Hunger for a Simple Life

On hiding, achievement, and the slow permission to live an ordinary life

For most of my life, I believed everyone else was coping just fine. I believed I was the only one performing, struggling beneath the surface.

I assumed that most people could reveal themselves naturally, while I had to decide carefully which parts of me were safe enough to show and which were better kept hidden.

I did not feel I could afford the same luxury of openness. Anything that felt risky had to remain concealed: my wishes, my thoughts, my fears, and eventually much of my personality. It simply seemed like the normal way to move through the world.

Looking back, I can see that this belief formed long before I understood anything about sexuality. By the time I realised I was gay, I already knew how to conceal myself.

My father struggled with alcoholism and substance abuse throughout my childhood, and our family lived according to an unspoken agreement. We were a respectable middle-class family, and respectable families were not supposed to have the kinds of problems we had.

Perhaps some people knew what was happening. Perhaps everyone knew. But nobody spoke about it directly, and we learned to preserve the image. I cannot remember a time when I simply existed without wondering what needed to be presented, explained, softened, or hidden. Performance did not feel like a strategy. It felt like life itself.

When I became aware that I was different from the boys around me, concealment therefore felt familiar. Natural. Obvious.

I did not need to learn how to hide because I had already been practising it for years. Sexuality merely gave the habit a new subject, a new territory in which to continue the false pretence that had always surrounded me.

I understood that certain desires could not be spoken aloud, but the silence did not remain limited to desire. It gradually spread into most of my personality. I became careful about what I liked, how I spoke, what I felt, and how much of myself another person was allowed to see. I was not merely hiding whom I might love. I was slowly learning to hide the person who might be loved.

For years, I believed that the greatest difficulty of growing up gay was being unable to talk openly about attraction. I no longer think that was the deepest loss. The deeper loss was being denied many of the ordinary experiences through which identity and intimacy are gradually formed. While heterosexual classmates were discovering how to approach someone, survive rejection, apologise after causing hurt, or recognise the difference between desire and love, many of us were learning something else. We were learning how to avoid being noticed. Recognised. Valued.

Teenage relationships are often clumsy and sometimes cruel. People cross boundaries, choose unsuitable partners, confuse attention with affection, and reject people they later realise they valued. None of this looks like education while it is happening.

Yet these experiences slowly teach a person how to remain themselves in the presence of another human being. They teach vulnerability, conflict, disappointment, repair, and trust. By the time adulthood arrives, many people have already spent years practising these emotional movements without even realising it.

For many gay people of my generation, this rehearsal happened later or under very different conditions. The experiences were not necessarily absent forever, but they did not arrive when the rest of the personality was first taking shape. Some parts of life moved forward while others remained suspended.

We grew older, studied, worked, earned money, became independent, and learned how to function. Yet certain forms of visibility, closeness, and permission were postponed.

I do not think this means that gay adults are secretly adolescents or that heterosexual people automatically understand relationships better. Life is not that simple. A mistake made at thirty is not the same as one made at sixteen. Adult mistakes are often more sophisticated because the people making them already possess responsibility, intelligence, and experience in other areas.

Still, I believe that experiences we are not allowed to have when we are younger leave a gap. Later experiences cannot simply replace them because they arrive within a different psychological landscape. The missing years do not disappear, even when life eventually gives us some of what they withheld.

I moved to London when I was twenty, and the change of place gave me a freedom I had not expected. The city did not turn me into someone else. It simply loosened the grip of the person I had learned to be at home. Nobody there knew the role I had spent years performing, so I could begin discovering what remained when that role was no longer required.

For the first time, being different did not automatically feel dangerous. A new environment allowed parts of my personality to emerge that had previously seemed impossible to express.

I felt that I first needed enough money, enough recognition, enough qualifications, enough knowledge, and enough evidence of competence. Only then would I be safe enough to hold another man’s hand without feeling exposed. Or kiss him. Or introduce him as my boyfriend.

Straight people generally do not have to collect certificates, assets, languages, or achievements before believing they are entitled to express affection in public. They may fear rejection, but they rarely believe they must become exceptional before they are allowed to be ordinary. I did.

Somewhere inside me, love became connected to achievement. I did not believe another person could simply be interested in my thoughts, personality, humour, or presence. I believed I had to construct a version of myself impressive enough to compensate for whatever made me feel unacceptable.

That belief helped me achieve many things I genuinely value. I became independent, academically successful, observant, resilient, financially stable, and psychologically curious. I learned to study human relationships closely, partly because they never felt entirely natural or guaranteed to me.

I developed humour, discipline, and strength. I do not dismiss these qualities or treat them only as symptoms of suffering. They are real parts of me, and they have allowed me to build a life I am grateful to have.

But they cannot do everything. Intelligence cannot replace emotional safety. Achievement cannot make another person want to hold you. Independence cannot offer the experience of sleeping beside someone without needing to protect yourself.

These qualities belong to one layer of life, while intimacy belongs to another. No amount of competence can entirely substitute for the ordinary experience of being loved by someone who is not asking you to prove why you deserve it.

I understood this more clearly through ordinary relationships than through dramatic moments. Cooking together, shopping, watching a series, sunbathing beside someone, or being held without having to explain myself carried an unexpected emotional weight.

These experiences were not extraordinary, yet their ordinariness was precisely what made them extraordinary to me. They showed me a life I had once assumed belonged only to other people.

When I was sixteen, I did not imagine marriage, children, or a shared future. I could barely imagine anyone loving me. What I wanted was more basic: security and safety.

Even that felt distant. I do not grieve my past in the way people might expect, because I know I survived circumstances that could have destroyed me. I built a life, developed abilities, and found forms of love and freedom that once seemed impossible. I do not wish to reduce that life to what was missing.

Still, I sometimes wonder what it would have meant to believe, at sixteen, that an ordinary future belonged to me too. Not because I had earned it, but simply because I existed.

Perhaps the most difficult developmental lesson was never learning how to love somebody else. Perhaps it was learning that I did not have to become extraordinary before I was permitted to live an ordinary life.