Steven LaChance Blog

School should be a safe place for all kids regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or anything else that might make them different from others. That is the ideal people like to talk about. But the truth is that it is not and never really has been.

Growing up, I understood something very clearly even before I had the words to explain it. At any moment the life I had built at school could come crashing down if people discovered I was gay.

You learn this by watching and listening. Children are very good observers. You hear the jokes people laugh at. You hear the words whispered in hallways. You see how quickly someone can become a target simply for being different.

Little by little those observations begin to teach you how to behave and how not to behave. What to say. What never to say.

Without even realizing it, you find yourself placed on a stage every single day. You begin to play a part that you hope will keep you safe.

Because you have already seen what happens to the others. The ones who are singled out. The ones who suddenly become different in the eyes of everyone else.

Once you see that, you understand something very quickly. Survival sometimes means performing a version of yourself that the world will accept.

This is also why we see higher suicide rates among LGBTQ teenagers. The performance becomes exhausting. Living two lives takes an emotional toll that is difficult to describe to someone who has never experienced it.

Over time the pressure builds. You become depressed. You become frustrated. You begin to feel alone even when you are surrounded by people.

I know this because it is how I felt.

My parents could see that something had changed. They knew I was depressed, that something inside me was not right anymore. But I could not tell them why.

Everywhere I looked I saw the potential for hate or rejection. In school. In conversations. In the things people laughed about or condemned.

Living inside that kind of constant vigilance takes its toll on a person.

Over time something else begins to happen as well. You start to forget who you really are. When you spend so much energy editing yourself, hiding parts of your personality, and carefully managing how you appear to others, pieces of you begin to disappear.

You shape yourself around other people’s expectations so often that your own identity becomes harder to recognize.

That is one of the quiet tragedies of it all. This is where we lose so many people.

By the time someone finally feels safe enough to come out, they are often left with the difficult work of trying to put themselves back together again. That is not an easy process. It takes time to rediscover the parts of yourself that were hidden away just to survive.

So stop for a moment and remember something important. The person standing next to you may be carrying a fear you do not understand. They may be fighting a quiet battle just to make it through the day without being exposed, rejected, or humiliated.

Words matter more than we sometimes realize.

What seems like a joke to one person can become a wound that stays with someone else for years.

Words can become weapons.

Use them carefully.