The Baltimore Orioles release an "It gets better" video

[charlie and algernon]

http://baltimore.orioles.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=17294739&c_id=bal&partnerId=ed-5084945-213931862

[redwitch]

1. I love the It Gets Better Campaign!

Thanks Orioles!

[Occulus]

4. The problem I have with the "It Gets Better" campaign

is that it seems to ignore those of us for whom it didn't get better.

There are those of us out there whose coming-out experience was so awful, so destructive, that it left us crippled, both emotionally and psychologically, for years, even decades. I've lost nearly seventeen years of my life to what can only be described as a kind of shellshock over what my parents did when they found out. From now until way back in 1994, I've been pretty much motionless. Inside my head, I'm probably still only twenty or so, and the betrayal and hurt I felt over it then is still, in many ways, just as fresh and sharp as on the day it all went down.

Some of us honestly believe, after going through that kind of coming-out experience, that we don't deserve any help, that we did something wrong, that we deserve to be punished. Over time, without some kind of intervention, those beliefs become internalized and, through actions against us by the society around us, validated. "You have to look forward", to those of us for whom it did not get better, is a meaningless platitude, and we get blank, helpless looks when we respond with "how?"

Time has made it bearable, but not better. I still have occasional crying fits, almost seventeen years later. I'm very prone to depression and I'm exposed to the triggers for it all the time. I know I have to resist the temptation to ask myself why it's taken so long to "snap out of it", because if I start doing that, I'll only be restarting the cycle I'm now trying to break. But I think we need to try to spotlight people like me, who have been totally destroyed on the inside but who somehow continue to exist.

It's these reasons that the "it gets better" campaign makes me uncomfortable (to say the least). Every one of these stories feels like a knife turning inside me because, for all these years, it hasn't gotten better. I know I'm not the only one who is or has been in this position and I know I'm not the only one who feels this way about this campaign. The fact that this much time has passed only adds a deep sense of feeling lost and a very large amount of regret, and I really don't want other people to go through this if I can help it.

[cmd]

2. The Orioles have a new fan.

Thank you!

[ellenfl]

3. thank you, orioles. eom