Freshman year of college is always an adjustment. Within a day, I moved two and a half hours away from my family to live on a hall of over forty other women. I was sharing a room with someone, something I hadn't done since a few years previously when I shared a room with my step-sister. No longer were the structured seven hour long days where I had seven, fifty-minute-long class periods every day. Now I could schedule classes after 10:30 and indulge my need to be able to sleep in.
That wasn't the only adjustment for me, though.
During my freshman year, something else began to change. I started to realize there was something about me that I spent years hiding, something that I had repressed deeply enough to pretend it didn't exist.
During my freshman year of college, I learned that I was gay.
Well, I guess technically it wasn't my freshman year that I figured it out. It was more so the summer before my sophomore year, but anyway, that's beside that fact.
I can't tell you exactly when it happened, or what snapped in me to make me realize, it just sort of...happened.
The best way of telling any story, though, is to start from the beginning.
Now, to clarify, I have dated boys in the past. There were multiple boys in high school who I dated or kissed or, well, maybe did a little more than kiss. I had relationships that were anywhere between a few weeks to a year.
I thought I genuinely had feelings for all of them. I mean, I cared about them. I thought the feelings I didn't have were normal. I just assumed there had to be something wrong with me, not that I was gay.
I couldn't be.
Fast forward to freshman year, I had what some would call an "Oh, shit" moment.
It's that moment when you realize that everything you thought you knew about yourself was very, very incorrect.
My "Oh, shit" moment happened when I kissed a boy freshman year, and suddenly it was like I didn't feel anything. There was no spark anymore, no butterflies, no feeling. It was just his lips pressed against mine.
This began the spiral.
It took months for me to figure out who I was, bouncing from one label to another to finally land on the identifier of "gay."
It was amazing; it was exciting; it was everything I could imagine. I finally understood the feelings I had, and the feelings I kept pushed beneath the surface.
It was great, but it was isolating.
Suddenly I had this thing about that set me aside from everyone else, and not in the way that felt cool and trendy. I felt the need to hide, to pretend like this change never happened, that I was still the same heterosexual Ariana, and it felt as though I was the only person in the world going through this (I would say sorry for the melodramatics, but we've all been there).
In August, I came out to someone for the first time. It fit itself organically into the conversation, and it ebbed away at that isolating feeling. With each person I've come out to since then, whether it be over text message or in the last 15 minutes of a car ride to the airport (sorry Mom), each time made me feel less and less alone.
So, will you find out you're gay during your college career? Maybe not, but I am just letting you know change will happen, and it will probably suck. You'll feel alone, and you'll feel like, out of the seven billion humans who inhabit this earth, you are the only person going through what you're going through. The important thing to remember is that it does get better, whether through friends or family or something else. One day you'll feel less isolated, and you'll realize whatever change you went through was worth it.
