What Coming Out Couldn’t Fix
I expected coming out to fix my life-long loneliness, but when I remained an anxious introvert, I realized I’d have to practice self-empathy before I could change.
Story by Riley Kankelberg
M y computer is open on my bed. My door is firmly closed. My best friend is on the other end of the call teaching me to use my new Tinder account. Allyssa practically built it for me. In my bio, she writes for me, “If I don’t respond, it’s probably because I’m reading.”
I tell her I’m probably the last person who should be on that app.
According to a Pew Research Center study, 55% of LGBTQ adults have tried some form of online dating, compared to 28% of straight adults. The working theory is that swiping through profiles is a lot easier when your dating pool is small.
That was part of my reasoning. I realized I was gay at 18 years old. So many things finally made sense: why I’d never been interested in a boyfriend, or why I’d been so nervous talking to that gorgeous girl from my fiction-writing class.
For a month or two after my realization, I was convinced that I had found the last piece to my puzzle. I would no longer be the shy girl whose face turned beet red when she tried to craft a coherent sentence in front of strangers and acquaintances. I was proved wrong the next time I sat in a classroom. I saw my classmates chatting and decided it was safer to stick to my book.
The honeymoon period of my discovery was over. Realizing I was gay had brought me peace and possibility, but it hadn’t fixed a glaring problem: I still couldn’t talk to people.
I was a solitary kid. I don’t need help remembering that.
My mother remembers picking me up from school or birthday parties and seeing me standing away from the group. In pictures, I was always off to the side. Apparently, I told her I liked sitting alone. Most of her memories lined up with mine, but there is one that differs.
When I was in fourth grade, my mother drove me home from choir. She asked why I hadn’t sat with the other kids at lunch. Apparently, one of the chaperones had pulled her aside and recounted the whole story.
I remember sitting at the only empty end of a long cafeteria table, far away from the kids in matching purple shirts. One of the mothers — probably the one who tattled — saw me and beckoned.
I shook my head. The other kids waved me over, but the more encouraging they got, the more I wanted to stay right where I was. I shook my head again and again, and they eventually gave up. I ate my lunch alone.
“I remember thinking, ‘Yeah, she does that,’” my mother said. “I just knew you liked to be more on the outside looking in.”
I did like being on the outside looking in. Somewhere along my timeline, though, it stopped being a choice.
Billie McEathron is a counselor at Liberty Middle School. We spent a lot of time talking about self-empathy, a concept she encounters all the time.
She broke it down for me the way she would for her students. A person might have a friend who always lifts them up and a friend who always brings them down. At the end of the day, we spend the most time with ourselves. It’s important that our internal voice is the friend lifting us up.
She told the story of a student whose relationship with math was entirely made up of negative messaging. She flipped to the back of their notebook and wrote down some alternatives.
“Sometimes it’s hard to go from, ‘I’m bad at math,’ to ‘I’m a great math student,’” McEathron said. “Sometimes it’s finding the neutral. Not going, ‘Okay, I’m excellent at this,’ but being able to say, ‘I’m learning math.’ That’s more neutral. There’s no judgment there.”
Psychology Today published a series of articles in 2020 about self-empathy. One of the themes the authors returned to again and again was the suspension of judgment.
Empathy toward others, after all, means understanding their struggle instead of merely acknowledging it. It’s equally important to direct empathy toward ourselves.
As McEathron mentioned, there’s nobody we spend more time with.
I remember being on the phone with my friend Allyssa, lamenting about never speaking to the girl in my class I had a crush on. Another friend had been pushing me to ask for her number, but the thought was terrifying. I could barely make myself speak to her.
When the conversation turned to the fact I would probably be alone forever, Allyssa interrupted me. She asked me when I’d started thinking about dating.
It had only been six months since I realized I was gay.
Then she pointed out the obvious. Where some people might have been stumbling through awkward flirting as early as middle school, I was just starting. Of course I had no idea what I was doing.
Practicing self-empathy means taking the time to understand our own reactions. It means suspending judgment of oneself. Only then can you take steps to adapt.
Steps like downloading a dating app, not for hookups, but to practice casual texting. I mentioned it almost as a joke to Allyssa. A couple weeks later, she called and told me to expect some texts from an unknown number.
Apparently, she was making me a Tinder account.