From Straight-A to Straight-Up Gay
From Straight-A to Straight-Up Gay
BY EVAN E. LAMBERT
This was the Plan: valedictorian, Ivy League for undergrad, Ivy League for med school, a brilliant career in medicine, a high-profile marriage to an eminent female neurosurgeon.
The Plan was preordained since the day I was 5, and my mom — watching me blow spit bubbles onto my baby-size Harvard sweater -– declared that I would one day cure cancer. It was irrelevant whether this was healthy or not. I stuck to the Plan: I maintained straight A’s throughout middle school, joined the swim team, joined the school paper, and took Latin.
By the end of 8th grade, I was on track to become the most successful heterosexual doctor in history. All I had to do was avoid drugs, not get so easily distracted, and never tell anyone, ever, that I had a crush on Indiana Jones.
Then, one day, my middle school crush Brad told me that he was bi. Instinctively, I knew that he would embrace my own secret identity. This was a chance to liberate myself. More pressingly, I wanted to kiss him.
And so I — without thinking, with no regard for the Plan — came out to him right back, effectively divorcing my future wife with no prenup. Thanks, ADHD.
I didn’t know back then that my impulsivity was a symptom of something more systemic. I also didn’t have time to think about it, since the effects of that moment were swift and unrelenting.
First, I realized that I had just become 200 times more interesting to the human race by coming out. This was in 2004; not even Lance Bass was out yet. A shiny new sexual orientation would make me the talk of the entire middle school. And since I was 14 years old, the promise of such infamy aroused a feeling akin to being high on meth. Chasing the dragon, I proceeded to come out to 3, 4, 5 other people after Brad, never stopping to think, “Maybe I should only tell people I trust.”
Sure enough, the next day, everyone at Kemps Landing Magnet School knew my sexual orientation.
Immediately, the high wore off, leaving the realization that I was in an early-aughts red district of Virginia. Backed into a corner, Brad soon withdrew his coming out and told me that he was now straight, snuffing any flicker of a romance between us. Friends cut me out of their lives. Students moved to the other side of the hall when they saw me. Two people on my bus told me I belonged in a zoo.
My sexuality followed me the rest of my high school career. All because of an impulse.
As I faced jeers and glares in high school, I discovered yet another obstacle to fulfilling the Plan: my inability to focus. I had managed to succeed in middle school despite it, thanks to the fact that middle school was not rocket science. Now it was a real problem. I could only pay attention to lectures for 10 seconds at a time, and I still didn’t know why. Racked by anxiety over this, I openly sweated in class. I ground my teeth. I constantly shook my leg, leading my friend Andrea to clamp it down until, like a wounded animal in its death rattle, it stilled.
My impulsivity continued to get me in trouble. On the night of my first major swim meet, I forgot to catch the bus to the pool because a random girl from my Spanish class told me that her boyfriend was bi and into threesomes, causing all non-sex-related thoughts to immediately leave my brain. My coaches were so mad when I rolled up to the pool an hour late that they almost dropped me from the team. I never even got laid.
On the other hand, my impulsivity also helped me get ahead of aggressors. Once, when a guy on my team told me that our fellow swimmers didn’t look up to me because of my sexuality, I heatedly explained that they only looked up to him because he was tall.
And yet, I convinced myself that I was a failure. I came to believe that although other people had difficulty focusing and thinking through decisions, they were smarter or tried harder. They could sit still in class because they had control over their bodies. Meanwhile, I couldn’t even listen to an extended train of thought or properly follow a movie. Why was it so difficult for me?
Later, in college, openly neurodivergent people gravitated toward me and embraced my apparent airheadedness, insisting that my brain was beautiful. At first, I blanched. My battle scars from high school still ached. I still berated myself for my shortcomings. How stupid I was for mixing up essay deadlines, I thought. How insufficient I was for zoning out during Calculus, I repeated. How myopic I was for coming out in middle school and enduring years of social ostracization rather than coming out in college and having an easier life.
But my friends continued to overlook my obsessive tendencies and anxiety, and accepted my sexual orientation as well. They showed me how my impulsivity led me to make bold, passionate statements, and how my social unease made me more empathetic towards people who were “off.”
Their embrace got under my skin and catalyzed my healing process. As I accepted these traits — these traits that I’d later learn were ADHD symptoms — I learned to embrace my coming out story.
If I had never come out to Brad that day, then I would have never learned how to lob witty remarks at bigots — not for years. I would have never learned from an early age how to distinguish between fairweather friends and friends who’d stick by me no matter what. I would have never learned how to face jeers head-on and get through my day with pride. I would have never seen how explosive impulsivity could be both obliterating and liberating.
More importantly, I would have never abandoned the Plan. I would have become a wealthy, successful — and miserable — heterosexual doctor.
Over time, my anger shrunk to the size of an atom, lodged at the back of my head. I allowed myself to love — others, myself, and my ADHD. Its impulsivity made me an authentic version of myself. It led me to fly to Lima, Peru to have a third date with a guy I’d met just two months prior. It led me to book dinner for us at Central, the best restaurant in the world. It led me to start a relationship with the guy, to call him my boyfriend, even though there was no Plan — even though the Plan was, in fact, so far behind me that I could no longer see it gasping for air.
It led me to my life now — partnered up and writing about missed high school threesomes.
It made me fabulous.
BIO: Evan E. Lambert is an essayist, journalist, travel writer and short fiction author with clips at BuzzFeed, Santa Fe Writers Project, Thought Catalog, Paste, Business Insider, Going, Strange Matters, and more. He spends much of his time in Lima, Peru, and is fluent in Spanglish.
