Trust Me (Tips for My Teenage Self)

Thomas Wilson-White

•You are right about Anthony Callea.

•Christian school sex education will leave a lot to be desired. Save yourself the grief and google ‘douching’ immediately.

•Kissing guys is always going to be great, so keep doing it. Also, porn is fine in doses – more experimental searches won’t trigger horrifying sleeper urges, as you fear they will. Except for that one that does.

•On that note, sex doesn’t have to look like porn. You will feel pressure to have it all the time because you are a gay man and that’s apparently what gay men do. This is a lie the creators of Queer as Folk invented because they couldn’t think of better storylines.

•You’re going to spend years writing from a heterosexual perspective, mostly because every aspect of life on Earth – and everyone – says you should. Your work will only start to get noticed when you stop doing that, so stop doing that. Trust me.

•Loving Tina Arena doesn’t make you gay, it makes you a decent human being. (So stop turning down the music in your headphones in case people can hear it.)

•Some of your friendships – even your favourite ones – will fall apart. And because of your deep-rooted belief that you are inherently flawed, you will take 100 per cent of the blame. Don’t.

•Your dad is going to break your heart into pieces and you’ll quickly turn the pain into a joke to survive. He’ll never reach the potential he had to be there for you, but you will have a good relationship with him, and in the end that will be enough. There will be times when you will hate the parts of yourself that are like him. But you wouldn’t curse the moon for causing oceans to ebb and flow, so don’t curse him either.

•Your mum would say comparing him to the moon is overly generous, but she is wrong because this makes her the sun.

•You will get really good at being broken up with, and you’ll think it will always be this way. It won’t; you’re fine. Try to care less. It works.

•That full-time babe on the school bus, whose eyes are like dark pools of Coca-Cola, who you swear made you gay with private school voodoo or some shit – you know, the one you’ll paint in the stars each night, who’ll never know the beauty of the constellations you crafted for him or the time it took to find the gumption to speak a hello – well, I promise there is more to that story, and it’s worth the wait. I can’t say exactly what I mean by ‘worth the wait’, but I’m raising a very suggestive eyebrow, so you do the maths, kid.

•People will sometimes be dismissive of you or condescending, and you will spend years thinking it’s because you’re gay. This is entirely incorrect. It’s because you are young with perfect skin and they are old and broken.

•Anything mustard-coloured makes you look pale and underfed, like a vegan art student. Do me a favour and just skip that whole mustard phase. Also vests. Take it off. Now.

•The only girl allowed to ask you for fashion advice is your big sister; the rest are stereotyping you and deserve nothing (unless they actually look amazing – then it’s your duty to tell them so as loudly and extravagantly as possible).

•You won’t have a single positive role model for a long time, and your path will often feel directionless and doomed. To make matters worse, the world will tell you what you are, and you will even play along with that for a while to please it, but that will get uncomfortable.

•You will never be good at vogueing, but your hips don’t lie and lots of girls in clubs will want to be your friend. One day a girl will buy you a drink and say, ‘I was so sad when I found out you were gay,’ and because you are naturally accommodating you will apologise. Let’s work on ‘sorry’ not being the first thing out of your mouth in these sorts of situations. Are you sorry for having brown hair? For having blue eyes? No, of course not, so don’t be sorry for being gay. Ever.

•Your siblings will hurt you sometimes, but they will save you more often. Be really good to them, because they get rich before you do.

•You won’t listen to me, but try not to get drunk so much. It will never suit you, and parties will always give you anxiety.

•On that note, when that awful thing happens to you in the bathroom stall of a gay bar when you are twenty-one, please believe me when I say it didn’t happen because you were drunk. And you didn’t ask for it. And it wasn’t your fault. People do bad things to other people. You’ll spend years bound by silence and regret and it will deform your early twenties. For what it’s worth, if I could I would reach into your future and push you out of the way, back out onto the dancefloor, away from the darkness that found you that horrible night, so that you could keep dancing in that gormless and innocent way, unaware and careless and wonderful. But I can’t, so your consolation prize is the strength you’ll find in the aftermath. And I’ll say it again: it wasn’t your fault. And you didn’t ask for it. And no one can take your good heart away from you; that’s not how it works. Use it to forgive yourself.

•There will be a heartbreak, the biggest and hardest of your young life. Oh baby, it’s a big one. You will have sworn he was going to be the one: a dark-haired dreamboat sailing the seven seas of life. But he won’t have an anchor, and you’ll be too sweet to taste the salt water filling your lungs. It will turn your heart into a foreign country, where they speak a different language, where the food has unpronounceable names and you can’t afford the return airfare. You’ll cry from night until day until night again, and as the sun rises on the second day you’ll promise to never let another person hurt you this way. The country inside you will enter a long winter, and years will pass. Another man will come along and build a house in this wintry landscape, but like most settlers he will be opportunistic and blind, unable to recognise the history and lore etched into the land where he’s found his city, and it will crumble. Yes, the winter will pass like winter does, but this new heart will remain. Eventually you’ll download Duolingo and learn the language of this place. You’ll learn the names of its foods and you’ll even enjoy them. It will be hard to be as bright and open as you once were, but one day you will realise you are grateful for this more cultured heart. There may be no greater lesson.

•And often you will find yourself wondering where it’s all going and what it all means. There won’t be a stretch of ocean on the entire east coast that you don’t search for answers, nor a pillowcase dry from the heavy tears you’ll shed, and in those times I urge you to wrap your arms around yourself and breathe into the chaos of it all. Because time will pass no matter how much you wish for it to remain static, and the ones you love will grow old, and they will leave you on this wretched earth without their light and their loving pokes and prods; and when you’re stuck to the ceiling, bone-chilled from the injustice of being human, wishing you could find a place to scream and scream until your throat resigns, just remember that the sun rises every morning, and it will warm your skin, and – I say this to make sure someone has said it to you – it will always get better. You will be okay. And when you finally see those you loved so deeply, whose best and worst you took to proudly build yourself, whose love defined this huge life of yours, in whatever way it happens, you’ll have such an almighty story to tell them. Trust me.