I Am Free.

I’ve been staring at this computer screen for weeks in hopes that sentences of any kind would flow from my brain to my fingertips and somehow make them move, but the closest I’ve come to it is writing a title. I look at it and I can honestly say that I am truly free. Free from these emotional chains that had been holding me back from moving forward and allowing myself to be who I am.

          Our story begins somewhere after posting my last blog “Unthinkable”. I was really happy to show everybody that not everything was perfect in my so called “perfect” life. I have problems just like everyone else and I like writing something that people can take and relate to their own lives. There was just one thing that seemed to be bothering me about the whole piece; I had disguised the person I had hurt with a not so clever codename. When I first started blogging when I was in my mid-teens I always wrote what I wanted. There was this freedom in words that I found comforting and it made me feel like I had control over something in a world where I felt held down and powerless. I always wrote about life and coming across people that only contributed in my growth process. The one thing I never did was hide who I was writing about. Meaning, I may have tweaked their name, but it was always gender specific. Whether it was a woman who inspired me in some way or a man who taught me a lesson about life, I didn’t write fiction. It was this letter, “X” that was so gender neutral that irked me so much that I had to take a step back and re-evaluate just the writer I was choosing to be. I had noticed this fear inside me. What was I really afraid of?  Was this the path I was choosing to pursue? A path of constant fear of a ripple effect my writing could cause if read by certain people in my life? Truth was, yes, I was afraid. There are certain people in my life that don’t agree with how I’m choosing to spend MY life right now. I took a break from trying to force an entry and wanted to get back to that teenager who felt free from restrictions when it came to his writing.

          In my creative hibernation I had a vision: A teenage boy, seventeen to be exact, sitting in a blue recliner tears rolling down his face because his father was calling him an abomination. I watched him as he held his little sister’s hand with his mother sitting next to her in silence. “Why is she letting this happen? Why is she just sitting there?” He kept asking himself. I could see so much on his face; he was exhausted physically, stressed out emotionally and knew that no matter what he said or did he was not going to win this battle. I could feel the blood boiling in his veins and how worthless he truly felt. I watched as the cracks in his soul became bigger and bigger till he was nothing but a pile of broken glass. The worst part of this whole vision was that it wasn’t a vision, but a memory. That boy being yelled at and being completely torn apart was me.

          When I was seventeen I got into some trouble which turned my world upside down. This happened in February of 2008 and I felt that was the year I had hit rock bottom. I felt stripped of my confidence, self respect, inner peace and the light that once brightened my world was taken away. Why you ask? Why did I have to endure such a fate? On February 1st, 2008 it was discovered that I was gay.

          I had already made the decision to make it official on my sixteenth birthday. I was gay and I had such a great support system before, during and after my coming out process. But the two people who could ever make me feel bad about it were my “loving” parents. After finding out that their only son was a homosexual it set off a chain of unfortunate events. My day that followed consisted of my dad dragging me all over town looking for my boyfriend at the time so he could beat him up, being yelled at on and off, being interrogated by my mom, being read scripture after scripture till my dad was blue in the face, and of course, watching my own mother cry tears of confusion and rage. Yep, it was quite the busy first day and it didn’t get any better after that. I think that was when our “picture picture” family exterior started to dissolve and real life started to sink in. It’s been years since that dark time of my life. I have pieced myself back together bit by bit and for the first time ever I feel whole. I sit here now smiling at myself. If my overall being hadn’t been shattered I wouldn’t have found the strength within myself to stop wallowing in my darkness and take back what was rightfully mine; MY life.

          I am completely overwhelmed at this point in my life from all the love and support I have received over the years. Without it I’d probably still be huddled in a corner giving up. So I’m making a change, I’m putting an end to my fears. I have come too damn far to go back in time now. I, Benjamin Tomas, am finally free; words that I can now say and believe.

Xoxo.

B.

Dedicated to that seventeen-year-old boy: The dark days are over. You may finally rest your weary soul and wake up knowing that it does in fact, get better from here.