I’m a lesbian. I’ve known that ever since I was 12 years old, and it’s always been the most important part of my identity. It was always the one thing I felt the most secure about.

But as I started college, I began to doubt everything about myself. I started to feel ashamed of  my queerness; I felt gross in my own skin. The internalized homophobia swallowed me at once. I cringed every time I felt any affection towards a girl, and eventually I changed my Tinder settings so I was only seeing men.

The last thing I was expecting when I came to college was to feel disgusted by a part of my identity I’d been comfortable with for years. One of the most insidious features of internalized homophobia is that it is inherently hard to seek help for in queer communities. I didn’t want to bring it up with my queer friends because I didn’t want to expose them to homophobia or make them feel like they were doing something wrong.

So, I didn’t go to anyone. Writing this is my first time talking about it at all. 

But just because I didn’t talk to anyone in person doesn’t mean I didn’t have a form of queer community readily available to me. I’m writing this to offer some advice on how to make it better if you’re spiraling like I did:

Watch queer media. Listen to gay music. Be engaged in your culture.

I was scrolling on TikTok one day, and I came across “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez. I was completely mesmerized. Besides Chappell Roan’s music, I don’t think I’d ever listened to a song about two girls in love that doesn’t make it about just being gay. I listened to Perez’s entire discography on Spotify. Her song, “Normalcy,” struck a chord in me I didn’t know existed. I fell into a rabbit hole of searching for queer pop.

I forced myself to sit down and watch the new season of “Heartstopper” a couple of days after discovering Gigi Perez’s music. I watched the Heartstopper characters struggle through understanding and coming to terms with their sexualities the same way I did when I was in high school. Watching the show was comforting. I saw myself reflected in it. Though the show is a little corny, the realness of it is what stands out; it’s not a hyper-exaggerated story about a gay person convincing their homophobic counterpart to love them or about a secret gay person falling in love with the only openly gay person at school. It’s about the real experience of being queer and being in a queer relationship in high school. 

After Heartstopper, I watched other films, like “The Imitation Game” and “The Half of It,” which reminded me how beautiful my queerness actually is. I listened to Perez and Roan proudly sing about the women they were in love with and I felt comforted in my identity. I listened to Nick Nelson talk about crying at an “Am I Gay” quiz and I hugged my inner child because she did the same thing. I listened to Perez sing about loving a woman despite her religious trauma and teared up because the same thing happened to me. I felt my love for my own queerness steadily return.

Representation is so important. When I felt I couldn’t turn to anyone in my life about my internalized homophobia, gay music and film provided me with the reassurance I needed to start loving a core aspect of myself again. 

On Oct. 19, I saw “The Rocky Horror Show” at Meadville’s  Academy Theatre for the first time. Now, I am just uncomfortable being myself. I keep telling people that watching these actors praise queerness for two hours on stage changed my life. I was surrounded by people who celebrated queerness as much as  I did. I think I might have been smiling the whole time from how amazed I was. As fake hotdogs fell into my lap and ensemble members tapped me on the shoulder or sang in my face, I sat in the audience and felt the internalized homophobia melt away. Because this is who I was; someone who loves women. I am absolutely going to share the beauty in that.

Being different is hard. But the best part is that it’s also beautiful, and there’s art to prove it. You can watch people who look like you, who act like you or who identify the same way you do and you can feel secure in your identity. No amount of internal bigotry can take away the beauty of being different, and I think that’s why media is so important. Because when you look at your screen and see someone who’s the same as you or listen to your music and hear someone preaching the same thing you would, that changes people’s worlds.

I’m a lesbian. I love being queer. I love art.