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Dear friend,
This past Wednesday, Oct 11, was National Coming Out Day. Last Sunday, we dedicated two of our songs in worship to National Coming Out Day. In celebration of National Coming Out Day, we highlight poet Dakota Pinon:
It was a September night the 12th to be exact and the year was 2016, I was fifteen years of age. My best friend Rachel came barreling through the door around 6 o’clock. I lit the stove and the air filled with the smell of sweetness as I gently turned each banana so they wouldn’t burn. She and I gathered around the table and nothing but the sound of crunching from the fried bananas and laugher filled the room. My laugher was nerve-wracking of course, because about an hour later we went to my room and chattered a bit, then called my mom to scurry in. I had to release the pressure that has been weighing on me since I came to terms with why I didn’t feel right in my body when I gained a conscious as a child. I was silent at first, I was afraid to speak I didn’t know how to say it. So, after a while of awkward phrased “sentences,” my mom replied, “are you trying to tell me you feel like a boy.” I said “yes,” she went to bed and we spoke the next day. It was extremely difficult the first few years, but today she is the most supportive person and I wouldn’t want anyone else to be my mom.
Here is a poem I wrote about coming out and what it felt like in the moment:
I am He
I was fifteen, scared and lonely. No one to lean on.
I have known since the young age of before I could speak.
I felt stuck, trapped. Like a dying star in a huge universe.
I couldn’t hide I just had to keep quiet. As the sounds got louder.
SHE, HER, DAUGHTER, SISTER, GIRL, FEMALE. Mental scars it leaves.
Nothing but pain… I couldn’t hold back fifteen was the age I broke. I AM A BOY,
silence, you can hear the sound of my heart pound in my chest as you hear
a high pitch flat line. Silence, just how I had to stay all these years silent.
Is it the end? Am I finally me. Proud and sacred.
For I am HE, HIM, SON, BROTHER, BOY, MALE.
You cannot change who I was born as
you can only respect and accept.
For I AM ME.
-poem by Dakota Pinon (He/Him/His)
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