I Have Something to Tell You

by Chasten Glezman Buttigieg

I had run so far away from home to escape my doubts about all that, but what I didn’t understand at the time is that you cannot run away from those things. Your soul, your truth, your identity, your fears—they all follow you.

But at the time I could think of nothing but the apparent impossibility of ever living a happy life, and this was especially painful given that my vision of a happy life didn’t seem like so much to ask for. I just wanted someone to eat my casseroles!

Ultimately, the advice I’d give for dealing with these situations resembles what I’d tell a student who was being bullied: remember that person’s comments say more about them than they do about you.

He wasn’t just helping me manage and surmount my medical and student debt—he was helping me manage and surmount my doubt. That is partnership, and that is love.

Though we’re very different people in some ways, we both have the same approach to each other’s problems: “I love you. How can I help?”

I came to think of my role as being everything and nothing. If I messed up, I was everything, the center of attention; if I did a good job, I was nothing, just doing my job of being Peter’s husband.

When folks would ask, “Just what prepared you for this?” I’d always joke that teaching middle school was the perfect preparation for a life in politics. Emotions are high; compromise is a crucial aspect of daily life. The biggest hurdle is trying to separate yourself from the drama in front of you in order to see the big picture. Scraps of hard-won progress, day in and day out, lead to bigger achievements over time. When you’re helping a student navigate an emotional breakdown, you have to remember that their behavior has nothing to do with you—it’s about something going on beneath the surface. Adults should know better, but they often don’t.

That gay experience in Tulsa is just as gay and valid as other, more visible experiences in the media, and attempting to police anyone’s gayness sets a dangerous precedent. It equates identity with presentation and prioritizes lifestyle over the conditions of someone’s life. It places even more needless pressure on a population that is already struggling. It says to that young person walking away from his only home, barefoot in the middle of the night, that there is a right and wrong way to exist when he may be contemplating if he even wants to at all.

To sum it all up, it’s a total mess; everyone comes out looking dirty. No one will ever win Twitter. Twitter wins Twitter by making it so that it seems like everyone on Twitter already hates everyone else, which makes it feel as if you need to spend all your time there. Nuance is lost, context is lost, and if you say the wrong thing, the immediate response is “You are canceled. You can’t sit with us.” It’s an illusion that you can win anyone over on the platform.