KarMel Scholarship 2008

Personal Story

“Slicing Through Darkness”

By Chelsie Doherty

Desciption of Submission: “An essay on discovering and dealing with my bisexual sexual orientation that focuses on my relationships with my best friend and mother” - Chelsie

I was thirteen when I realized I wasn’t straight. Walking alone in Vancouver, B.C., I had been thinking about a trip I’d just taken to Alaska with my best friend, a blue eyed girl with freckles that I’d known since the age of five. She and I had spent a week with only each other, isolated on a cruise ship from our friends and families back home since only her mother had accompanied us and opted to spend most of her time with other adults on the ship. We memorized the halls and rooms on board, generally avoided the other teenagers that had been dragged along at their parents’ whims, watched movies, wrote poetry, stayed up late. We went outside only after midnight to stare at the incredibly overwhelming blackness of the night which we had never encountered before—a blackness so thick that there was no water and no sky, only darkness our boat sliced through. We learned each other. At times we parted ways to explore and record our thoughts and sentiments, but we always ended up at one another’s side again, having learned each other’s patterns and preferences and peculiarities. We learned each other, and in Vancouver, finally alone for the first time in weeks as my family enjoyed the sun back at the hotel, I realized I was in love with her. It was something I would struggle with for years afterwards.

In seventh grade my mother made the mistake of asking me my sexual orientation. I had, as she noticed, taken up the habit of making small pro-gay marriage arguments when I could, contrary to the staunchly right-wing alignment of both my parents. I told her the truth, that I was bisexual. At first, she blinked a few times, asking me what exactly that meant, and I tried feebly to explain to her that I believed in loving someone for who they are, regardless of religion, race, age, or gender. And all of it made sense to her, save that last bit.

The episode that followed seemed melodramatic and hollow, but unfortunately I am reminded of it often. My mother started crying. She exclaimed that I had to have children, that I had to be married, that my disabled brother could not provide her with grandchildren and I was her only hope in that regard: an incessant barrage of desires that should have had nothing to do with my sexual orientation and everything to do with my desires as a human being. She asked if my best friend knew, how she could possibly be okay with a close friend who might look at her sexually. She called a psychiatrist who told her it was nothing more than a phase. In a confrontation a little while later she said she thought I’d go to Hell for being bisexual. But when I acquired my first real boyfriend the following year, she said to me proudly, “And you thought you were having problems. See? I told you,” after having reminded me never to tell my conservative Catholic father of my “problems.”

Since then my mother and I have exchanged a few heated words about this issue, and every time one or the both of us ends up crying. Over the past year or so I’ve let it drop completely. In my sophomore year of high school, my best friend and I recognized that we had feelings for one another that ran deeper than our already understood platonic bond. In middle school, when I first came out to her, she entertained the thought of entering a romantic relationship with me, but after a month we decided it was best to stay with what we had known. In sophomore year, we realized what we had left unanswered would eventually demand our acknowledgment. I’ve had four boyfriends since this insight came to me. But there is nothing to be done yet, because although I have accepted my sexual orientation, my mother and father haven’t. My friends have. My best friend did, even though she has yet to fully recognize her own. So I am taking one step at a time, as it were, because it seems the only way.

Last year I went to a LGBT dance with a lesbian friend of mine, both of us looking to celebrate Mardi Gras with people willing to look at us as individuals rather than girls, rather than preparatory school students, rather than whatever other labels we automatically come with. I enjoyed myself immensely, and exchanged phone numbers with a girl I met there. My mother doesn’t know that a local gay club sponsored the dance—and I don’t plan to tell her, not just yet. But eventually, when I am allowed the freedom I so desperately want, presumably in college and my working life thereafter, she will have to come to terms with my bisexuality. In refusing to do so, she refuses a part of me: the part of me that sees people for who they are, rather than for their specific characteristics. I used to pray that it was just a phase as the psychiatrist suggested, used to worry I was not attracted to males at all—but those childish fears have left me, because I have chosen to grow in spite of any opposition I have encountered.

I’m seventeen now. I speak my mind now. I’m an agnostic, a liberal, a poet, an honors student, an older sister, an aunt, a volunteer, a bisexual—but above all, I’m a person. And I think my mother knows that this fact is most important, anyway.

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