My Great Awakening
Butterflies were soaring inside my stomach as my friend, Sadie, and I eagerly waited in a long line full of Oh Wonder fans outside The Observatory in Santa Ana. Prior to that day, members of my family were the only people who went to concerts with me because just about everyone at the all-boy high school I attended listened to artists that had “Lil” in their name, and I listened to bands like Oh Wonder. I told Sadie about that so she knew how special she was for me to bring her to see one of my favorite bands. The timing of mine and Sadie’s meeting was perfect. My parents' separation was still fresh, and she was happy to be a shoulder for me to cry on. I needed someone like her more than I thought.
When the doors finally opened, we rushed into the venue so we could secure a spot closest to the stage. As the anticipation grew, Sadie and I continued chatting until the band came out. The lights went dim and the crowd cheered when the giant “O” and “W” shaped lights lit up the room. As the two members of the band walked out onto the stage, I looked at Sadie, my eyes full of excitement. The sound from the speakers thumped inside my chest and filled me with joy as I sang the words to every song. It was a happiness I hadn’t felt before.
After the show ended, we sat on a curb outside the venue waiting for my mom to pick us up. As we waited, Sadie’s phone lit up with a Facetime call from her friend Sarah.
“Did you guys make out yet?” Sarah blurted out the second Sadie answered the call. We awkwardly laughed off Sarah's uncomfortable question and changed the subject of the conversation at lightning speed. It was a night to remember.
However, that night felt too good to be true. I had never experienced the feelings Sadie made me feel. I watched one of my favorite bands with someone whom I cared deeply about. That night was the closest thing I had ever had to a date. What more could a boy my age want? I was sixteen the first time I felt butterflies. Sadie was the reason for that feeling, but something was off. The awkwardness of Sarah’s question lingered on in my mind. The entire night my mind had never ventured into thoughts about kissing Sadie. All I could think about was how happy I was just being with her. I told myself not to rush anything with her because I assumed all the pieces would eventually fall into place.
As the first weeks of summer quickly unraveled, Sadie and I spent a lot of time together. My mom and I even spent a night under the stars with Sadie and some of her relatives when Father John Misty played at the Hollywood Bowl. Again, I was so caught up in the music and being with my friend that I kept assuming that it would not be much longer until Sadie and I would naturally become more than just friends. One hot day in July, I went over to Sadie’s house where the heat of the summer forced us to stay inside her air-conditioned home and watch TV. At some point during that day, Sadie and I were in her house all alone sitting side by side on the couch. Instead of “making a move,” I dozed off into brief sleep during our Friends marathon. That day at Sadie’s was another missed opportunity for me to progress our friendship into a relationship. It was the last day I spent with her. We continued to text, but whenever I tried to make plans with her, she was always busy or preoccupied with something. I was determined to convince Sadie to go with me to the Orange County Fair because fairs seem to have this “summer romance” energy that I hoped would nudge us into a couple.
Unfortunately, I never made it to the fair that summer, but Sadie did. Not too long after I had asked Sadie to go with me to the fair, she went with someone else. Before I came along, Sadie had a thing for my friend Rico and I guess I did something that urged her to go back and pick up where they left off. Inside my chest, I felt my heart shatter into dozens of pieces when I saw them posting on their Snapchat stories as they sat together riding the ferris wheel. I so badly wished that I was the one riding the ferris wheel with Sadie. I spiraled into a pit of sadness the rest of the summer and carried the pieces of my broken heart into the beginning of junior year. I could only wonder what it was that I did that caused her to ghost me so suddenly. I swear she was crushing on me the same way I was crushing on her. Even my grandpa, the quietest member of my family, told my grandma, “That girl must really like Nathan,” after he met Sadie. By the second half of junior year, Sadie and I had not spoken for months. With my heart still broken, I was grieving a relationship that I never even had.
In the midst of my junior year, I befriended a senior named Adam. We became close friends and eventually started hanging out. During one of our first outings, I shared with him everything that went down between Sadie and me. One night when we were having dinner at a pizza parlor, I felt something inside me wishing that Adam was more than my friend. When I wasn’t getting lost in his brown eyes, my attention was on his hands resting on the table, wishing our fingers were intertwined. The butterflies that came from Adam felt different than the ones I had felt from Sadie. Thoughts of holding Adam’s hand and kissing him crept into my mind, but I knew none of that would happen because he had a girlfriend. I was devastated when Adam told me he had a girlfriend. Any and all hope of anything more than a friendship between us flew out the window. One night, I saw Adam with his girlfriend and I just about completely lost it. I thought my heart broke when I saw Sadie with Rico; that was nothing compared to the night I saw Adam with a girl. I envied her. I yearned for his affection so much that it became overwhelming because I had never experienced such an intense feeling.
When I realized I wished that Adam was more than a friend, I was terrified because I was aware that the feelings I felt for him were deemed wrong in the eyes of my religion. Instead of confronting the possibility that I might be a homosexual, I decided to dive deeper into my faith and began a desperate search for a girlfriend. My mission to find myself a girlfriend began before Sadie and Adam entered my world. I wasn’t aware of it, of my own attempt to convert myself. Having a girl-crazy older brother, I had expectations to live up to from my family and peers. I told myself that my situation would become easier once Adam graduated because I would rarely see him. And to an extent it did, but I didn’t forget the way I felt about him.
Flash forward to homecoming weekend of my senior year of high school. It was my first formal dance in four years. I promised myself that I would go to every event that was on the calendar of my final year of high school. Homecoming was the first major event that year. Since I was no longer speaking to Sadie, my list of female friends was back to zero and I had no one I could take to the dance. Luckily for me, my best friend, Seth, at the time was dating someone who introduced my friend Rico and I to two of her girlfriends. After the six of us hung out several times, Seth, Rico, and I all asked one of the girls to attend homecoming with us. I was relieved because I was overwhelmed with anxiety, stressing about who I was going to take with me to the dance. I couldn’t go to the dance alone, that was more embarrassing than not going at all.
Come the day of the dance, I had lost my mind. I had to look my best, say and do all the right things with the hope of becoming more than friends with my date by the end of the night. A lot was on the line and I couldn’t afford to mess it up the way I did with Sadie. At the end of the night, I thought I did everything right: I impressed my date’s mom, was the most gentlemen-like I’d ever been, and I paid for dinner. It was everything I thought a boy was supposed to do on his first date with a girl. When it came time for the dancing, my date said she didn’t know how, while Rico and Seth danced the night away with their dates. There were no sparks, no matter how hard I tried to start a fire that night. What is wrong with me?
The weeks following the dance, I removed myself from the homecoming group because seeing them only reminded me of another attempted failure at trying to prove to myself that I was heterosexual. My entire senior year, I struggled to make romantic connections with girls. Any progress I made led to dead-ends in the friendzone. After all my failed attempts at being a heterosexual, there was nothing more I could do. Deep down, I knew I was gay; I had known from several years of having crushes on boys, my obsession with Selena Gomez, and how excited I got when I got to wear make up in a school play in junior high. Despite the fact that I knew I was gay, I couldn’t be gay in a religious environment, toxic thoughts followed me wherever I went. So, I convinced myself that being a good Christian and God's love was worth sacrificing any form of authentic happiness I would find as a gay man.
Once I graduated high school, I had an important decision to make. Was I going to continue searching for a heterosexual relationship I could force myself into? I was oblivious to the fact that I was the maker of my misery until I finally took the time to figure out who I was. The person I tried to be in high school was nothing close to the real version of myself who was waiting to come out of the closet.
Looking back on the time I spent with Sadie, I realized that I did not have any romantic feelings for her. As a socially awkward teen who attended an all-boys, Catholic high school, meeting girls at social events during that period of my life was not something I was good at. When my friend introduced me to Sadie, the two of us clicked. I was so excited to have a female friend to spend time with again like I did in junior high. I was in a setting that made me believe that because I got along well with a girl, that meant I had to have romantic feelings for her. When Sadie stopped spending time with me, I was devastated, but for reasons I was not aware of at the time. At some point, it occurred to me that I was sad over the fact of being rejected by Sadie because I was desperate to obtain a girlfriend and convince myself and the people around me that I was straight.
When I departed from the bubble of Catholic school, I also left my faith behind. As a young child, I had some sense of awareness that I was not straight, but being so heavily invested in my relationship with God, I did whatever I could to change that. High school would have been a brutal battlefield had I come to terms with my sexuality then; God forbid any of my peers found out. I decided to terminate my religious identity for several reasons, the main one being that I knew where I would end up according to my beliefs if I pursued the lifestyle of a homosexual. Sitting in church every Sunday, thoughts of self-hatred flooded my mind, distracting me from what my pastor was preaching about. I constantly asked God why he would make me gay if he loved me. At one point I was so desperate to not be gay that I, someone who identified as a Christian and not a Catholic, contemplated becoming a priest. However, I felt that I no longer belonged in a place as sacred as the church, so I abandoned my religious lifestyle practically overnight. I received a great deal of backlash from my family, but specifically my mother. She couldn’t understand why I stopped going to church all of a sudden. If she couldn’t accept that, how would she accept a queer kid as her son?
I did a considerable amount of damage during my crusade of turning myself into a heterosexual, but those days were over after high school. The Covid-19 pandemic that interrupted my senior year spared me from the stress of finding a date to prom. It also forced me to spend a great deal of alone time with myself on the countless number of walks I would go on each day. I could feel the real me trapped inside, endlessly begging to come out. That summer I made the brave decision to start coming out to my closest friends who accepted me with open arms. It felt as if my life was just beginning. I was free. I was me.
Since then, I have learned to embrace parts of myself that I suppressed prior to coming out. I wear crop tops and short-shorts to the gym while working out to the queens of pop. While I am still getting used to being openly gay, I get to learn new things about who I am constantly. I’ve fully emerged and embraced my gay identity. I have kissed a guy, several to be more specific, I’ve had good dates and terrible dates, I’ve gone to gay clubs, and most importantly, I am finally out to everyone I know and love. In the back of my mind I always rested the thought that my life would fall apart if I abandoned my faith and allowed myself to exist as a homosexual, but it didn’t and it still hasn’t. My life is far from easy, but I am who I was born to be.
Nathan Corrál (he/him) is a queer, Chicano writer, and editor at Statement Magazine. He is a first-generation undergraduate student pursuing his bachelor's degree in English at Cal State Los Angeles. Nathan is a featured writer for the Words Uncaged Program. His creative nonfiction has appeared in “Cultural Daily.”