Читать книгу Undivided: Coming Out, Becoming Whole, and Living Free From Shame - Vicky Beeching, Vicky Beeching - Страница 11

Transfixed, I stood in the music store, gazing at the most beautiful electric guitar I’d ever seen. It was red and white, modeled after the famous Fender Telecaster—a cheaper version but still stunning to me. The gregarious salesman grabbed a stepladder and got it down, the weight of it surprising me as he handed it over. I plugged it into an amplifier and began to play. My face lit up, and my mother, watching from nearby, could tell I was desperately hoping we might take it home.

We’d only planned to buy a basic, cheap classical guitar that day, something for me to learn on instead of always stealing my mum’s acoustic. But she could tell my heart had attached itself to this red-and-white electric. I agreed that I’d gladly have it as birthday and Christmas gifts all rolled into one. So we left the store with that gorgeous instrument, plus a small practice amp, a tuner pedal, a capo, and all the cables and plectrums I could wish for.

With this new guitar waiting for me each evening when I returned home from high school, I practiced even more than before. Once homework was done, every night I’d close my bedroom door and play, teaching myself from a book and asking Mum for help if I got stuck.

One evening, shut away in my room playing and singing, something unusual happened. Usually I only made up worship songs, taking my lyric ideas directly from parts of the Bible, like the Psalms. But that evening, rather than singing about faith, I found myself writing a love song. And it was about a girl.

After five minutes, I blushed, stopped, and put the guitar away. It felt as though I’d used my musical gift for something wrong and dirty; I’d polluted the beautiful talents God had given me. I put the guitar down, switched off the bedroom light, pulled the curtains open, and stared out at the stars. “Sorry, God,” I whispered. “I won’t do that again. I promise to use my music for one thing only: to glorify you.”

That was the last time I sang about a girl.

Music quickly evolved from a hobby to something more serious. I recorded my first demo during a high-school summer break—a cassette tape with eight of my songs on it. I borrowed the school’s four-track recorder, a now-ancient device that can record four different layers of audio on one cassette. This was long before easily affordable laptops and music software came into being; as I look back, it feels like the technological Dark Ages.

Proficient in several instruments by then, I played guitar, drums, and piano and then layered vocals and harmonies on the four-track tape. Finally, I finished it off with synth pads and some harmonica.

My parents and sister could barely walk around our living room for weeks, as I’d filled it with cables, wires, amplifiers, and instruments. A piece of paper taped to the door, scribbled in my handwriting, read: QUIET PLEASE: RECORDING IN PROGRESS. I’m grateful that my family was infinitely patient and supportive of my musical quest.

Once the finished demo tape was in my hands, I sent it to one of the UK’s biggest Christian record labels. It was a shot in the dark, but worth a go. To my amazement, they chose one of my songs out of thousands of submissions and featured it on a CD. A copy of the album arrived in the mail, and my family and I sat around and listened to it together. My crazy summer of cables, wires, and recording equipment had opened a significant door.

Spurred on by this, I worked on other songs, hopeful that they’d be published and recorded too. The following year, at one of the Christian youth camps I attended, the leader brought me up in front of five thousand attendees and spoke about how impressed he was with my songwriting. After that, other teenagers came up to me all week, saying hello or asking me to sign their copy of the CD. It was heady stuff for someone still in high school, but instead of making me develop an ego, it just fueled my desire to be the best Christian I could be. I didn’t want to let anyone down.

I discovered that plenty of people made a living recording Christian music and touring across the UK, the US, and Canada. Once I knew this, I wondered if it could ever become my full-time career; I certainly hoped it might. It felt like my childhood dream of becoming a missionary, but through music. I want to be a musicianary, I joked to myself. This dream brought up lots of insecurities too—I worried that I wasn’t good enough at singing or songwriting—but most of all it brought up embarrassment about my “secret personal struggles.”

Amid the growing musical opportunities in my teens, my sexuality hadn’t shown any signs of being a phase. My feelings for girls were real as ever. Daily, I played mind games with myself to silence the thoughts. Who you’re attracted to isn’t a big part of life anyway, I told myself. I mean, it’s just one small fraction of what it means to be human. I can shut it out, stay single, and have a perfectly happy and fulfilled future … I was trying to compartmentalize my heart, and silence my emotions, but it was a struggle I couldn’t seem to win.

Because of this, despite the exciting musical doors that were opening, I was feeling less and less enthusiastic about life. As I segmented my identity into good and bad parts, I felt like I was fragmenting. A dark cloud fell from the sky and settled over my mind and heart.

In my anxiety, I created long, detailed prayers that I would recite to myself each time I felt attracted to a girl. It was my own private liturgy—my internal confession booth—in which I told God how sorry I was ten times a day. My mind became a complex place, a far cry from the mind of the simple, happy child I had been before.

Friends in my class noticed a change in my previously carefree personality. I became aloof and felt awkward in my own skin; I slouched my shoulders and didn’t look people in the eye. Mostly I had my Walkman headphones plugged in, shutting out the world, with my midnight-blue denim jacket buttoned all the way up to the top like a suit of armor.

I began throwing my packed lunches away and stopped eating during school hours. I didn’t know how to relate to my body anymore. It seemed to be betraying me with its sinful desires, so I didn’t want to give it food. My flesh and blood were now the enemy; I was fighting a battle against myself.

Do you think there’s any chance he likes me?” one girl asked, looking hopeful, as she ate her sandwich. “I mean, he did sit next to me on the bus the other day—and I could’ve sworn he was looking at my hair and my outfit. I just can’t stop thinking about him.”

I never knew quite how to handle these conversations. I wanted to be part of the crowd, so I listened to my classmates sharing their latest stories. But when someone casually asked me, “So, Vicky, which of the guys do you like? Anyone you’ve got your eye on? Who have you been kissing lately?!” I felt totally stumped. Stumbling over my words, I would say, “Oh, no one really …,” but that recurring answer was only making people ask more frequently, as they were curious.

I’d had my first kiss somewhere around the age of twelve or thirteen. It was with a boy, of course, as girls were, in my mind, forever off-limits. In keeping with my outdoorsy, countryside childhood, it had happened when we were sitting in a field of tall yellow flowers; so tall that they stood far above our heads, swaying in the summer breeze. And the boy I’d sat in tree houses, splashed in rivers, and run through wheat-fields with since we were nine was the one who’d decided to kiss me.

It was a first kiss that almost anyone would treasure, picturesque in location and with someone I cared for. But I felt nothing for him beyond the platonic friendship we’d always shared. My heart was wired differently, so I couldn’t reciprocate his attraction. So my first kiss, despite being a happy memory because of our friendship, was not one I felt a romantic connection to. At the time, I wondered if maybe I would feel something for other guys; perhaps he was more like a brother than a boyfriend to me, I’d thought.

Several other interested boys came and went during my high-school years, mostly just friends I bonded with over guitars. My heart would sink if those guys began looking at me differently, as I knew what was coming. They’d tell me about their feelings, and I’d be forced to choose: try dating them and see if any feelings appeared or admit what I already knew, that I was gay and attraction to boys would never be there.

When one of these male friends tried to kiss me at a bus stop, nothing about it made my heart skip a beat or gave me butterflies—but I did feel all of those things when I looked at the girls I liked. Kissing somebody male felt unnatural and awkward to me, like playing a forced role in the film of my life, an understudy for the person I was trying to become. But it felt important to explore this—I was figuring out who I was, and I was desperate to fit in.

I said yes to dating a few of my male friends, but they were deeply hurt when I broke up with them only weeks into our fledgling relationship. I couldn’t tell them the truth about why I had no attraction to them—so I was left grasping at clichés like “It’s not you; it’s me” or “You’re more like a brother to me.” It was an emotional car crash for both of us every time; we both walked away hurt, and they had a sense of confusion because my reasons for breaking up were never fully convincing.

As my female classmates and I arrived at the legal age of consent to have sex (sixteen years old in the UK), conversations about “fancying boys” became more serious and progressed further. Some of the older girls were claiming to have “gone all the way.” I’m sure much of it was just bravado, but a number of my peers at school were now sexually active. This, in turn, would bring a new degree of heartache for me.

Once, on my way to a science lesson, the blue-eyed girl in my class whom I’d fallen for three years earlier and still couldn’t seem to get over said she wanted to go on a walk with me at break time to tell me something. Getting to spend time with her alone was the Holy Grail for me, and I thought about nothing else all morning.

We met at lunchtime and walked across the school field to the secluded area where tall trees lined the edges. It was June and unseasonably hot with scorching sunshine, so we tied our sweaters around our waists and kicked at the dry grass.

Leaning against a tree, she looked around nervously, scanning for teachers, and reached into her bag. Pulling out a cigarette, she lit it and inhaled the smoke to calm her nerves. Perhaps one reason I liked her so much was because she was my polar opposite. Known as a troublemaker, she always seemed so sure of herself and willing to challenge the status quo. There was something beautifully dangerous about her.

She cleared her throat, preparing to tell me her news. Ever the optimist, I wondered if she was going to tell me that she liked me—that she was gay. (Of course, she had no idea that I was or that I liked her in that way, as I put immense energy into hiding it.) That lunchtime, as she looked into my eyes, nothing could have been further from her mind.

“So,” she began, “I’ve decided … I mean, I think I’m ready to …” She paused to take another drag of her cigarette. “I’m ready to … have sex with him. I think I’m … in love with him,” she said, her face flushed.

Her boyfriend had been keen to sleep with her ever since she’d turned sixteen, and here she was, telling me she was going to do it. I coughed and looked away. She thought I had cigarette smoke in my eyes and apologized, exhaling slowly in the opposite direction.

“So what do you think?” she asked. “I mean, I know your faith wouldn’t condone it, but apart from that, what do you think, as my friend?”

“Friend” rang in my ears. That was all I would ever be to her. All I would ever be to any of these girls, now or ever. All I could mumble in response to her question was “Well, I guess only you can know when you’re ready …”

My heart broke into a hundred pieces as I processed the news she’d shared. It wasn’t that I wanted to sleep with her—my feelings were far more innocent than that, plus I believed that sex should only happen within marriage, as that’s what my church had raised me to think. I just wanted some sort of emotional exclusivity with her, where I was the one she ran to when she was frightened or happy. I wouldn’t have allowed myself the “sinful” behavior of kissing or dating her even if she had been interested, as my faith made that impossible for me. Liking her had felt much easier when she was single, but now that she was seriously dating a guy, it was a constant reminder to me that she was falling in love with him and not with me.

Anytime I found myself thinking of her in that way, I shut the feelings down at once, as guilt and shame rushed in. But as we stood there talking, I felt lost in her gaze. She seemed closer than ever, and yet now, based on this news, she’d never been further away.

“I guess we’d better go back for afternoon class,” she said, stubbing her cigarette out on the trunk of the tree. We started our walk back, and when we reached the school entrance, I told her I’d see her later.

I made my way to one of the bathrooms, locked the stall door behind me, and stood with my back against it. Silent tears fell down my cheeks, creating a mess of black mascara. I slid down the back of the door until I was sitting on the floor and, pulling my knees into my chest, I sobbed into the thick blue wool of my school sweater.