How to Be Happy

by David Burton

  The theatre studies course also included the option of following it with a year studying education, to become a teacher. So, should I indeed graduate and discover myself instantly poor and homeless as my career counsellor had predicted, I could go back to study and become a drama teacher. I had very little idea of what I really wanted to do with my life, but drama was the only thing that really made my heart bounce.

  My principal, teachers and some members of my family baulked at my commitment to almost certain poverty, especially in light of the legal pathway and its promise of financial success that was open to me. But my parents insisted that I choose the pathway that provided me with the most happiness (and to keep the teaching option open for as long as possible). If it wasn’t for my parents, I would’ve almost certainly surrendered to the pressure and a career plan that was far more ‘sensible’, but filled with far less joy.

  I’d now like to tell you one of the worst-kept secrets in education. The endless exams, numbers and streams of bureaucracy that year-twelve kids are made to suffer actually mean very little in the real world. They may help you get into a university in the months immediately following your secondary graduation, but that’s about all they’re good for. The gap between an ‘A’ grade and a ‘B’ doesn’t ruin your life.

  I was bewildered by some of my classmates’ behaviour. Having been told that the last two months of high school would dictate their success as human beings for the rest of their lives, many collapsed in stress and despair. Some threw their hands up without even trying, finding it easier to fail without effort than to risk academic rejection.

  In the years since graduating with my theatre degree, I have spent long months in poverty. These periods were filled with stress, but also abundant joy at being involved in an industry that I loved. Since that time, I have built a stable and robust career.

  I wish I could say that my depressive days were over by the time I finished year twelve, but the worst was yet to come. If I had faced the same challenges that I was to encounter in my post-high-school years while working in a job that I found financially but not spiritually rewarding, I would likely no longer be living.

  I’m not exaggerating. I would have died.

  At seventeen, I had all kinds of delusions about the type of person that I was. But I was smart enough, thanks to my parents, to understand one golden truth: I was not my grades. I was not my career. To put my identity down to a number on a piece of paper was an insult to the wild spaciousness of education, but also to the largeness of my true self. Working hard is a great and necessary thing, but there are elements that are always going to be out of our control, and failure is incredibly important and also temporary.

  I was blessed to have been taught these lessons from my parents at an early age. I only wish I had listened to them deeper in my heart and applied them to other aspects of my life. As I stood on the cusp of high school graduation, however, there was a lot I had yet to figure out.

  For example, I was still to find a shag.

  11

  Out

  In the months immediately following graduation, a lot happened to my classmates.

  A young bully became a young father.

  A shot-put superstar was forced to deal with the sudden death of his mother.

  A couple of high-school sweethearts got engaged.

  And most of the year level got well and truly sloshed at schoolies.

  I stayed at home and waited the four months before university began. I spent most of the time in my bedroom, doing pretty much what I did during my hiatus from existence a few weeks earlier. A lot of TV, a lot of dark thoughts, and very little interaction with the outside world.

  Mum pushed me once again to go to a psychologist. I wasn’t eating and I was barely moving. With nothing but time to kill, and feeling completely miserable, I relented.

  This was how I met Gary. Gary was cool. He didn’t patronise me. He didn’t have ye olde maps on the walls. He was in a band and he had Tolkien on his bookshelf. I felt like he listened to me. He was my first really positive experience with a psychologist, and I grew to trust him. I began to talk about my most urgent concern.

  I’d had unexpected support from a few classmates when I came out in the last few weeks of school, but I had saved the most dreaded announcements for last.

  Mum, Dad and Simon needed to be told. I felt that if I was able to be honest with them I might experience some kind of liberation, even though I desperately feared each of their reactions.

  I knew I would lose at least one of them.

  I came out to Mum in the middle of the night.

  We were up having a long conversation about some of her troubles. Mum was perpetually unhappy, and it was something that I was simultaneously frustrated by and sympathetic to. The world had been hard on Mum in all sorts of ways, and I did my best to help her. This particular evening she had been crying, and we talked for hours.

  Exhausted by her tears, she got up to go to bed. It was about two o’clock, and she would be up in a few hours. Mum liked to garden at dawn before launching into a retinue of household chores.

  As we wandered to the kitchen, Mum asked how I was. I shrugged, non-committed, and turned around to face her. She was in the lounge room, in darkness, peering at me in the dim kitchen. I made a decision.

  ‘Mum,’ I said. ‘I think I’m probably gay.’

  She nodded, and with barely a pause said, ‘Well that’s fine.’ Her voice pitched upwards, as if she was trying to convince herself, and desperate to convince me.

  ‘That’s fine,’ she said again, more certain. And she smiled. ‘I’m not surprised.’

  And then we said goodnight and went to bed.

  I knew it was only a matter of hours until my father heard the news.

  A few days later, Dad and I were in the car.

  ‘Are you ready for an awkward conversation?’ he asked with an embarrassed laugh.

  Holy fuck, he’s bringing it up. It’s happening now. Shit, it’s happening now.

  ‘Um. Yeah?’

  He was so uncomfortable. I’d never seen my dad more uncomfortable.

  ‘Mum tells me, I hope you don’t mind—’

  Why would I mind? Jesus, Mum, why would I object to that in anyway?

  ‘Mum tells me you might be gay. And I just wanted to let you know that that’s fine with me, that’s fine.’

  Silence. This is good. I think this is good. Is this good?

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘But I also wanted to let you know that you’re young. You’ve got time. And you might want to experiment a little more before you say—’

  ‘I’m pretty certain,’ I interrupt.

  So he’s not fine. He’s in denial. Mum probably is too. Right. They think it’s a phase.

  Even though I had never had a kiss, let alone a sexual experience with either a man or a woman, I was unwilling to tolerate even the faintest notion that I might simply be confused. I was so sick of confusion. I needed certainty. The internet research and countless videos and television I watched taught me that parents often responded to their child’s coming out with the denial-laden ‘it’s just a phase’. According to my research, t
his was pure intolerance and needed to be combated.

  It was not a phase. It was me.

  I was defensive, but I was also surprised that I hadn’t been kicked out of home or shunned.

  Let’s face it, my parents had always been nothing but supportive, and while Dad was a little hesitant, he certainly wasn’t offended. Mum was more worried about other friends’ or neighbours’ reactions, but by this point I’d had enough positive coming-out experiences to not waste time worrying about neighbourhood gossip.

  But the real test was always going to be Simon.

  I told him a few weeks after schoolies.

  Over the internet.

  Good choices, Dave.

  His schoolies experience had been a blur of drinking, cheap food and sunburn. Now he was getting ready to leave for Canberra to study engineering in the defence force.

  ‘It was pretty wild,’ he types.

  ‘Did you hook up with anyone?’

  ‘I met a girl called Melissa.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘We mucked around a bit.’

  ‘Still talking?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s online now actually. We’re talking.’

  ‘Ooooooo!!!!!!’

  I tried not to be jealous of Simon’s easy ability to end up ‘mucking around’ with someone. The idea of going to schoolies and striking up a conversation with a drunk stranger made my stomach turn. But Simon was happy. Good for him.

  A few minutes pass. He must be busy chatting with Melissa.

  I type, ‘What’s Melissa like?’ Just as a question pops up from him.

  ‘What’s been happening with you?’

  Now’s the time to tell him. Before I think, I type, ‘I’m pretty sure I’m gay.’

  The words blink onto the screen, set into pixelated stone, never to be erased. There’s no going back.

  Long seconds tick past. My confession hangs there, begging for a reply.

  Then: ‘She’s from the Sunshine Coast. She’s going to do engineering or something down in New South Wales. We might be able to see each other, but I don’t know how it’ll work.’

  Shit. Did he not see it? Or has he seen it and chosen to ignore it?

  ‘Cool,’ I type back nervously. I don’t know how to proceed. Do we just keep talking about Melissa like I haven’t just said I’m gay? Was this it? Was it over? Do I type it again?

  A message appears on the screen.

  ‘Are you excited to meet the other fags at drama school?’ He punctuates the thought with a .

  I read it three times. The first time I’m confused. The second time I’m hurt. The third time I’m angry.

  ‘That’s shitty,’ I say.

  There’s nothing for a long time. He’s probably laughing with Melissa now, telling her his best friend’s a faggot.

  ‘Jeez,’ he types, ‘I was just joking.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘Stop being a girl.’

  That’s it. I’m sick of being told I’m a woman, or a fag. And I’m sick of Simon’s bullshit. I close the laptop and sit back in my chair.

  I go over the conversation in my mind. I don’t know whether the face meant Simon’s disgust or if it was supposed to be my face offering a blow job.

  I need support. I knew he’d be a douche about it. I feel my throat tighten, and my eyes begin to sting.

  We’d seen each other almost every day for five years.

  I convinced myself I was better off without him anyway.

  Simon was the last point of contact I had with high school. None of my previous classmates would be studying in the local arts faculty, let alone in my course. I would be alone. It was a chance to start again.

  Crazy Drama Dave could finally retire.

  A part of me was relieved. The performance had been exhausting. And now I was ‘out’, I felt way more at ease with the possibility of making new female friends.

  But would I even be able to make new friends? I would be completely alone at university. And without Crazy Drama Dave, would I just return to being the scared thirteen year old who was picked on and hid out in the library? Would I plummet to the bottom of the social ladder again?

  I desperately needed a new personality.

  I decided to make my new-found sexuality the cornerstone of the new me. Confident, proud, energetic and gay. Crazy Drama Dave was dead. Gay Dave had risen.

  I was lucky. I landed in the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory of sexual confusion: a university theatre department.

  12

  All the Feels

  In drama school you learn how to feel things. A lot. All the time. My first fortnight at uni was like emotional boot camp—the exact kick in the heart that I needed to restart the sense of who I was.

  We spent most of the first semester in a small room of painted-brown concrete, developing a show for young children. The quickest way to get to know someone is to create something with them, so our merry band of seventeen strangers quickly became a chaotic orgy of liberated outcasts. We were all outsiders, we were all geeks, and we had all found safety and refuge in the drama room at school. Now we were in a drama class that never ended. In fact, we were going to build our lives into a drama class that never ended.

  Heaven, right?

  There were a lot of feelings.

  A lot.

  And we were instructed to shout these feelings at top volume. Into a wall. Or to a partner on the other side of the room. Now with a partner, joining hands, chanting together to specific rhythms. Now as an animal. A shadow. Just syllables. Vowels. Consonants. Just as feelings. Noises. A tree. A tree in the wind. The feeling of wind.

  Feelings! So many feels!

  In between rehearsals we talked. We were seventeen drama nerds, all from different places, but we talked about high school as if we had managed to survive a war. There was the softly spoken young man who said he turned to White Pride and Hitler speeches in year ten in an attempt to make the bullies scared of him. The girl who self-harmed by heating forks over a candle flame and then branding herself, letting the burn marks sink into her skin. There was the charismatic boy who told us he had made it through the last few years of high school by drinking a bottle of cheap red wine every day.

  That last one was Ravi.

  I spent most of my uni years wanting to be Ravi. He was charming, handsome and exotic, and loved. Ravi laughed. A lot. His humour was infectious. And he was sexually free and liberated, or at least he appeared to be. With a bit of pushing, he would hint at sexual encounters with beautiful strangers. We would all sit around him, enthralled. I wanted to be Ravi.

  I owned gay like a badge, marching forth and letting it lead my personality. Ravi had enough confidence to shrug in the face of his bisexuality and happily carry on. I hadn’t figured out how to do that yet, and it drove me nuts. I only knew how to be an outspoken gay guy, but Ravi was a relaxed gay (or bi, depending on his mood) guy. Of course, he was coming from an equally confusing time at high school, but he seemed far more relaxed about the enti
re thing.

  Friendship groups quickly formed, and I attached myself to Ravi like we were long-lost brothers. Ravi—strong, chaotic, sensitive, almost certainly a Time Lord. Ravi would come to uni cloaked in a pashmina he’d picked up from the op shop. He would take us on journeys through the town at night, finding little niches of parks with the best playgrounds, which I had never seen. He’d show us how to get to the town’s water tower and to hop, skip and jump our way to the top. Ravi and I had grown up in the same town, but in very different places. My bedroom had been my escape. For Ravi, the whole town was his hidey-hole.

  I also became friends with Nina. Short-haired, sharp-witted, a simmering fighter. She’s a Legolas: a nimble elf, a precise marksman, an agile foe. Nina is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Her cutting, dry humour was fantastic in a drama class: she could dismantle even the faintest whiff of bullshit with the shortest utterance. She’d face up to the lecturers ready for any challenge, and she was rewarded. Beneath her thick armour beat a heart of fierce loyalty; she had a softness and deep affection for the special few she loved. She was the first one in the class that I came out to.

  Mainly because she asked.

  ‘You’re gay, right?’

  That’s how Nina asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  And that was it. I was out at uni. I was officially Gay Dave. I was Gay Dave with a merry bunch of friends.

  The final friend to join this furious foursome was Amber. Amber was older than us by a couple of years. She had dabbled in various certificate courses before finally landing in the theatre course. Quiet, funny and smart, Amber was a perfect Hermione Granger. Her stability and calm influenced us all. She was frightened of the world, but she was worshipped by our class as it quickly became obvious that Amber knew how to organise a production schedule better than anyone else. In fact, Amber knew how to organise most things better than anyone. Ever. When she smiled or giggled, she hid her face, as though she was scared that you might see her feelings underneath. She wore black. A lot.