Two Girls in Sydney

There is not one feeling in the world worse than that of being afraid of yourself. Being afraid of the truth which everyone around you seems to believe, but you are trying desperately to turn away from, can be truly terrifying.
Whilst being afraid of myself at the age of 15 and 16 and even 17, I was also afraid of being alone. Not just concerned about feeling lonely, but genuinely anxious about being completely left alone in my world if I admitted ‘the truth’. 
Logically, I now know that so many other people, the world over, were experiencing similar thoughts and fears, but at the time I was sure that it was just me. My Catholic school teachers informed me that they knew of ‘two girls in Sydney’ who were also gay but, strangely, this was of little reassurance.

Reading posts such as Going Back Again, by Lucy Hallowell, makes me want to go out into the yard and jump in my time machine and visit 15 year old Balexi and say “See!”
On the way home from 15, I’d stop off at 17 and tell that girl (and two unnamed and unknown girls from Sydney) that there were tonnes of us and more than just the four my Catholic school teachers led me to believe.

I read things like this with two completely separate streams of consciousness. I’m 15 and 31 and at the extremes I want to laugh and cry at the same time. The part of me which will always be 15 and afraid, that lives somewhere at the back of my mind, manages to take a deep breath and relax into a reassured smile because someone else felt that way too. The present me that has a thousand life experiences, a lot more perspective and has not been truly afraid for a very long time also smiles and thinks "Yes, exactly!"
Even though I still remember vividly what 15 and 16 and 17 felt like, the weight of the positive experiences I’ve had in the past 10 or so years has tipped the balance in the direction of happy.

Had I read even one commentary about survival in the face of self-loathing, fear or Catholic school guilt back then, I think my days would have been a little brighter. Even though the world is changing and, hopefully, support and advice is more readily accessible, we still need to tell these stories on the off chance that a girl living at the bottom of the world, or two girls in Sydney, need to hear it.