Everyone slightly changes his or her personality in the presence of different people; it's a social survival skill. College, however, can magnify those changes into an alternate personality. College is undoubtedly a time for discovery of whom we are making it the perfect time to make a new first impression. For many of us that means we can finally get away from the people who where there when we were shoving crayons up noses up until graduation. Some of us take this opportunity to completely change the image we had in high school, others might emphasize different parts of their personality, while others stay exactly the same. Then we go about our year building off that impression and don't come to realize how different we have become.
I came out of high school, quite literally if you catch my drift, so naturally I was excited to start fresh at Yale. I felt like I was ready to finally find myself there and to make friends different from those in high school. I wanted to be more open and outgoing than I had been before so I emphasized my sass and attacked awkwardness with humorous questions just hoping it would come off without a hitch. Without the 13 years of background knowledge that I was actually a quiet supporting character before college, people, later turned friends, bought it. Before I knew it, I became a pretty dominant personality within my friend group and I thoroughly enjoyed the attention during the school year.
Throughout the year, I maintained contact with hometown friends in addition to seeing them when breaks permitted. My high school sanity had been sustained by a strong group of friends that persisted throughout the years and whose friendship did not waiver in my senior year coming-out revelation. The summer before we all left had been the best and freest time of my life. This summer, however, I returned to home with a year of "the college me" under my belt and nagging question in my head. Who is the real me "the college me" or the "senior summer me"? Last summer, my quiet, coming-in-clutch-with-a-joke personality just started to open up under the weight of four years in the closet. And yet, towards the end of freshman year and into the summer I felt like maybe I had sold out into becoming more like a gay cliché at school to make up for it. But I enjoyed it. But I also enjoyed my more masculine alternate from the summer before. I didn’t exactly feel like I wasn’t being myself in either case. At school I found it harder to make male friends than it had been before and yet at home I couldn't help but feel slightly left out when I was about the only one who didn't catch the sports jokes.
The social environment also factors into the mix up. I had become more accustomed to the more socially aware and accepting college atmosphere. Most individuals dropped words like “faggot” or “gay” out of their vocabulary while at home those words are thrown around carelessly, but at least not harshly. At home I sit passively dismissing it as a fault in our generation's slang but, at the same time, the growing college LGBT activist in me is disappointed at them and myself for not saying something.
In both worlds I feel at peace but I am still searching for the balance between both. I wouldn’t say that I’m a completely different in both environments; it's just slightly alternate attitudes. I'm sure others understand the struggle and it's a good thing we've got the next few years to figure it out.
