It Gets Better

As I'm nearing the end of my undergraduate studies at university and moving onto a different part of my life, I have been thinking about all the comments that people say in high school about university. They especially relate, for me, to the It Gets Better campaign started by Dan Savage and contributed to by various celebrities to tell me, a young gay teen, that life gets better after high school. So now I'm wondering, did my life really get better? And I realized that the answer is hard to determine.

It does not appear useful to me to view my life as taking a linear progression as life really does not work that way. First, what are we defining as the "it" that is supposed to get better? If we're talking about overall happiness, it would be hard to make such a judgement as my happiness levels vary from day to day depending on various circumstances. If we're judging it based on individuals discriminating against and bullying me for my sexual orientation, well that never really happened to me on the level that people often discuss and thus, I guess my life didn't need to get better. But the loneliness, the feeling of exclusion and the confusion around being queer in this world still exist four years later and don't seem like they are going to go away no matter how many good jobs I get. In fact, I'm closer to getting married or fulfilling other normative goals now due to my opposite-sex relationship(such a weird term) yet have not lost any of those feelings due to my still queer sexuality. If getting better means getting into a same-sex relationship, that hasn't happened at all for me since high school. Whether that's due to me being insufferable or my shyness doesn't really matter as neither are things that have changed or would have just by going to university.

So, I guess there's two main points I'm trying to get at. One is that life does not function as a linear path that we follow. There's always good and bad parts of our lives and good and bad days. There's no way to judge the quality of one's life on an arbitrary path that ignores the complexities of our experiences. Well, no useful way at least. The second point is that being gay isn't something that just gets better once you are free from bullies and "people who don't understand". You know who doesn't understand? Most people. It's a continual thing to perpetuate attitudes that leave queer people feeling excluded or an afterthought. When you state comments about how men and women behave in relation to each other that are always laced with heterosexual chemistry, you are perpetuating our exclusion and just really annoying sexist behavior. Thus, "it" getting better does not depend on going to university but to fighting against the system that consistently oppresses our existence.