Soft Stories

My life is not a soft story, but my heart is a soft heart.

I was born onto this earth with what the adults in my life called “an overactive imagination.” Nothing satisfied me more than Playing Pretend. I was a knight fighting a three-headed monster. I was a good witch wandering the woods. I was a professional baseball player in the final inning of the World Series. I was an astronaut on my way to the moon. I’d be a chef, a teacher, a lion, a dragon, a grocery store clerk. One of my favorite things to pretend to be was the editor of a catalogue called Socks that was simply 20 pages of notebook paper stapled together, featuring circus-colored, wacky-patterned socks my sister and I drew and brought to life with crayons. The only thing I wouldn’t play was “house” because the only thing I refused to pretend to be was a wife.

Child psychologists these days are starting to understand that playing pretend is actually an evolutionary biological function, in which kids tell themselves and each other stories to rehearse for grown-up life. They’re building social intelligence and emotional intelligence that’s preparing them to survive all the challenges of being a person in the world. Which is why even my baby-brain couldn’t play house. An alien? Sure, I could be an alien. A sea monster? A unicorn? A walking, talking Gummy Bear? Heck yes! Some man’s wife? No, absolutely not.

I didn’t understand that I was gay, but my noggin did, even when it wasn’t fully formed. It’s called “implicit memory,” when we don’t know what our brains do know.

The way we are drawn to — or repelled by — certain stories, for reasons we can’t fully comprehend, is so fascinating to me. I can’t watch or read horror, for example, or even really intense mysteries that involve a lot of gore or blood. It’s always been true. I know now it’s because my nervous system was already way-overactive because I lived a scary, confusing childhood, and my body literally could not handle any more stress or fear. For so many people, watching horror is about letting fictional characters get slashed in your stead, so you can freak out your body and then let it exhale relief into the likelihood that you’re not going to get serial killed by some psycho in a clown mask. It’s about seeing yourself as a Final Girl. That starts in childhood too, if you really think about it; fairy tales are absolute horror shows.

Lately I’ve had to make some terrifying, life-changing decisions. I’ve had to step further out of my comfort zone than I’ve ever done before. And the stories I’ve been chasing and clinging to are the softest ones I can find. Heartstopper, the maybe-sweetest gay love story that’s ever made it to TV. Prime Video’s rom-com adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue, a fantastical Disney-worthy fairy tale about a Prince and his romance with America’s First Son (but, like, way sexier). Even the final season of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and it’s endgame sapphic love story between a couple of queer theater kids, the most idealistic youths on the face of the earth. I’ve devoured those things in the last few weeks, meaning I’ve seen more gay people hugging on-screen, and for longer, than ever before in my life. And in that softness I have found the courage I’ve needed to step out into my own brave new world.

Someone recently said to me that I’m “out here claiming the most unbearably boring paint-by-numbers assimilationist bullshit as a radical victory for queer culture,” that I was doing a major disservice to the LGBTQ+ community with my “sunny optimism.” It was such a weird thing to hear because I have been beating back an all-consuming cloud of perpetual depression my entire life, and especially the past few years as I’ve had to re-learn how to live after being walloped with chronic illness and disability.

Graham Smith said it best in Waterland: “Only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man – let me offer you a definition – is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep on making them up. As long as there’s a story, it’s all right. Even in his last moments, it’s said, in the split second of a fatal fall – or when he’s about to drown – he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.”

My life is not a soft story, but my heart is a soft heart. Soft the way bread dough is soft, because it’s taken a beating. Soft with intent and soft with promise. Soft because I trained it to be soft, with tender stories of hope and purpose.