10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #9: F*** you, dad

9.  After receiving an e-mail from my dad mentioning how he thought I had too much free time in my life, which lead to daydreaming and ultimately fantasizing about sex (among other things), I sent him back a long, angry and honest e-mail, basically telling him things I couldn’t muster the strength to tell him.  I told him about how I’ve never once said anything bad to him; how he didn’t have the right to judge who I was when he had never been there in my life; how if all I was to him was someone to pass on the family name (and because I’m gay, I can’t) then I was glad that I wouldn’t be passing on a name representing bigotry, hypocrisy, and ignorance.  I wrote a lot of things in that e-mail, and I don’t regret any sentence, word or letter.  I responded in a rage, my fingers furiously hacking at the keys like there was no tomorrow.  My mom told me the next day that my dad, already slightly ill, was even sicker because of me, because of that e-mail, and she told me to apologize to him.  She told me, her 18 year old son, that I shouldn’t be swearing, even though I only swore 3 times in that e-mail and it wasn’t insultingly (ie. Fuck you!) but adjectively (ie. I won’t be a fucking doormat!).  I just felt glad to not be harbouring my thoughts any longer.

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #8: Coming out to my mom

8.  I was trying to teach myself to play the guitar when my mom walked in and sat on the bed next to me.  Immediately, I knew she had something serious to talk about.  She looked at me and asked if I was gay.  I said yes, and already I could sense the tears waiting to be shed.  We had a long, long talk about it; she couldn’t seem to understand how I “became” gay.  She kept trying to make up excuses for it, but when I told her it was just who I am, she didn’t believe it.  Tears kept falling down my face, and some of them fell between the strings of the guitar and on the frets.  Needing to know how my mom felt about me now, I asked her if she still loved me.  She replied, “You are my son.  I’ll always love you.” and that was when I really bawled.  I hugged my mom tightly and cried on her, still not believing that she would really accept me for who I was because I knew she was the traditional Asian kind.

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #7: Music

7.  I had managed to snag my friend to come along with me to this coffee shop in Burnaby I had never been to.  I phoned earlier to ask about signup times and was told that it started at 8:00.  We both got there at around 7:30, in awe of the small setting and the music equipment on stage.  My friend saw this chalkboard of times and told me to sign up for a time.  I wrote my name down for 8:20, the first act after the host played at 8:00.  The waiting and anticipation was incredibly hard to handle.  My friend was extremely nervous, for both of us, as we didn’t know what would happen.  Finally, when my time rolled around, I was called to the stage.  Because the café already had a piano there, and most people that performed were guitarists, the host asked me, “Are you doing spoken word?” to which I shook my head and pointed to the wooden piano.  After I played my 20 minutes, I received positive comments by a few audience members and I was filled with such humility and I genuinely felt like a real musician, despite always being told from my family that I sucked at everything.

Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #6: Creativity

6.  A few months after leaving high school and all those losers behind, I began to work on composing songs.  What started out as a bunch of words slowly turned into a thought-out piece of music, and after many, many, many versions and scribbles of one verse, I finally played the entire thing out and was proud that I had completed my first song (that I actually considered a song.  I started writing songs back in Grade 10.)

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #5: Being emo

5.  Feeling completely alone, ignored by my parents and ready to give up on life, I locked myself in my room, listening to a goodbye song from S Club on repeat while going through my big yellow scrapbook compiled in the second grade and crying.  When I got to spelling test with “not good enough” written on the top, I just bawled for a few minutes.

10 Defining Moments of My Life (so far) — #4: Coming Out

4.  August 23, 2003.  During the summer of Grade 9 year at high school, I was hanging out with two of my best friends.  I had pre-planned to finally come out to them.  After lots of dodging the subject, we finally settled beneath the shade of a great, maple tree.  I was incredibly nervous and scared that I made my friends guess it.  I told them I wanted to tell them something, that I liked someone in our grade.  The two of them were running through the list of girls in our grade, but I kept saying that they were guessing the wrong type of people, to which they asked, “So what?  You want us to list ugly people?!”  One of them must’ve caught on because she asked jokingly, “Do you like men?” and with my red cap covering my face because I was so completely embarrassed and afraid, I said, “Yes.”  (A brief amount of silence followed, which I learned two years later that during this time, one of my friends was apparently stuffing her mouth with bread to keep from laughing.)