The power of self-definition...

I suppose there are individuals who breeze through high school and college, buffeted by the winds of their supreme confidence and deep certainty about their developing identities.

I just don’t know any of them.

Kai Perket, who graduated from high school in 2016, describes their teenage years as a “really tumultuous time” in their life. Basic issues of acceptance are hard enough when you are in high school, but when you add questions about sexual identity into the mix, the confusion can build like a gathering storm.

Kai writes about that storm of confusion here. Since graduating, they have moved on to Macalester College in St. Paul, MN, where they major in International Studies with a Political Science focus. They play softball and work with other athletic teams as a sports medicine assistant. Despite missing Mexican food and the California sunshine, they are getting the most out of their college experience.

In their piece, Kai writes about their own personal journey toward identity and self-acceptance. “My post is about learning that growing pains are inevitable,” they said. “Life hurts. But your opinion of yourself is the only opinion that truly matters, and anyone who tries to make you feel lesser for your identity isn't worth your time. You have the means and opportunity to define yourself and nobody can take that power away from you.”

- C.H.

High school is a weird time and a weird space—everyone is attempting to grow into themselves, college is a looming storm on the horizon, and the pressure to fit in can be overwhelming. For me, the pressure to become someone or something, pushed and pulled me in different directions. I wanted to stand out, but social pressures dictated that I do my best to blend in.

I tried to grow into myself by squishing myself into a box. I became obsessed with identity, with labels, with securing a community to tie myself to. I was an Arab, first and foremost—it’s a little difficult to be much else when cuisine and tradition and faith, when politics, demand you acknowledge your roots. I begrudgingly accepted my race.

My next label was to be a woman. Definitely a straight woman. I didn’t know how to be anything else. Growing up in a socially conservative environment meant that topics such as mental health, gender, sexuality, and social activism were off the table. I had to google “LGBTQ” to figure out what the acronym meant. A deeper internet search allowed me to redefine my gender identity.

What threw me off was the gnawing feeling that maybe I wasn’t as straight as I thought I was. I thought my interest in women, gender non-conforming individuals, and others to be another passing whimsy that comes with new knowledge. It took me six months of my sophomore year to admit that this wasn’t “just a phase.” In my newfound knowledge, I struggled to find a label that could adequately describe myself. I bounced between a few before I could finally settle on “pansexual.”

I had new labels, a new name, and friends who were undertaking similar self-exploratory journeys. All I needed, all I wanted, was for this new me to be brought into the family.

I will be the first to tell you that it did not go well. My labels were thrown back into my face with some amount of spite. I didn’t attempt to come out a second time. I used my legal name through high school, refused to entertain the idea of dating, and stuffed myself back into the role of a straight woman who was simply too shy to speak.

Allow me, if you will, to tell you that this made me miserable. I hated myself. I hated a lot of the people around me. I’d wake up, go to school, and come back home to isolate myself. That part was not so safe. I wouldn’t recommend it. There was a lot of crying in bathrooms. I was bursting at the seams.

It took six months of waking up angry and hurt to come to a realization. As I spat out my toothpaste one morning, I had the sudden thought that other people’s opinions of me were only as important as I let them become. I stood there, dumbfounded, as I realized that the only person whose opinion of me mattered was my own. I deserved to be myself; I deserved to love myself. If anyone didn’t approve of who I was, that was their loss. I will be stuck with myself for however long I’m on this planet, and I deserve to have as pleasant an experience as possible.

As a junior in college now, I’ve found my own community. It’s an assortment of colors and orientations and opinions, a hodgepodge of thought. I have support networks in place, friends who understand, “Real Adults” that I can reach out to for help—and they’re never more than an email or text away.

My unsolicited advice to you is this: you deserve love. You deserve happiness. You deserve to grow into the best version of yourself. Take your time. Not everyone will love all of you, and that’s okay. Labels are only as important as you make them. You are your own person and you are living your own life. Do no harm, but take no shit.