This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content. You can search the text using Ctrl-F, and you can also play the audio by clicking on a desired timestamp.
When I was nine. I remember my father saying to me, he may not be living with us much longer and I said, Why is that? And he said, Your mother and I disagree on things. She thinks that gay men are nice, and I asked, What's that? I don't understand. And he said, men who love other men. But didn't Jesus say we should love each other? I asked. No, no, not like that. Men who kiss each other and [00:00:30] I was like, Oh, and that was my introduction to homosexuality. My depression started up when I was about 11. I was ruthlessly bullied at school. There was something about me that didn't quite fit because I spoke clearly. They would come up to me and say, Are you English? And then pretty soon it turned into Are you gay? It was my first experience of people pointing the finger. [00:01:00] My mother really tried to be there for me, but there was so much stuff that I couldn't actually say to her because I felt confused and didn't know what kind of response I was going to get. When I was 12, I started having my first sexual dreams they were of me wrestling with my friends and I'd waking. I'd think, Oh, that's wrong. But it was something deep within me that I had no control over. I guess [00:01:30] my relationship to gayness had moved significantly since my father first mentioned it. I'd gone from. I can't see what's wrong with it to feeling deeply worried and anxious and ashamed about what was going on inside my head. And then in sex education class at Intermediate, the local health nurse talked about wet dreams, she said. Sometimes you might even dream about having sex with your male friends. This doesn't [00:02:00] mean you're gay. It's just a normal part of growing up. And I just remember this incredible sense of relief. Oh, I'm not gay. But those types of dreams kept happening, so I became increasingly homophobic over my high school years. I suppose it was act of repression fighting the homosexual thoughts. In my mind, I started smoking cannabis. I always felt anxious, and I found it very hard [00:02:30] to go to school. At the same time, I began to take part in workshops run by my church. A big part of those was about examining yourself and I think I was starting to see the cracks. I was sort of living two lives. There was a part of me, this sort of tear away, loose cannon Self-destructive person who was really miserable and had suicidal thoughts on a daily basis. And then there was a part of me that needed to maintain [00:03:00] an appearance of ness and sanity by being this amazingly responsible person who the church group loved and adored. So after leaving school, I held down a few jobs before going on to the unemployment benefit. And then, because of my depression, I moved on to the sickness benefit. For two years, my doctor kept signing off my benefits until one day, she said, Things need to change because you're not getting better. I [00:03:30] was 21 when I agreed with her that I needed medication to help stabilise my moods. I had stopped doing drugs and drink a couple of years before and was really anti medication. But the doctor gently convinced me into trying a very low dose of antidepressants that had a profound effect on me. Within days, my anxiety about things calmed down and I could start looking at myself again part of what the meds did was to take away [00:04:00] the bumps and dips so that I could start learning how to manage my emotions in a healthier way. I went to an out gay counsellor who gave me the opportunity to talk about what I was experiencing. The more I talked about it and acknowledged it, the more OK I felt about being me. I think ultimately my mental state was because I had been repressing myself for so long. I'd spent years beating myself up and beating parts of me into a corner. [00:04:30] It took quite some time for things to come right. I had a couple of relapses and major crashes along the way and even now there are still times I get unhappy. But I now know that I have the ability to take command of that and make it pass before it gets into more serious depression. A big part of my story is about being true to myself, developing a sense of pride and stepping beyond [00:05:00] my fears.
This page features computer generated text of the source audio. It may contain errors or omissions, so always listen back to the original media to confirm content.
Tags