTQ youth. My message always is, you are you, you are loved. Do not let this one part of you define you. If you can’t get the love you need from home, come to me. I will find you the friends and people you need to feel safe with. I see these pained teens every day and I do my best to make sure they have a network, some possible friends and a safe harbor where they can say anything and it will be listened to with love. Anger, rage, abandonment, loss. I absorb that for them. I do it because no one did that for me and I was one of the most miserable people you’d have ever met until I was in my 30’s. I remember being a young teen and trying to wade through the expectations of relationships as a queer young woman wanting desperately to be straight.
I truly thought I was alone, that no one would ever love me unless I fit their criteria. I do not want another person to feel that as keenly as I did, ever.
Sex, relationships, feelings, love. Trying to figure any of that out with no role models, no one to say it was okay, that was hell. These days I can sit with these kids and honestly tell them that they are within the confines of normal. I reel at how different my life could have been if I had been assured my feeling were natural and normal at a stage in my life where I was figuring myself out. It was the times, not always the failure of others. Times are changing. Which brings me to…Mark Gatiss. I know it looks like it was just a few words, a nice retweet, acknowledging a fan. It was so much more than that. I am not familiar with his experiences growing up. I am not familiar with LGBTQ sentiment in Britain in the last 40 years. I will make the assumption that there was at least a few bumps in the road and a few bad days, and I’ll go from there.
I know he is a man who is open about his relationship. I applaud that and hope to reach that point in my life some day. I also assume that being around the same age, we have had a few similar experiences, of course separated by country and gender, but close enough for government work and myself.
Seriously though. He is the first person I have ever consciously seen refer to it as a gift. A gift. A gift. My mind whirls around that. I have been gifted with the ability to love someone as they are, gender be damned. I have never, ever, in my life thought that. I have all my life, somewhere in the back of my head thought I was damaged, broken, not worth another persons serious consideration. I thank Gatiss with all my heart. A weight has been lifted. I am not a person who is burdened with the gay curse, I am a person who is gifted with love. I hope that Amberly reaches the same conclusion. She is a beautiful young woman and it could save her 20 years of self loathing and pain.To pull this into his(and his colleagues) work and our fandom…
There are a few scenes in Sherlock where Holmes is thinking and voices going back to childhood are commandeering his thoughts. There was a message in those scenes that was much bigger than the screen. I saw those moments and was reminded of that quote “Be mindful how you speak to your children, your words become their voice”
I think it’s time I work on correcting that voice.
Thank you Mr. Gatiss, 10 words and you have made an impact.