The Missing Journals And The Unintentional Education I Gave My Father

The first time I noticed my journal was missing, I was bombarded by a myriad of emotions – confusion, wonder, mirth, disbelief, shock, panic then ultimately, fear. In that particular order.

The thing is, it was no ordinary journal. It was an outlet. A medium through which I was able to give voice to what was going on in my mind. In it, I ruminated and introspected on my feelings; particularly because unlike my peers, I felt different. Odd.

If you identify as gay, you’ll no doubt have at some point in your life felt these things growing up. The sense of oddity amongst your peers. The feeling of being a stranger in your own home. In your own friendship group. And sometimes, in your own body. This is something that isn’t learned. It just is. An instinctive sense of being deviant from the norm.

All these were some of the thoughts I expressed in my journal when I was 13. These and the fact that being raised Christian made me feel very unnatural for being attracted to members of my own sex.

Well, the journal was missing. And I was afraid. Afraid it had fallen into the hands of only one person I could think of.

My father.

My father was the only one who had recognised, and sometimes been scared of, my precocity. I grew up a very curious child with an inquisitive and very imaginative mind, and this – he often admitted – scared him sometimes.

If I couldn’t find my journal, he had to be the one who had it. And I feared that I’d revealed enough in that book to incur my father’s wrath. The one time he unleashed that wrath on me regarding my sexuality was a few years earlier, when he walked in on me and my friend, a boy, who was the son of my mum’s friend, and our neighbour. The situation was, well, explicit: my tiny little penis was nested in the boy’s butt. We were both 7.

My father lost his temper, something he rarely did back then, and let’s just say, I still bear some of the scars of what resulted from his rage – scars that are both physical and emotional. That whole ordeal made me especially not ready for any form of confrontation with my father over this issue, especially since a few years after that incident, my parents separated. A situation that ensured that I no longer had the comfort of my mother’s defence.

However, thirty-six hours after the journal went missing, and after waiting and experiencing no wrathful reaction from my father, I decided to start another journal. After all, I hadn’t been confronted about the first one. This time however, I didn’t write anything personal. Just the narration and interpretation of some dreams. I was testing whoever took my first journal. I also kept this journal safely hidden.

A couple of days later, it went missing as well.

Unfazed, I started a third journal. That went missing a few days later. It was just me and my father in the house, and no one was saying anything about these books up and vanishing into thin air.

OK.

I promptly started a fourth journal. This was around the time I’d just learned the name for what I was feeling. I’d been introduced to the English word, homosexuality. I had finally found out that men who were attracted to other men were called homosexuals. A gossipy friend at school had said it to me. He’d been talking to me about the experience he had when he went to a party with his brother, and upon getting there, was having a conversation with some guys when his brother pulled him aside and told him to stay away from those guys. That they were “homosexuals”. My friend was particularly effeminate, so go figure. He was sixteen. I was thirteen.

With a straight face, I responded simply with “Wow”, feigned disinterest and proceeded to ask if he had had anything to drink at the party. All the while, my heart was pounding furiously away in my rib cage.

I now knew who I was – or suspected I was. A homosexual.

I got home, pulled out a dictionary and with the seriousness of a detective, went into the process of educating myself. Something about the word had felt…right.

That was when I went looking for my journal and discovered it had raptured. Undeterred, I got one of my spare 60-leaves exercise books and proceeded to write my thoughts down. I finished and tucked it away, changing my hiding spot again.

This fourth journal lasted me a while. It didn’t go missing until after about seven months. During which time I’d discovered the internet and with it, the introduction to Google. With Google came porn, and with porn came more things to research. By the time the journal went missing, I had an almost extensive list of known sexual orientations, their pros and cons detailed in the journal. These as well as porn sites.

After it went missing, I decided to no longer keep journals. After all, whatever research the thief needed my journals for, he had more than enough to go on.

A couple of years later, I relocated to my mum’s. And a year after that, my younger sister informed me that my father had returned to the university for a second degree.

In Child Development and Psychology.

Coincidence? I think not.

Written by Deviantus