Boy Erased

I knew it would be impossible to ignore this movie, that my parents would soon be calling to ask if I’d seen it, and I thought seeing it with Charles and Dominique might give me some perspective, allow me to mock it in some way

Then, one night in early May, for reasons I can’t remember, something drew me to his dorm. It could have been the crushing loneliness I often felt during that period of my life.

The counselor wasn’t here, not in this place, though he had already patterned his thoughts into the white mass my mind had become.

Having something to do calmed me a bit, slowed my breathing. Later, I would come to recognize these symptoms as the first signs of a panic attack. At the time, they felt like the first symptoms of dying.

“Even then I knew that logo was strange,” she will later tell me. “The heart was cut away, like that was all it took.”

I began to look forward to the idea of a needle pricking my skin, to blood funneling into labeled vials, to anything concrete that might tell me what was wrong with me or why I couldn’t perform what seemed to me then the simplest of tasks:

I decided that this was what it was like to be truly insane, that only insane people clung to both sides so doggedly, refused to let them part ways, let them battle inside the mind.

later I’d learn that a change of scenery would never change someone like me,

And when they discovered that secret, nothing would stop them from retroactively dismissing each detail of my personality, each opinion of mine, as mere symptoms of homosexuality.

“Harry Potter is nothing more than a seducer of children’s souls,”