Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More

by Janet Mock

I didn’t know how to be truly happy. I had to cope with it by dismissing it, by forecasting its inevitable end. My belief system operated on the notion that the good things in my life were a universal hiccup where doom surely loomed. Happiness was fleeting and accidental; goodness wasn’t in the cards for a girl like me.

This would only upset Dad, whom I was acutely aware had a complex about my sensitivity.

On the road toward self-revelation, we make little compromises in an effort to appease those we love, those who are invested in us, those who have dreams for us. Those people tend to be our parents.

Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless and runaway American youth, as many as 40 percent are LGBTQ, according to a 2006 report by the Task Force and the National Coalition for the Homeless.

It’s no wonder nearly one-third of LGBTQ students are driven out of school—a dropout rate nearly three times the national average, according to Lambda Legal.

Even then I knew that I was never a priority for my mother. It was the curse of always excelling. I never got in trouble. I always took care of things, and this was a blessing for my overstretched mother, who knew I had a handle on things.

B. White, in his love letter “Here Is New York,” wrote that it is the New York of “the young girl arriving from a small town . . . to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors” who gives the city “its incomparable achievements.”