At this point, Little Nick’s story becomes closer and closer to my own. A lot of the stories from here on out, I’ve recounted in essays, blog posts, Twitter threads, and long talks with friends. Actual friends. Finally.
It took 18 years, but I finally lucked into making some decent friends. My search for an art school took me north to Santa Fe, where I attended the Santa Fe University of Art and Design (R.I.P) for a full semester! The school itself was kind of tragic, and I turned out to get out at the right time, but the people I met over the four months I was there were absolutely transformative. It was a short time together, but being around encouraging people made such a difference. My life started to change, and not because of what other people did to me, but because of what other people drove me to do for myself.
I’m not going to drag things out and recount the exact story of how I decided to come out, but I did, on December 21st - the day that happened to be Michael N.’s birthday - via Facebook post, but being at SFUAD, being around other queer people, had a huge influence on that decision. I finally was able to give Little Nick that sense of pride he had been feeling for years, even if I sort of “rescinded” the coming out 24 hours later. Either way, I took the door of the closet down, so that even if I wasn’t fully out of it, people could still see into it.
It took time, but I eventually figured that out. That’s the pattern I’ve determined is what drives my life.
Coming out was the first decision that I made that brought Little Nick further and further out of the sphere. Over time, I did more and more things that took down more of the screens and filtered out less of the duality. I enrolled at UT Dallas, I started regular therapy, I made friends who saw more of the broken screens, and I finally started piecing together dreams for the future. In my sophomore year, I decided that I was meant to be in academia, and that I wanted to be a professor. I’d been fortunate enough to have had so many caring and attentive teachers and mentors, that I wanted to give back to the world and become one of those for someone else, maybe an even littler Nick.
Having goals that felt tangible was exciting. Acting on those goals, less so. Eventually, I found that I was tired of just having academic pursuits, funnily enough, around the same time I decided I wanted to be a professor, so I began to think about dating. I’d half-heartedly made a Tinder account with some friends the previous semester, but nothing too serious came from it; a couple of friendships, but never a date. I told myself, once I got back to Dallas, I’d start to date. But first, I had a summer to spend in El Paso.
The first two years at UTD, I lived in dorms that closed for the summer, so I had to relocate back home and throw all my Dallas belongings in a storage locker. I didn’t have a car, so driving it all back wasn’t an option, and by the end of sophomore year, I’d had enough of that. I took money that my grandmother had left me after her passing and put half the value of a white Subaru Forester down, while my mother financed the rest. At this point, my parents had begun the process of separation. Regardless of if my abuse caused me and my outbursts to sour their marriage, it was over now. That’s not something that I easily believe, but I have to.
I had a license, at least, so I was able to become mobile and useful for the first time in my life. Before, when I got my license at 18, I had a car that I rarely drove because I was so afraid of everything on the road. I was so afraid of not having complete control. But at 21, I’d had a bit more time to get comfortable with the idea of ceding control, because I’d replaced it with substantive control over other parts of my life. I was living as an out queer man, I had goals for the future, friends in Dallas, and I wasn’t ashamed of nearly as much. So, trading the control of my safety that were now in the hands of other drivers for the control of my time and transportation was something that finally became viable at that point.
Something that I remember the most about that summer is that I wanted to take my family places. I wanted to spend time with my brother and mother, with whom I lived for the summer session. And when we rode in my car, I wasn’t afraid of having them listen to my own music. That sounds silly, but there’s a lot of meaning to that.
Music has always been a very personal thing for me. I’m sure that’s not surprising for someone whose first real coping mechanism was a music contest, but regardless, I kept that shit locked down. No one knew what music I liked, and if they tried to get that information, I acted like a guard dog whose perfect meal was being threatened. Those outbursts were some of the manifestations of Little Nick’s pain from the abuse, pain from feeling unwanted and unloveable, pain from being threatened yet again. I hated it when it happened, but I wasn’t able to control that.
But by the summer of 2017, I was.
Sure, it helped that I listened to more than just Eurovision songs by then, but I was excited to silently break down that wall. My mother, especially always noticed it and appreciated it, either telling me (and watching me roll my eyes because I wanted to seem normal still) or silently going along with our conversations as if it was no big deal. It’s a real mystery as to where I got that habit, I suppose.
That summer always pops up in my head as the most important one of my life, because it was the last time I lived at home, and knowing I was going to move into an actual apartment on campus at UTD in August, it would be the last time. So we all tried to make the most of it; there weren’t a lot of fights, not a lot of conflict in general, just making good on the time we had together. Of course, there were already fractures, and those weren’t going to be blindly patched over the course of one summer. But it felt like progress was being made.
I wish I’d had more time then.
Leaving home for good was like freezing the movement I was making back towards my family. It’s still malleable, but not nearly as much. It takes more intention, more effort. And, of course, they’re not static people. Over the past five years, I’ve watched all the members of my family change in drastic ways. It’s hard to make up the ground back to them, when they’ve moved so much on their own.
Honestly, that’s part of why I’m writing this. All of Little Nick’s pain, it’s been seeping out for the past 13 years, and it’s been my job to get to a point where I could do that justice, in some way. To bring it to the surface and make his pain my own. To release it unto the world, so that Little Nick can finally get the chance to grow up. But. He’s growing up in a completely different world than the one that sealed him inside the sphere. It’s hard to see so many of the people who were important to him exist in such different ways now.
His family is gone, as he knew it. His friends are totally different people, and he’s not sure how to interpret their friendships. He’s been exposed to love, to heartbreak, to saudade, to sonder, to every other attempted anglicization of an emotion without an English translation. He’s aging up to 26 all at once, and it’s hard. It’s painful.
My own pain has played a part in the directions that everyone has moved, little or small, and it hurts to see it happen. Michael, my brother, is getting married now. He’s 22 and has completely changed multiple times since we were kids. He’s marrying a lovely girl he met at college. Bible college. He’s wanting to be a pastor. He’s an intern at a church that explicitly calls homosexuality a sin. He’s attended youth groups run by churches that have discriminated against gay people.
Michael has dealt with the adversities he’s faced in his own way. They took him to religion, and that wrapped him in the purpose that he was lacking. Told him the things he needed to hear, and brought him into its fold. I just wish that fold made room for me. I’m scared that he’ll get to the point where he doesn’t want me in his life, except to “save me from sin.” I’m scared that I’ll never get the chance to apologize to him. To tell him that the person who was awful to him for all of our childhoods wasn’t acting rationally. To tell him how I wish I could’ve been the big brother he deserved, to have never let him feel abandoned, to have never let him feel unloved. It’s my greatest fear that I’ll never get the chance to pull him back towards me, and have him accept me.
Ultimately, I know I’m not owed that. I know that he’s going to live his life on his terms, the very same way I will. His marriage just really brought all of this to light in my mind, even if I wasn’t able to realize and elucidate it just then. But now, here I am, finishing this story and turning it into plea while on the plane to his wedding. Funny how that happens.
—
This story isn’t for me. I’ve lived it. I’ve had to accept its peaks and valleys, its ebbs and flows, its God-given miracles and hellish transgressions.
This story is for Little Nick, whose spirit I kept safe for 13 years, and on whose promise I hope to deliver.
This story is for Michael, whose life was altered by the transference of cruelty I experienced.
This story is for my mother, whose enduring love still strikes me as something unbelievable.
This story is for my father, with whom I so desperately want to connect and forge the father-son bond we were set to develop.
This story is for my family, who wasn’t able to weather the storm together, but still floats together.
This story is for my friends, past and present, who might have never gotten a chance to know me until now.
This story is for Michael N., whose pain became my own, and whose actions I hope to avenge through my life.
This story was never for me.
—
Hi. My name is Nicholas, and I’m from El Paso, Texas. I’m 26 years old, live in Dallas, and I’m a survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
And now, the rest of the story can be written.